WhiteBoxNYC
Hyman Bloom - Paintings and Drawings 1940-2005
White Box presents
Hyman Bloom
Paintings and Drawings 1940–2005
(“The Rabbinical Series”)
July 17 through September 23
Hyman Bloom (1913–2009) was a Latvian-born painter influenced by Eastern European Jewish heritage, Middle Eastern
and South Asian music, and mortality. Bloom and his family immigrated to Boston in the 1920s where he was discovered at
14, and received a scholarship to study drawing under famed Harvard art professor, Denman Ross.
The Rabbinical paintings presented in this exhibition, permeated by historical influences ranging from Grünewald and
Rembrandt, to Redon and Soutine, to Indian tantric art and Chinese painting, reflect the mystical and macabre with vivid
intensity: sordid subjects depicted in sensual, jewel-like colors. According to the artist, his works serve as “an attempt to cope
with one’s destiny and become master of it.”
Art critic, Thomas Hess, hailed Bloom in Art News as “one of the outstanding painters of his generation”. Bloom’s
“successors” Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning considered him the first Abstract Expressionist. His first public showing
contained thirteen paintings in the Museum of Modern Art exhibition “Americans 1942”, curated by Dorothy C. Miller. Bloom
represented the United States at the 1950 Venice Biennale alongside Gorky, Pollock, and de Kooning. In 1954, a traveling
retrospective of his work appeared at the Whitney Museum of American Art, to critical and press acclaim. In the mid-50s, he
participated in an experiment recording the effects of LSD in his drawings.
Bloom was a key figure in the Boston Expressionist movement. His shy, reclusive nature did not allow for joining arms
with the Abstract Expressionist explosion in the art world of the mid-20th century in New York. Rather, uninterested in fame,
Bloom veered off in his own direction, evoking the spiritual and the metaphysical, and not succumbing either to the pop art
movement that became ubiquitous later. Nonetheless, he remains an important link in American post-war art history, and his
work has been increasingly revisited since his death at the age of 96.
Hyman Bloom - Paintings and Drawings 1940-2005
White Box presents
Hyman Bloom
Paintings and Drawings 1940–2005
(“The Rabbinical Series”)
July 17 through September 23
Hyman Bloom (1913–2009) was a Latvian-born painter influenced by Eastern European Jewish heritage, Middle Eastern
and South Asian music, and mortality. Bloom and his family immigrated to Boston in the 1920s where he was discovered at
14, and received a scholarship to study drawing under famed Harvard art professor, Denman Ross.
The Rabbinical paintings presented in this exhibition, permeated by historical influences ranging from Grünewald and
Rembrandt, to Redon and Soutine, to Indian tantric art and Chinese painting, reflect the mystical and macabre with vivid
intensity: sordid subjects depicted in sensual, jewel-like colors. According to the artist, his works serve as “an attempt to cope
with one’s destiny and become master of it.”
Art critic, Thomas Hess, hailed Bloom in Art News as “one of the outstanding painters of his generation”. Bloom’s
“successors” Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning considered him the first Abstract Expressionist. His first public showing
contained thirteen paintings in the Museum of Modern Art exhibition “Americans 1942”, curated by Dorothy C. Miller. Bloom
represented the United States at the 1950 Venice Biennale alongside Gorky, Pollock, and de Kooning. In 1954, a traveling
retrospective of his work appeared at the Whitney Museum of American Art, to critical and press acclaim. In the mid-50s, he
participated in an experiment recording the effects of LSD in his drawings.
Bloom was a key figure in the Boston Expressionist movement. His shy, reclusive nature did not allow for joining arms
with the Abstract Expressionist explosion in the art world of the mid-20th century in New York. Rather, uninterested in fame,
Bloom veered off in his own direction, evoking the spiritual and the metaphysical, and not succumbing either to the pop art
movement that became ubiquitous later. Nonetheless, he remains an important link in American post-war art history, and his
work has been increasingly revisited since his death at the age of 96.