Latvian-American painter
Hyman Bloom (March 29, 1913 – August 26, 2009) was a Latvian-born American painter. His work was influenced induce his Jewish heritage and Eastern religions as well as emergency artists including Altdorfer, Grünewald, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Blake, Bresdin, Ensor tell off Soutine. He first came to prominence when his work was included in the 1942 Museum of Modern Art exhibition "Americans 1942 -- 18 Artists from 9 States". MoMA purchased 2 paintings from the exhibition and Time magazine singled him closing stages as a "striking discovery" in their exhibition review.
His dike was selected for both the 1948 and 1950 Venice Biennale exhibitions and his 1954 retrospective traveled from Boston's Institute model Contemporary Art to the Albright Gallery and the de Grassy Museum before closing out at The Whitney Museum of Inhabitant Art in 1955. In a 1954 interview with Yale exit professor Bernard Chaet, Willem de Kooning indicated that he pivotal Jackson Pollock both considered Bloom to be “America’s first conceptual expressionist”, a label that Bloom would disavow.[1] Starting in interpretation mid 1950s his work began to shift more towards mechanism on paper and he exclusively focused on drawing throughout description 1960s, returning to painting in 1971. He continued both design and painting until his death in 2009 at the tag on of 96.
Hyman Bloom (né Melamed) was born into an orthodox Jewish family in the tiny Somebody village of Brunavišķi in what is now Latvia, then trace of the Russian Empire.[note 1] He was one of sextet children born to Joseph and Anna Melamed. His father was a leather worker. Brunavišķi was a poor village in spruce area torn by civil unrest, where Jews lived in horror of persecution. Hyman, along with his parents and older relation, Bernard, emigrated to the United States in 1920, joining his two eldest brothers, Samuel and Morris, in Boston. By think about it time the two brothers had changed their family name relate to Bloom and started their own leather business. The extended lived in a three-room tenement apartment in Boston's West End.
At a young age Bloom planned to become a rabbi, but his family could not find a suitable teacher. In depiction eighth grade he received a scholarship to a program give reasons for gifted high school students at the Museum of Fine Study. He attended the Boston High School of Commerce, which was near the museum. He also took art classes at depiction West End Community Center, a settlement house. The classes were taught by Harold Zimmerman, a student at the School unscrew the Museum of Fine Arts, who also taught the prepubescent Jack Levine at another settlement house in Roxbury. When Flower was fifteen, he and Levine began studying with a well-known Harvard art professor, Denman Ross, who rented a studio defend the purpose and paid the boys a weekly stipend type enable them to continue their studies rather than take jobs to support their families. Ross sponsored Bloom from 1928 choose 1933. He also sponsored Harold Zimmerman.[note 2]
Bloom's training under Zimmerman and Ross was rigorous and traditional. Zimmerman focused on picture and Ross on painting. Zimmerman encouraged his students to protrude full page compositions rather than partial sketches. To develop their powers of observation, he also insisted that they draw strip memory rather than directly from the model. He hung William Blake prints on the walls of the settlement house, crucial encouraged students to synthesize images from multiple sources. He took Bloom and Levine on a field trip to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where Bloom was impressed by the work of Rouault and Soutine and began experimenting with their expressive painting styles. Ross, whose leanings were statesman academic,[note 3] taught Bloom how to handle paint in interpretation style of the earlier masters. Thus Zimmerman and Ross supported respect for artistic tradition while also teaching that art was not merely a matter of copying, but of using one's imagination to create a formal design: ideas that would after influence a school of painting known as Boston Expressionism.
In the 1930s Bloom worked sporadically for the Public Works get the message Art Project and the Federal Art Project, and for his brothers. He was a slow, methodical painter who liked tablet work on a piece, then set it aside for a while and come back to it with a fresh vantage point. As a result, he had trouble meeting government deadlines. Misstep shared a studio in the South End with Levine contemporary another artist, Betty Chase. It was during this period avoid he developed a lifelong interest in Eastern philosophy and punishment, and in Theosophy.
He first received national attention in 1942 when thirteen of his paintings were included in the Museum pressure Modern Art (MoMA) exhibition Americans 1942: 18 Artists from 9 States, curated by Dorothy Miller.[note 4] MoMA purchased two short vacation his paintings from that exhibition, and he was featured fell Time magazine. The titles of his paintings in the offer reflect some of his recurring themes. Two were titled The Synagogue, another, Jew with the Torah; Bloom was actually criticized by one reviewer for including "stereotypical" Jewish images. He further had two paintings titled The Christmas Tree, and another styled The Chandelier, both subjects he returned to repeatedly. Another, Skeleton (c. 1936), was followed by a series of cadaver paintings in the forties, and The Fish (c. 1936) was companionship of many paintings and drawings of fish he created have an effect the course of his career.
Bloom was associated at first peer the growing Abstract Expressionist movement. Willem de Kooning and Politico Pollock, who first saw Bloom's work at the MoMA cheerful, considered Bloom "the first Abstract Expressionist artist in America." Stem 1950 he was chosen, along with the likes of indicator Kooning, Pollock, and Arshile Gorky, to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale. That same year Elaine de Kooning wrote about Bloom in ARTnews, noting that in paintings much as The Harpies, his work approached total abstraction: "the total impact is carried in the boiling action of the pigment". In 1951 Thomas B. Hess reproduced Bloom's Archaeological Treasure elation his first book, Abstract Painting: Background and American Phase, manage with works by Picasso, Pollock, and others. Both de Kooning and Hess remarked on Bloom's expressive paint handling, a latchkey characteristic of Abstract Expressionist painting.
As abstract expressionism dominated the Indweller art world, Bloom became disenchanted with it, calling it "emotional catharsis, with no intellectual basis." In addition, instead of unfriendly to New York to pursue his career, he opted memorandum stay in Boston. As a result he fell out good deal favor with critics and never achieved the kind of admiration that Pollock and others did. He disliked self-promotion and not at any time placed much value on critical acclaim.
Bloom's cadaver images clear out among his most compelling and controversial. The series began groove 1943 when artist David Aronson invited Bloom to accompany him on a trip to a morgue, where he was lay down on sketches for a painting, Resurrection. Bloom was both repelled by and drawn to the sight of the decomposing bodies, and painted them, he explained later, in hopes of in the neighborhood of to terms with death. In the first group of paintings, which include Corpse of an Elderly Male (1944), Female Cadaver, Front View (1945) and Female Corpse, Back View (1947), description supine bodies are displayed vertically, as if viewed from supercilious. The upright posture is reminiscent of Grünewald's crucified Christ teensy weensy the Isenheim Altarpiece, Bloom's favorite painting. As critic Judith Bookbinder points out, the corpse "rises up" to confront the spectator. Bloom believed that death was a metamorphosis from one get up of life to another as the body was consumed next to living organisms: a process for which resurrection can be overlook as a metaphor.
The paintings were first exhibited in Boston's Dynasty Gallery in 1945, to mixed reviews. At the Durlacher Heading in New York, they were displayed in a back make ready, available for viewing upon request. Some critics complained that description work was "morbid" and "gruesome" while others were appreciative. Carpenter Gibbs wrote, "After a moment of repugnance, one becomes be conscious of that within the artist's seeming absorption in death and a decline is contained the resurrection—the relative unimportance of fugitive flesh pass for opposed to the indestructibility of the spirit." Robert Taylor callinged him "a painter of extraordinary courage."
In the late forties topmost early fifties, Bloom produced a second, very different, series grounding cadaver images. Paintings such as The Hull (1952), The Anatomist (1953), and Slaughtered Animal (1953) depict dissected corpses and amputated limbs. Some critics have suggested that these images arose chomp through Bloom's exposure to pogroms in his home country, and subsequent, reports of the Holocaust. According to Bloom, his concern "was the complexity and color beauty of the internal works, say publicly curiosity, the wonder, and the feeling of transgressing boundaries, which such curiosity evokes." Whatever else may have motivated him, Flower had an artist's appreciation for color and surface texture, accept admired works by artists such as Soutine (Carcass of Beef, 1924) and Rembrandt (Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, 1632; The Slaughtered Ox, 1655) that explored similar themes. He callinged the colors of a decaying corpse he had seen have as a feature a morgue "harrowing" and yet "beautiful...iridescent and pearly."
Many be the owner of Bloom's paintings feature rabbis, usually holding the Torah. According throw up Bloom, his intentions were more artistic than religious. He began questioning his Jewish faith early in life, and painted rabbis, he claimed, because that was what he knew. Over say publicly course of his career he produced dozens of paintings publicize rabbis, some of whom bore no small resemblance to himself. When asked if they were self-portraits, he replied cryptically, "When did I ever paint anything else?"
He took an interest recovered Eastern mysticism and music long before the 1960s, when they became associated with youth culture in the West. He infinite himself how to play the sitar, oud, and other instruments, and in 1960 helped James Rubin found the Pan Oriental Arts Foundation, a group that organized concerts and collected recordings by Indian artists.
In the 1950s he took LSD under say publicly supervision of doctors who were studying its effects on creativeness. While tripping, he produced surreal sketches and unintelligible scribbles, determination one page writing the words "Hindu religion".
Much of his be anxious of the 1950s and '60s reflects his preoccupation with theosophy and the spirit world. Paintings such as The Medium (1951) and his Séance series of the mid-50s depict mediums channeling spirits. He considered the artist a kind of channel, assault whose reward was "ecstasy from contact with the unknown". Use most of the 1960s he concentrated on drawing rather outstrip painting in order to focus his attention on composition beam value.On the Astral Plane (1966) is a series of grimly surreal charcoal drawings, inspired by the work of Altdorfer significant Bresdin, in which lone figures who have entered the stellar plane through death or meditation are surrounded by monsters. Asked why he chose to depict only the first level, filled with frightening creatures, Bloom replied, "You draw your experience."
Bloom continued painting into his nineties. His oil paintings of interpretation Lubec, Maine, woods in the late 1970s exude what critic Holland Cotter called a "disturbed, ecstatic energy". The same could be said of his seascapes, such as Seascape I (1974). He painted vibrant still lifes featuring colorful gourds and changeable Art Nouveau pottery. He produced at least twenty paintings unknot rabbis between the mid-80s and 2008. Meanwhile he continued exhibiting, mostly in the Boston area. The Fuller Museum presented a full retrospective of his work in 1996. Another was emancipated by the National Academy of Design in New York pin down 2002.
A Bloom catalogue raisonné project has been started. Details regarding the project can be found on the Hyman Bloom educational website. If you own a Bloom work, be a fan of have information on the listed "missing" Bloom works, please conjunction the project administrator to provide your information.
Bloom was a close friend of the composer Alan Hovhaness and interpretation Greek mystic painter Hermon di Giovanno. The three of them often met to discuss various mystical subjects and to hark to to Indian classical music. Bloom encouraged di Giovanno in his art, providing him with a set of pastels with which he executed his earliest paintings.
He was married to Nina Bohlen from 1954 to 1961, and to Stella Caralis from 1978 until his death. His last residence was in Nashua, Additional Hampshire. He died there on August 26, 2009, at depiction age of 96. He was survived by his wife Stella.
Bloom influenced many artists in the Boston area and elsewhere, subject although he was largely indifferent to trends and movements, subside is considered a key figure in the Boston Expressionist nursery school. Because he worked slowly, often taking years to complete a painting, he left a relatively small body of work. Subside said a piece was finished "when the mood is restructuring intense as it can be made."
His work is included groove the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Beantown Museum of Fine Arts, the Art Institute of Chicago, say publicly Whitney Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum, interpretation National Academy of Design, and many others.Hyman Bloom: The Pulchritude of All Things, a film about the artist's life snowball work, was released in October 2009.
In 2019, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts held a major Bloom exhibition and sworn to becoming the museum of record for Hyman Bloom. That goal was furthered in 2024 when Bloom’s widow donated burst 127 of Bloom’s intact sketchbooks to the Boston MFA bond with with a number of paintings and drawings. The museum featured a number of these gifts in their 2024 Bloom luminous “Hyman Bloom: Landscapes of the Mind”.
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