Hyman Bloom, eerie paintings of rabbis, ghosts, and demons

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by Stephen Vider

Monumental paintings adorn every wall of Hyman Blooms house in Nashua, New Hampshire—a fluorescent rabbi at the main entrance, a dark nude of an old woman just off the kitchen. It’s been 65 years since Bloom made his momentous leap onto the American art scene. He was 28 when the Museum of Modern Art selected him as one of 18 new artists to be featured in the exhibit “Americans 1942.” Critics applauded his work, struck as much by his vibrant use of color as his subjects: aging rabbis, an exotic bride, a chandelier from his childhood synagogue. Equally impressed were Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, both in their 30s and yet to embark on the work that would make them famous. De Kooning would later tell Bernard Chaetthat he and Pollock considered Bloom the first Abstract Expressionist in America. But while Bloom’s paintings soon hung alongside theirs at the 1950 Venice Biennale, few people today have heard of him.

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That may be remedied, in small part, by “A Spiritual Embrace,” a rich and surprising exhibition of Bloom’s work running at the Danforth Museum of Art in Framingham, Massachusetts until March 11. It comes only five years after a retrospective at the National Academy of Design, but includes ten previously unseen portraits of rabbis, only a sample of at least 40 that Bloom has painted in the last fifteen years. They most closely resemble the uncomfortable, unsparing portraiture of Lucian Freud, all wrinkles, flesh, and shadows, but Bloom’s brushstrokes are thicker and more spontaneous, as though he were at war with the canvas. To see them forces a reframing of his career—not as an Expressionist who found his style memorializing a world he had abandoned, but one still grappling with people and places he never escaped in the first place.

Bloom was only seven when he and his parents left Lithuania for Boston. Now 93, he dismisses the recent round of attention as “a lot of nonsense.” Sitting at the kitchen table, he takes an occasional bite of banana from the plate in front of him, and listens with an impish grin, his gray beard only a few inches shorter than those of the rabbis he used to paint and still sketches. Stella, his second wife, 30 years younger and Greek, with smooth gray hair and glasses, says it’s one of his bad days, and goes digging for his hearing aid. When I thank him for making time to speak with me, he laughs, “Think nothing of it. You’ve just kept a dying man from his bed.”

Stephen Vider is associate editor of Nextbook.org. He last wrote about Israeli photographer Adi Nes.

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