Quotes about Hyman Bloom

…the subject of a painting by Hyman Bloom is as inseparable from its physical aspects as is the work of Grunewald or Rembrandt.  Like these artists he seems to think with his brush; complex philosophical implications are conveyed in the action of painting.
Elaine de Kooning, ARTnews, January 1950

What Bloom has achieved already, in the first decade of his artistic maturity, marks him as of the first importance among American artists, and as one of those who are making our production in painting of more than only American significance
Sydney J. Freedberg, Perspectives, 1954

Hyman Bloom is one of the strongest painters in America today.
Frederick Wight, April, 1954

…now forty years old, in his third one man show since his spectacular debut in the Museum of Modern Art’s “Americans 1942” exhibition, is one of the outstanding painters of his generation.
Thomas Hess, April, 1954

Introvert, mystic, moralist, and one of the great expressive artists of this age, Bloom takes his place in the company of Gruenewald, Van Gogh and Orozco by virtue of his capacity to feel within himself the most painful experiences of the human race and to personalize them in image and paint.
Selden Rodman, “The Eye of Man”, Devin-Adair, New York, 1955

People have the crazy idea that an abstract painter doesn’t like realism, he said. I like Hyman Bloom’s work and, going back further, Ryder’s, and even Eakins’s….The final test of painting, theirs, mine, any other, is: does the painter’s emotion come across?
Franz Kline, “Conversations with Artists”, by Selden Rodman 1957

It is not to be missed. I was particularly swept away by the landscapes which remind one of Altdorfer, Bosch, Bresdin, Blake and all other Gothic and romantic masters of dense detail and mystical inspiration, But after a visit to the San Francisco Museum… [they] will remind one forever of Hyman Bloom.
Alfred Frankenstein, San Francisco Chronicle, July 10, 1968

Willem de Kooning made it very clear to me in a conversation in 1954 that he and Jackson Pollock considered Bloom, whom they had discovered in “Americans 1942″, the first Abstract Expressionist artist in America.
Bernard Chaet, Archives of American Art Journal, 1980

Bloom’s work forecasts the emotional fervor and spontaneous brushwork of many young neo-expressionists today. There is a difference, however. Perhaps it lies in the symbolism, even grandeur, of Bloom’s images, which seem closer to Rembrandt and El Greco than to Pollock, more imbedded in baroque tradition than in the introspection of Abstract Expressionism.
John I.H. Baur, 1986

…much of the work I have done as a curator in recent years – retrospectives of Richter (at MoMA last year) of Beckmann (soon to come to MoMA from Paris and London with which it was collaboratively organized)…has been informed by the understanding of painting I gained from you.
Robert Storr, personal letter to Bloom, Feb. 1, 2003

…one of the most significant American artists of the post-World War II era.
Holland Cotter, NY Times, August 31, 2009

Hyman Bloom was more than just “influential,’’ more than just a “painter’s painter.’’ His art, at its best, combines visceral power with a striving, speculative, swarming quality that does indeed suggest a visionary sensibility, and feels unique in American art.
Sebastian Smee, Boston Globe, October 2009

Rare, unusual, brilliant and deep. Also quite lovable.
Brian O’Doherty, email, 2014

I am so pleased that Hyman will be getting the attention he has long deserved.
Barbara Novak, on the forthcoming Henry Adams book, email, 2018

…I think of [his art] as multicultural, in the present sense, an art that synthesizes global influences to create something brand new, not seen before…no art past or present looks like Hyman Bloom’s.  He’s solitary wonder. His apartness continues to be a liability to his placement in art history, but it is a great, great blessing for us all.
Holland Cotter, speaking at the Boston MFA Bloom Symposium, February  2020