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This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  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
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Biography from The Columbus Museum-Georgia:
| 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 |
| ** If you discover credit omissions or have additional information to add, please let us know at registrar@AskART.com. |
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