Artist Biography & Facts

Hyman Bloom

Following is the obituary of the artist, by Michael McNay, published October 12, 2009, online at http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/oct/12/hyman-bloom-obituary.  Courtesy Peter Kostoulakos.

Hyman Bloom, who has died aged 96, was one of the last survivors of the thousands of artists who benefited from the patronage of President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal programme, the federal arts project. The project, one of several to aid the arts, ran from 1935 until 1943, and at its height employed 5,300 artists. Their most famous products were murals in schools, hospitals, sports centres and government offices, but Bloom was included in the easel painting programme. It kept the bailiff from the door.

The federal director of the project, Holger Cahill, was the husband of Dorothy Miller, curator of paintings at the Museum of Modern Art (Moma) in New York. In 1942 Miller was putting together a survey of new American art when Cahill showed her Bloom's paintings. She included 13 of them in the show. Time magazine pronounced a benison on this "shy, mop-headed" young artist living "a hermit-like existence in a Boston slum" without ever having had an exhibition and scarcely having sold a picture. Soon two other painters on the federal arts project, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, were proclaiming this Bostonian as the first abstract expressionist. It couldn't last, and it didn't.

MOMA bought one Bloom canvas from the exhibition and never another. For one thing, he wasn't abstract, and the critic Clement Greenberg turned down his thumb on Bloom and crowned Pollock and De Kooning with laurels.  But there remained a few years before the decline: the Carnegie International in 1949, the Venice Biennale of 1950, in which Bloom's work shared the US pavilion with Pollock, De Kooning and Arshile Gorky, and a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1954.

Bloom was American like Mark Rothko was American (both of them Latvian born), and Gorky (Armenian), and De Kooning (Netherlands), a few of the many Europeans fleeing war, pogrom or poverty. Bloom, whose surname was Melamed, arrived in Boston with his parents in 1920 (where they changed their name to Bloom); he lived there until he moved to Nashua, New Hampshire, in 1986. As a child he was hailed as an art prodigy and he soon won backing, first from Harold Zimmerman, a teacher in the Jewish community centre in Boston, and then of a Harvard professor, Denman Ross.

Bloom had originally wanted to be a rabbi, but his father couldn't find a teacher for him, so he made rabbis the subject of his painting instead (but there was also a livid sequence of post-autopsy corpses). His style of richly coloured, agitated pigment laid on heavily was like a visual equivalent of the stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer, and clearly influenced by the European expressionists Georges Rouault and Chaim Soutine. The New York Times art critic Hilton Kramer once wrote that on approaching a gallery showing Bloom's work, he could smell the pastrami. He rebutted the subsequent accusation of racism with the reply that it was a case of one Jew on another.

Ross gave some of his collection of Bloom's work to the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard, and may have helped him to find work teaching the practice and principles of drawing there in the 1950s. One of Bloom's pupils at this time was John Updike; many years later Updike endorsed the 1942 Time magazine impression of Bloom as unworldly and shy: "Of my instructors at Harvard, Hyman Bloom was far and away the quietest," he wrote. "His utterances were few … and he moved about the classroom on shoes notable for the thickness and the silence of their soles ... by small indications he implied that we could do better, that the goal was not yet achieved …"

Bloom's later lack of success has been attributed to his shyness and indifference to publicity, but to a large extent it must have resulted from the energy with which Greenberg took up the abstract expressionists and the gusto of such gallery owners as Peggy Guggenheim in backing the cause. Unlike the abstractionists, Bloom never ran out of steam, but in any case the juggernaut of American pop art squashed them all flat in terms of public attention.

It was 1996 before Bloom had another retrospective, this time at the Fuller Museum of Art in Brockton, Massachusetts, but it signaled the start of a slow spiral of renewed interest in his work, sustained until his death.

He was twice married: his second wife, Stella, survives him.

• Hyman Bloom, artist, born 29 March 1913; died 26 August 2009

The figurative painting of Hyman Bloom, born March 29, 1913 in Brinoviski, Latvia, reflects his perception that the bedrock horror of life ends with disease, death and decay.

Bloom came to America at age seven.  As a young student at the West End Community Center in Boston (with Jack Levine), he studied with Denman Waldo Ross and Harold Zimmerman.  Bloom was urged not to draw from life but from imagination, his inner vision.  He has essentially followed this precept throughout his career, whether in such obviously visionary oil paintings as "Chandelier II 1945, 72 x 42, or in the overt horror of decaying bodies and body parts in works like Female Corpse, Front View, 1944-45, 70 x 42, and A Leg, 1944-45, 25 x 50.

But even the visionary in life and Bloom's understanding of it, has its portion of horror in his hoped-for beauty, transcendence or meaning.  The glowing, thickly painted, close-up chandelier has a certain gory quality both in its overall effect and the fact that it assumes a human shape with a face where it attaches to the ceiling, an implacable presence.  The female corpse has a the leg, rotting, with small and large chunks of missing flesh, and the glow of warm reds and oranges contrasting with putrescent greens, tries to edge from monstrous horror to some kind of beauty.

Bloom found inspiration for such paintings in the rotting figures of Christ depicted by Hans Holbein in The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb, and Matthias Grunewald's Isenheim Altarpiece, while actually viewing such subjects in visits to the Kenmore Hospital morgue in Boston in 1943.

Dorothy Miller, curator at the Museum of Modern Art, selected Bloom for inclusion in the exhibition of new painters, "Americans 1942."  He was also represented in the 1950 Venice Biennale, and by a 1954 traveling retrospective put together by the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston.  Bloom received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in 1949.

While he remained a figurative artist during this period, which was almost completely dominated by Abstract-Expressionism (his fellow Americans at the Biennale were Pollock, DeKooning and Gorky), Bloom was a passionate painter in his own right.

Despite leaving his religion of Orthodox Judaism following his bar mitzvah as a thirteen year old, Bloom was inspired by Hasidic music of Eastern Europe, and has spent a lifetime searching for the spiritual meaning of life contained within and beyond the intrinsic horror of its materiality.  His interest in the occult produced The Medium, 1951, 40 x 34, which reflects his admiration for French artist Odilon Redon, while also reminding of the glowing, mystical paintings of Henri Matisse's symbolist teacher, Gustave Moreau.  Three visionary objects, one a radiant, sun-like face, another, a vaguely-defined, congenial, bearded head of a guru, crowd about an Indian Buddha-like figure rapt in meditation, perhaps the offspring of his trance.

Though he lived and worked in Boston, Bloom has lived in rural New England the last twenty years.  His paintings were most recently seen in a major exhibition at the National Academy of Design in New York City, October 2nd to December 29th, 2002.

Michael Duncan, Art in America, April 2003
http://www.artnet.com/library/00/0093/T009325.asp

A native of Brunoviski, Lithuania, Hyman Bloom moved to the United States at the age of seven.  He received his early artistic training at the West End Community Center in Boston and was a classmate of fellow artist, Jack Levine.

While living in Boston, Bloom was attracted to and inspired by many of the works at the Museum of Fine Arts.  He achieved recognized for his works that were displayed in the Americans 1942 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

From 1940, Bloom focused on religious and allegorical paintings.  His works sometimes contained morbid subject matter such as corpses and skeletons.


Source:
Staff, Columbus Museum