Hyman Bloom

Bloom and his parents immigrated to Boston from Brunoviski, Lithuania, following World War I. Bloom was a precocious draughtsman and, while still in high school, began studies with Harold Zimmerman at the West End Community Center where he met lifelong friend Jack Levine. Denman Ross, a color theorist and Harvard professor emeritus, took the young artists under his wing, rented a studio for them and provided small weekly allowances. During the 1930s, through intermittent employment on the WPA and support from several dealers, Bloom avoided the confines of a full-time job and, along with Levine and German-born Karl Zerbe, became known as a Boston Expressionist. Bloom is at heart a mystic and philosopher, a private individual intrigued by ideas of reincarnation, Jewish tradition, Eastern philosophy, and the occult. In his paintings, and in the drawings that occupied him primarily from the 1950s until the late 1970s, Bloom deals with themes of life and death and with human emotional conflict.

Virginia M. Mecklenburg Modern American Realism: The Sara Roby Foundation Collection (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press for the National Museum of American Art, 1987)