The Estate of Hyman Bloom
The thick forests — their dankness, their rot, their sprigs of growth from beneath deep layers of deadfall — were his natural habitat, a wellspring of inspiration in tune with a lifetime of artmaking against the grain of the obvious. They gave him the viscerality he craved, a living laboratory of the rhythms of mortality in perpetual motion.
Murray Whyte, Boston Globe, 8/15/24
About Hyman Bloom
Hyman Bloom was born in Latvia in 1913. In 1920 he left for the US with his parents and brother to join his 2 older brothers who had moved to Boston during the year of Hyman’s birth. He was “discovered” at the age of 28 by Museum of Modern Art curator Dorothy Miller, and his very first show was a group show at MoMA in 1942. Time magazine’s Arts review of the show would be the first review — but hardly the last — to characterize Bloom as a reclusive artist with esoteric interests:
The most striking discoveries in the Museum of Modern Art’s show were Boston’s 28-year-old Hyman Bloom and Seattle’s 31-year-old Morris Graves. Until the Museum’s Painting Curator Dorothy Miller dug him out of a hermit-like existence in a Boston slum, Latvian-born Hyman Bloom had been painting in solitary squalor in a little second-story studio. A lover of Oriental musk who beguiles his spare moments playing on the Arabian lute, Hyman Bloom loves to paint, with exuberant Oriental color, the gloomy, bearded rabbis and synagogue scenes that he remembers from his childhood. Uninfluenced by other U.S. artists, indifferent to both money and publicity, shy, mop-headed Bloom has seldom sold a picture, never had an exhibition.
Bloom’s work was selected for inclusion at the Venice Biennale in 1948 and again in 1950. A major retrospective was held in 1955 at The Whitney and a major drawing show was held at The Whitney in 1968. In 2019, the Boston MFA held a large Bloom exhibition. Bloom’s works can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Boston’s MFA, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Hirshhorn Museum, the LA County Museum, as well as many others across the US.
Available Works
Paintings and drawings are now available for purchase directly from the Bloom Estate.
Essays, etc.
Online Video
Videos associated with the Boston MFA Bloom show are available on YouTube.
Modern Mystic
