Hyman Bloom

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Hyman Bloom (b. Brunavišķi, Latvia, March 29, 1913) is a painter. His work is influenced by his Jewish heritage, as well as the supernatural. Many of his works feature macabre subjects such as skeletons or corpses.

Bloom was born into an orthodox Jewish family in the tiny Jewish village of Brunavišķi, in the Bauska District of the Zemgale region of southern Latvia, near the town of Bauska and about 45 miles south of Riga near the Lithuanian border. He emigrated to the United States with his family in 1920, at the age of seven. He lived for most of his life in Boston, Massachusetts and at a young age planned to become a rabbi, but his family could not find a suitable teacher.

At the age of fifteen, Bloom and Jack Levine, another Jewish painter from Boston, received scholarships in the fine arts by the famous Harvard art professor Denman Ross (1853-1935). They also studied with Harold Zimmerman, who died in 1941 while still in his thirties. Bloom, along with Levine and another painter, Karl Zerbe, eventually became associated with a style named Boston Expressionism.[1]

In 1940, after viewing Bloom's abstracted paintings of archeological sites, Clement Greenberg, Jackson Pollock, and Willem de Kooning dubbed Bloom "the greatest artist in America."[2] In 1949, Bloom received a Guggenheim fellowship, and in 1950 he was one of only seven artists (including Arshile Gorky, John Marin, Jackson Pollock, and Willem de Kooning to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale.[3] In 1954 Pollock and de Kooning called Bloom "the first Abstract Expressionist artist in America." The same year, Bloom had a major retrospective of his work at the Whitney Museum of American Art.[4]

He was a close friend of the composer Alan Hovhaness and the Greek mystic painter Hermon di Giovanno. The three of them often met together to discuss various mystical subjects and to listen 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.

Bloom lives with his wife Stella in New Hampshire.