Hyman Bloom:
A Survey of Works on Paper
by Robert Alimi, © 2024
As one of the most technically gifted draftsmen of the 20th century, his drawings hold their own against any in history. They are masterworks, in which volume, shading, light, and line are brilliantly communicated.
- Drawings by Hyman Bloom by Bernice Davidson, 1957
- Eight Drawings by Hyman Bloom by Hyman Swetzoff, 1962
- The Drawings of Hyman Bloom by Marvin Sadik, 1968
- Hyman Bloom: The Lubec Drawings by Philip Isaacson, 2001
- The Drawings of Hyman Bloom by Sigmund Abeles, 2002
- Hyman Bloom: A Survey of Works on Paper by Robert Alimi, 2024
This essay presents a chronological survey of Hyman Bloom’s lifelong engagement with works on paper. The more than one hundred illustrated pieces span eight decades, from 1926 to 2006. The image galleries are largely organized by medium or subject, highlighting Bloom’s recurring interests across different phases of his career.
Bloom is especially admirable for the steady discipline with which he developed his natural abilities as a draftsman and painter. Never satisfied with talent alone, he kept pushing himself to grow in both aesthetic sensibility and technique throughout his life. A profoundly multicultural artist, he drew inspiration from both Eastern and Western traditions. He felt as deeply connected to the art of the sixteenth century as to the innovations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His works on paper offer an especially revealing lens through which to trace this long and fruitful artistic journey.
Known for immersing himself in specific subjects through extended series of paintings, Bloom approached drawing with similar intensity. His works on paper show a focused exploration of both subject and medium: at times examining a single motif through multiple materials, and at others investigating the expressive range of a single medium—such as white ink—across diverse themes..
The first museum exhibition devoted entirely to Bloom’s drawings took place in 1957, organized by curator Bernice Davidson. Featuring 35 works, it traveled from the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire, to the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, concluding at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut. A second major exhibition followed in 1968, curated by Marvin Sadik. Comprising 44 works, it traveled from the University of Connecticut Museum of Art to the San Francisco Museum of Art and finally to the Whitney Museum of American Art.1
Throughout his career, Bloom utilized a variety of materials and techniques, including the following:
- Graphite
- Charcoal
- Silverpoint
- Conte crayon
- Ink (black, white & sepia)
- Gouache
- Monotype
- Monoprint
- Etching
- Pastel
- Watercolor
For one who pursues so many different drawing methods, theories which separate drawing and painting into various categories are of little concern. When pressed for definitions he simply described drawing as "forms without color." Drawing, then, as practiced by Hyman Bloom, is a separate discipline. He has developed personal techniques which have expanded his visual vocabulary. He works both in a graphic manner -- showing each tool mark constructing the form -- and in a tonal manner wherein the blending resembles painting. And although he works with many different techniques, his drawings contain the same symbols which have long been identified with his paintings.
As with his paintings, Bloom was never overly concerned when it came to the titling of drawings: many landscapes are simply titled “Landscape” and most rabbi portraits are “Rabbi with Torah” — creating cataloguing challenges. For example, four different drawings have been exhibited under the title “Landscape 2” (1957, 1958, 1962, and 1970), distinguished only by variations in size and medium. While some drawings are initialed, many are unsigned. The main exception is the series of large charcoal landscapes executed between 1962 and 1967, which Bloom initialed and numbered — though even these show some inconsistencies in sequence numbers.
We’ll trace Bloom’s career chronologically in sections loosely based on the Bloom chronology included in Modern Mystic: The Art of Hyman Bloom.
Student Years & the Zimmerman Method (1926-1933)
In 1926, Mary Cullen, Bloom’s eighth grade art teacher at Washington Junior High School, successfully recommended him for a scholarship to attend after-school classes at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. At Cullen’s suggestion, he also enrolled in drawing classes at the West End Community Center, a settlement house on Blossom Street. The instructor at the settlement house was Harold K. Zimmerman (1905–1941), whom Bloom later described as a “hero figure.” Bloom remained Zimmerman’s devoted pupil for the next seven years.
Harold Zimmerman was just 20 years of age and a student at the Boston Museum School when Bloom became his student.
Born in New York City in 1906 to parents Samuel and Lena, by the time he was five, the family had moved to Malden, MA. Among his siblings was older brother Isadore, who in 1950 commissioned the Frank Lloyd Wright “Zimmerman House” in Manchester, NH, now owned by the Currier Museum and open to the public.
In her dissertation, art historian Judith Bookbinder quotes Bloom describing Zimmerman as “a teacher of almost military discipline” who instituted “an exacting training procedure of drawing from memory after intense observation.”2
Zimmerman’s unique approach to art instruction is discussed in Denman Ross‘s “An Experiment in Art Teaching” , a 1930 proposal to gain funding from Harvard University for support of Zimmerman’s teaching of Bloom and fellow student Jack Levine.
The whole problem of art teaching is involved in Zimmerman's experiment and a solution of the problem will be not only interesting but may be far reaching in its consequences.
Ross never received his requested funding, but continued to pay out of his own pocket to keep the project going for another 3 years.
Another resource on Zimmerman’s method is the journal of her studies with Zimmerman kept by Rosamund Pickhard 3 as well as an excellent video of Nina Bohlen explaining the Zimmerman method as taught by Bloom.
Gallerist Hyman Swetzoff briefly described the Zimmerman method in a 1962 article for The Massachusetts Review5:
The method evolved by Zimmerman was based on a series of physical rhythms: the hand, following its natural movements, rhythmically traced with a hard pencil on paper what looked to be a giant spider's web. From this the imagination took over to perceive in the linear patterns, figures and landscapes, the subject which the pupil was to develop. As the hand became more controlled and proficient, the imagination, with the aid of observation and memory, formed more specific concepts until the maze of lines disappeared into the total idea. And a picture was produced. At that period, the drawings of these students were very much alike. But in a very short time, an amazing development could be seen in each one. The differentiations that occurred were those of touch and, increasingly, as the imagination took hold, of personality.
With Zimmerman as his instructor, Bloom’s draughtsmanship and compositional skills advanced rapidly. By the age of sixteen, his work encompassed both genre scenes and complex mythological subjects. His most notable juvenile work is “Man Breaking Bonds at Wheel” (Gallery 1, first image). A close examination of the drawing reveals the name “Hyman Bloom” inscribed on the figure’s belt, and the name “Robert Reilly(?)” written on the right leg shackle—a detail that invites speculation about Robert’s relationship to the young artist.
Drawings from this period are often executed on both sides of the sheet. Some feature a sequence of small studies on one side and a more fully realized composition on the other. A few early works are drawn on the reverse of mechanical drawing homework assignments. None bear Bloom’s own name; he apparently salvaged graded papers from classmates at Boston’s High School of Commerce, valuing the quality of the paper.
By 1929–30, Bloom had become more intensely focused on the human figure. Wrestling and boxing scenes began to dominate his subject matter. A significant group of these early drawings is now housed at Harvard University’s Fogg Museum, many of them donated by Denman Ross.
Gallery 1
Student Works (1926-1933)
In 1961, Art in America featured Bloom in the first of a series of “portraits” of contemporary artists. In his article, Art in America editor Brian O’Doherty wrote:
Bloom’s early drawings under Zimmerman are young master drawings and, like the glass flowers at the Peabody Museum, they are among the major Boston phenomena. They are incredible achievements for a young boy with resilient sureness of line and a facility that is breathtaking.
The years 1926 through 1933 were an especially productive period for Bloom. During this time, his technical abilities advanced rapidly, and under Harold Zimmerman’s guidance—whose approach to picture-making aligned closely with Bloom’s own thinking—he acquired the skills necessary to work independently. He was now ready to find his own artistic direction.
Exploring Themes (1934-1938)
In 1933, convinced that his student years had reached their end, Bloom ended his association with both Ross and Zimmerman. He began sharing a studio with two close friends, Jack Levine and Betty Chase. Bloom also lived in the unheated studio space, retreating to his parents’ home only during stretches of severe winter cold.
To support himself financially, he joined the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP); when that program concluded, he transitioned to the Works Progress Administration (WPA). He remained intermittently on the WPA roster of Boston easel painters until 1941.
Throughout this period he continued to explore the human figure—particularly figures in motion—developing a dynamic series he referred to as his “circus pictures”. These drawings and paintings often depict equestrian acrobats and trapeze artists, capturing the vitality and rhythm of performance. Representative works from this phase appear in Gallery 2.
Gallery 2
Theme Exploration (1934-1938)
By the end of 1939, Bloom had found his own voice as a painter, starting with his series of four powerfully expressive Christmas Tree oils. In 1942, he gained national recognition when 13 of his paintings were selected by Museum of Modern Art curator Dorothy Miller for inclusion in the exhibition “Americans 1942: 18 Artists from 9 States”. After the exhibition opened, he was courted by a number of prominent New York dealers and finally settled on Durlacher Brothers in late 1944, where his first NY gallery exhibition opened in 1945. His career as a painter was well underway.
The Young Painter (1939-1954)
The period of 1939 through 1954 represents Bloom at his oil painting peak. From the bride pictures, the treasure pictures, the chandeliers, to the cadaver and autopsy series, Bloom produced a very powerful body of work.
During this time, he filled a large number of sketchbook with ideas that would sometimes lead to the paintings we know today. In 2024 the Bloom Estate donated all 127 of these intact sketchbooks to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
The sketches are done in a variety of materials, including black ink, graphite, charcoal, gouache and occasionally watercolor. Gallery 3 shows a selection of sketchbook pages from the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s.
Gallery 3
Sketchbook Images (1939-1954)
Notably, in the late 1940s, as part of the “treasure picture” painting series, Bloom completed two fully finished gouache pictures as part of this same series. These two works are his only documented major gouache works with a full-color palette. “Old Glass” was purchased by New York dealer/collector Edith Halpert for her personal collection while “Pompeian Glass” was purchased by Karl Zerbe, the head of the Department of Painting, School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Gallery 4
Gouache "Treasure pictures" (1948/'49)
The Mature Draughtsman -- The 1950s
In 1952 Bloom began to experiment with producing large-scale, fully rendered drawings as cartoons to be used for paintings; this approach lasted a few years and was primarily concerned with anatomical themes. He abandoned the practice after deciding that this approach interfered with his painting process when it came to rendering the works in oil.
In his 1958 article Chaet wrote:
The oversize Conté drawings exhibited a few seasons back in his retrospective at the Whitney Museum were intended, we learned, as actual "cartoons" for paintings. He found that transferring these "cartoons" to canvas was a very difficult job at best. And when it was possible to transfer them properly he found it uninspiring to paint on an already completed vision; there was little margin for development. He jokingly remarked that "cartoons would be practical if an apprentice would do the transferring and the painting."
In gallery 5 we can see side-by-side comparisons of the two drawings that ultimately had counterparts in oil, while gallery 6 shows large conte crayon drawings never resulting in oil renditions.
RIGHT The Anatomist (1953), Oil On Canvas, 70.5 x 40.5 in.
Both in the collection of The Whitney Museum of American Art
RIGHT Cadaver on a Table (1953), Stand Oil And Dammar varnish, 52 x 40 in., Currier Museum of Art.
Gallery 5
conte crayon with related oils (1952)
Gallery 6
conte crayon without oil counterparts (1952)
A new theme also emerged in 1952 as Bloom began incorporating Seance and Medium subject matter into his visual vocabulary alongside his anatomical studies. The theme offered an apt metaphor for his artistic process: the artist as intermediary or “medium,” channeling forces that cross the boundary between material substance and immaterial presence.
Two of his early seance paintings, “The Medium” and “Apparition of Danger”, were acquired by Joseph Hirshhorn and are now part of the collection at The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. In Gallery 7, works on the seance theme from this period are presented in ink, charcoal, and conté crayon.
Gallery 7
mediums/seance (1953 - '54)
Bloom’s renewed engagement with drawing in the early 1950s — initially undertaken as an aid to painting — became very significant as he increasingly devoted himself to drawing as an independent pursuit. Rekindling the passion for drawing he had shown in his youth, he applied his considerable technical skill to new subjects and materials. As in his work of the late 1920s and early 1930s, Bloom treated drawings as complete works in their own right. This shift marked the beginning of a new and defining stage in his artistic development.
1954 was a very notable year for Bloom: in March his Durlacher Bros. gallery show opened, followed by the opening of his major museum retrospective in April. His painting “Apparition of Danger” was featured on the April cover of ARTnews and a full page color image of his “Slaughtered Animal” painting was featured in the April 26th issue of Time magazine. Also in April was his supervised LSD experiment with Harvard physicians Drs. Benda and Rinkle. And in September, he married Nina Bohlen.
In 1955, Bloom moved away from anatomical subject matter as his dominant theme. He continued to explore seance scenes and rabbi portraits, plus newly introduced themes of skeletal fish and turban squash still lifes. His output in oils continued at his typical pace of about 5 works per year, but his output of works on paper skyrocketed.
1955 was also the year when Hyman and Nina started going to Lubec, Maine for three weeks every August. The experience of Lubec becomes very evident in Bloom’s themes, which now include a number of fish skeleton drawings and, for the first time, landscape works inspired by the Bold Coast area of Lubec. The Bold Coast is adjacent to what is now Quoddy Head State Park, the easternmost point of land in the United States. More information about Hyman and Nina’s time in Lubec can be found in this essay.
Bloom had sporadically used fish as subject matter going as far back as the early 1940s, but these earlier works were essentially one-offs and didn’t develop into a series until 1956. He produced a large number of fish pictures in the mid to late 50s — mostly drawings, and again in the 1970s and 1980s – mostly paintings. The fish paintings of the 1970s are some of his most iconic works.
The brothers Hyman and Seymour Swetzoff had both worked at Boston’s Mirski Gallery in the mid-1940s, where they likely first became acquainted with Bloom.
In 1948, they established their own gallery, the Frameshop Gallery, on Huntington Avenue. Five years later, in 1953, Hyman Swetzoff assumed sole ownership and relocated the business to Newbury Street, renaming it the Swetzoff Gallery. Swetzoff was well educated, fluent in French, and both a translator and writer of poetry. He published critical essays on Redon and Bresdin.
Swetzoff was an enthusiastic Bloom supporter and established a strong market for both Bloom’s early student works and contemporary drawings. The vast majority of Bloom drawings produced in the 1950s and 1960s were sold by Swetzoff.
The Swetzoff Gallery held solo exhibitions of Bloom drawings in 1957 and 1965. These gallery exhibitions served as precursors to the museum shows taking place in 1957 and 1968, and Swetzoff was heavily involved in both museum exhibitions.
Through Hyman Swetzoff, Bloom met Jerry Goldberg, a businessman who, like Bloom, had grown up in the West End. Goldberg became a good friend and patron, and paid Bloom a monthly stipend in exchange for drawings. Eventually, through acquisitions directly from Bloom as well as purchases from Swetzoff Gallery, the Goldberg Collection of Bloom drawings grew to over 35 works. Of the 17 drawings included in the 1960 “Francis Bacon/Hyman Bloom” exhibition, 13 came from the Goldberg Collection. Many of these drawings, thanks to the generosity of Goldberg’s son and daughter, are now in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and The Morgan Museum and Library in New York.
Another notable collector who collected Bloom works on paper was Boston dentist Dr. Earl stone. In the late 1950s and through the 1960s, Dr. Stone built a collection of 8 excellent large Bloom drawings. All are now in the hands of private collectors.
Rabbi pictures merit special attention within Bloom’s body of work. His relationship to Judaism is often brought up in discussion of his heavy use of rabbi imagery. After all, just after his bar mitzvah in 1926, he had turned his back on practicing the faith that he was born into, and by the late 1930s was deeply immersed in the study of Eastern religions and Theosophy. Yet, from the 1940s on, he produced more rabbi portraits than any other single subject, and by a wide margin.
Bloom’s comments on rabbis as subject matter provide insight as to why he found this theme so compelling. He said “[Rabbis] represent the best that can be made of a human being…even if they don’t live up to that standard, they still have a symbolic value.” 7
Perhaps the most astute summary of Bloom’s use of rabbi imagery is contained in the catalog essay of his 1968 drawing exhibition, where Marvin Sadik wrote:
In his drawings of Rabbis, Bloom has striven to personify his Ideal Man. Garbed in and surrounded by all the regalia of religious ritual, these Rabbis are not only involved in the world of Hebrew orthodoxy, but, seemingly saturated with immense learning and profound wisdom, they have risen above it, and are, ultimately, mystics. And it is this mysticism which interests Bloom most, an ecstatic state, which, though it has been arrived at here through the medium of a specific religious tradition, in the final analysis, has nothing to do with it.
Rabbis were his chosen metaphor for what man should strive for: the dedicated pursuit of knowledge & enlightenment. It is ultimately his completely optimistic view of what man can achieve in a lifetime. It’s what he was striving to achieve as a spiritual being and artist.
It’s worth noting that while Bloom was no longer engaged in the practices of Judaism, he hadn’t completely turned his back on some of its fundamental traditions. His extensive library, in addition to numerous texts on Hinduism and Buddhism, included volumes exploring elements of Jewish mysticism such as Kabbalah. And ultimately, at life’s end, he opted for a traditional Jewish burial.
Shown in gallery 8 is the series of four large rabbi drawings completed in 1955 which are among Bloom’s best figurative works. All are now in institutional ownership.
Gallery 8
rabbis (1955)
In 1956, Bloom shifted to mostly ink and conte crayon. He completed a series of works in black ink and another series in white ink. He also produced a number of conte crayon works using both sanguine and brown conte crayon.
Notably, Bloom completed his first known landscape drawing inspired by Lubec, Maine, a black ink drawing (Gallery 9, image 1). Dated Aug 15th, this is a rare work that Bloom completed while actually staying in Lubec8.
He also completed a series of “beggar pictures” in black ink, some of which are shown in gallery 9. Bloom would reference beggars when discussing certain similarities between artists and rabbis. In her essay for the 2006 exhibition “Hyman Bloom: A Spiritual Embrace” 9, curator Katherine French wrote :
...he uses the word ‘beggar’ to describe artists and rabbis, who both must depend on society to make their living. “Rabbis were the aristocrats of learning,” he says, deeply respectful of a knowledge acquired through diligent study. “But rabbis had to live through the help of rich people. They did the service, but they had to beg for everything to be supported.” The connection between the painter and his chosen subject is clear.
Gallery 9
black ink (1956 )
Gallery 10 features a selection of white ink drawings. The white ink drawings introduced an element of color through the use of dark toned paper in either red, green or blue. The color from the dark toned papers has been lost in previous black & white reproductions, and unfortunately some of the images in gallery 10 are from B&W sources. These images will be updated as better photos are obtained.
Theme-wise, the beggar series continued and a new theme of fish skeletons was introduced. Bloom had been using fish as subject matter for both painting and drawing since the early 1940s, but now the decidedly more skeletal theme developed into an important series of drawings.
Gallery 10
white ink (1956/'57)
As an example of an unconventional drawing technique Bloom sometimes employed, the 1956 conte crayon “Fish Skeletons” (gallery 11, image 1) drawing is notable for the use of dissolved conte crayon applied with both a pen and a brush.
Chaet discussed the process used in this drawing in his 1958 article:
Fish, a recent red ("Watteau") Conte-crayon drawing, reveals a seemingly mixed-media work. It is perhaps better described as a mixed-instrument drawing (if there is such a category). Let us explain. The darkest tones at the top have been rubbed with a dry brush to insure a rich, smooth dark. The watery effect at the lower right is created by wetting the already applied Conte surface. The darker brush strokes at the lower left are produced the same way, but with less water. And still other light tones are produced by working into the drawing with kneaded gum eraser. Thus far the technique is not too unusual. But the pen strokes are produced with an "ink" composed of fine Conte-crayon particles and water. These pen strokes can be seen in the upper left; here they gradually blend the darks around the form. Pen marks are also employed to detail the structures within the main forms.
Once he had re-engaged with works on paper in the early 1950s, Bloom’s drawings generally drew upon the same themes found in his oils, along with the addition of a few new subject areas such as beggars and skeletal fish. However, one slightly unusual series of drawings took him back to his days as a young student.
The subject of mythological creatures was one that Bloom regularly employed in his early student drawings of the 1920s, and it’s the one subject from his student years that he briefly returned to in the 1950s. The best example of this is the Dragon Series executed in 1956, along with the related drawing Smoke. Two of the dragon works – there are 5 known in total – were included in Bloom’s 1957 traveling museum exhibition.
More than any other drawings from the 1950s, the conte crayon Dragon Series shows Bloom echoing interests from his youth, when he was fully immersed in the study of Old Master works.
Bloom’s first dragon, Dragon I, is a creative reinterpretation of one of the dragons depicted in Agostino Carracci’s (1557-1602) Two Dragons, with Details of Their Heads, and Half-Length Studies of Four Further Dragons. The Carracci drawing itself is based upon the dragon in the drawing Apollo and the Python (1589) by Bernardo Buontalenti (c. 1531–June 1608). For his own dragon, Bloom provided the creature with a smoke filled background and drew the dragon as decidedly female. The wonderful drawing Smoke was possibly completed as a fully developed study of the backgrounds Bloom used in his dragon pictures.
The dragon series, along with Smoke, might be seen as works where Bloom was simply taking pleasure in the pure joy of drawing while also providing a slightly nostalgic tangent to the type of subject he loved to draw in his early teen years. He was able to further showcase his mature, virtuoso draftsmanship while revisiting a touch of Old Master subject matter. Unlike typical 16th century depictions, Bloom’s dragon is not an demonic creature about to be dispatched by a heroic saint, but is shown alone, apparently responding to some unidentified threat; perhaps a metaphor of our untamable natural world that might be somewhat related to his large charcoal landscape drawings that would come just a few years later.
Gallery 11
conte crayon (1956)
As we saw in Gallery 4, the two early 1940s “treasure” gouaches were full of color. Now, the gouaches were strictly monochromatic, from deep blacks to pure whites. Subject matter varied, but included two excellent “Rabbi with Torah” portraits. These are two of the best rabbi portraits — in oil or on paper — that Bloom completed after the 1955 Rabbi series. One entered the Goldberg Collection while Edith Halpert purchased the other for her own collection.
Gallery 12
gouache (1956/'57 )
I spent yesterday in Hartford where I went to see the exhibition of your drawings. It is a very fine show, full of wonderful drawings and very well shown. I do wish we could have had the show here before it started on the road. Some of the drawings I know, but it seems to me the best ones I did not know. The great revelation was the landscape drawings and the drawings of the last two years which are really superb. They keep reminding me of the late 15th and early 16th century in Germany and Switzerland. The landscapes are such a completely new departure and new vision for you that I was tremendously fascinated by them. I am wondering if anything like that will appear in the new paintings. However, I am very conscious that it will be some time before I see them, and you well know that I can and do wait.
Bloom never did send more paintings to Durlacher Bros. and would put aside his oil paints entirely in 1962. Askew, not able to find a suitable buyer for Durlacher Bros. when he retired, shuttered the gallery in 1967. By the time Bloom started painting again in 1971, he had new representation in New York with the Terry Dintenfass Gallery11.
From 1958 through 1961, Bloom didn’t exhibit any particular preference in materials or subject matter when it came to works on paper. He produced major drawings in ink, gouache and conte crayon. Gallery 13 shows a selection of these works.
Gallery 13
misc. works (1958-1961)
Gallery 14 shows works that Bloom produced between the mid 1950s and the mid 1960s that are best categorized as “studies”. The subjects are those that Bloom often used for studies: head portraits, fish, and rabbi with torah. Most often done in black ink, but occasionally in conte crayon, these studies were clearly something he enjoyed producing. The head studies are sometimes in the manner of Old Master caricature portraits and da Vinci’s “grotesques”12.
Gallery 14
Ink studies: heads, fish & rabbis (1955-1965)
The Mature Draughtsman -- The 1960s
With the intention of focusing exclusively on drawing for six months, Bloom put aside oil paints completely in 1962. He also set aside ink, gouache, and conté crayon, turning his full attention to charcoal. Between 1962 and 1967, this experiment yielded a remarkable body of large-scale charcoal landscape drawings, some as wide as nine feet.
He described his motivation this way: “I thought by reducing the variables I could get to fundamental issues. The Sung painters, after all, have a complete aesthetic in black and white, and I had hoped by imposing such limits I might be able to give greater strength to the whole composition. Also I wanted to explore charcoal tone as Redon had done, and pursue ideas I had developed from studying the drawings and prints of Altdorfer and Bresdin.”
His planned six months would turn into the better part of a decade.
Bloom’s subjects originated in the deep woods set back from the high cliffs of Maine’s Bold Coast area. These are not scenes of pastoral calm; the forests he drew are dense, shadowed, and overgrown, filled with fallen trunks and twisting branches. The theme of mortality—long central to Bloom’s work—reappears here in another guise: nature itself becomes the site of continuous death and renewal. The forest, tangled and decomposing, is rendered not as landscape but as metaphor—a visual counterpart to his earlier anatomical works.
He used charcoal with physicality—rubbing, erasing, scratching, layering, and even vacuuming the paper to adjust tonal density. The resulting surfaces are richly worked, alternating between heavy blacks and luminous grays that suggest light filtering through branches. Forms emerge and dissolve, hovering between the descriptive and the abstract.
The elaborate details suggest both Bresdin’s intricate etchings alongside Altdorfer’s ability to render individual conifers as strikingly animate, yet Bloom’s approach is unmistakably modern—the image is informed more by experience than by narrative. The viewer is drawn into a thicket that seems both physical and psychological, a landscape that mirrors inner states of contemplation and unrest.
When first shown in his 1968 exhibition, this series confirmed his stature as one of the finest draftsmen of the century. By limiting himself to charcoal—“reducing the variables”—Bloom discovered an expanded expressiveness within self-imposed restraint. These works demonstrate not only his extraordinary technical command but also his enduring belief in drawing as a means of personal revelation, connecting back to the most fundamental aspect of Harold Zimmerman’s teaching.
In these expansive sheets of charcoal, the forest becomes a living symbol of the artist’s lifelong search for unity between the material and the spiritual worlds.
Gallery 15
Large Charcoals (1962-1969)
Midway through completion of his series of twenty-four numbered landscapes, Bloom pivoted to a new subject: The Astral Plane. Maintaining the same large-scale format and continuing to work in charcoal, he completed seven Astral Plane drawings in 1965 and 1966 before returning to finish the Landscape series in 1967.
The astral plane is a concept drawn from ancient spiritual and philosophical traditions, common to Hinduism, Buddhism, and Theosophy.
In Theosophical writings, it refers to a realm of matter—a zone of consciousness situated between the physical and the purely spiritual—divided into seven subplanes. Whereas the highest subplane represents pure, unselfish feeling and joy, with souls preparing to pass to a heavenly realm of light and serenity, Bloom’s images evoke the astral plane’s lowest level: a dark, hellish region of souls unable to release earthly cravings and desires.
Bloom’s 1968 traveling museum exhibition included twenty-four of these large charcoals—both Landscape and Astral Plane subjects—and was enthusiastically received.
From the San Francisco Chronicle:
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.
From the Boston Globe:
Bloom is not only a master craftsman and draughtsman, he also has something to say... Many of his drawings are limited in theme to the forest primeaval, as it were. Charcoal (or conte crayon) is the only medium used. Color is nil. Only black and white and a thousand and one shades of grey are asked to tell the story here. A native of Latvia, who came to this country in 1920, Bloom handles charcoal like an old master. In his drawing, light and shadow, shapes of all description fluid compositions, space and basic structure are all so beautifully related one to another and to the overall theme that there isn't a jarring note throughout. We urge you to see it. It's a knockout.
The high note of the museum show’s April opening was soon cut short by tragedy: the murder of Hyman Swetzoff the following month. Having lost both Durlacher Brothers and Swetzoff Gallery representation within a twelve-month span, Bloom’s work was subsequently taken on by the Terry Dintenfass Gallery in New York. It would be four years before Dintenfass mounted a new exhibition—she knew, no doubt from conversations with Kirk Askew, that it was best not to press Bloom for new work.
The Later Decades (1972-2009)
Once Bloom resumed painting around 1971, his period of intense, singular focus on works on paper came to an end. The years 1970–1972 were essentially a transitional phase marking his return to painting. During this re-engagement with oil, Bloom also created a series of black ink landscape drawings, a small number of etchings, and about a dozen monotypes—some of which are shown in Gallery 16. His initial oil paintings were executed in grisaille, several of which were exhibited at the Terry Dintenfass Gallery in 1972.
Although he continued his daily sketching and occasionally produced large, finished drawings, his attention had decisively shifted back to oil painting. By 1973, Bloom had resumed working with a full color palette and, in 1974, completed more than a dozen landscape oils. Bloom—the painter—was back.
Gallery 16
Monotypes, etchings, watercolor (1970-1985)
Gallery 17
Late year sketches (1980-2006)
Conclusion
Hyman Bloom’s lifelong engagement with works on paper produced a body of art unique in twentieth-century American art. A remarkably gifted young draughtsman, Bloom was fortunate to study under Harold Zimmerman, whose guidance helped him refine his compositional skills. Bloom’s passion for drawing—and his disciplined pursuit of mastery across a range of media—culminated in an extensive and distinguished body of works on paper.
During the 2019–2020 Bloom retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Holland Cotter, co–chief art critic of The New York Times, participated in a symposium devoted to the artist. Cotter concluded his presentation with remarks that eloquently captured Bloom’s enduring distinctiveness:
People tried to label his work: Expressionism, Abstract Expressionism, Symbolism, Jewish art, Spiritual art. But nothing really worked, no label was accurate. No label was enough ... Despite the fact he came on the scene and had his biggest public successes in the 1940s and 50s, I don’t really in my mind associate his art with that time. I think of it as countercultural in the 60s sense. A resistance to an established order, certainly to the “anti-spiritual in art” order that has gained dominance from the 1960s onward in academic circles. And I think of it 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 a 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.
A sustained look at Bloom’s drawings underscores the truth of Cotter’s observation. Bloom’s deep engagement with both Eastern and Western art and philosophy, his reverence for past masters, and his extraordinary technical skill combined to produce a body of work unlike any other—one that continues to invite close study and renewed appreciation.
While only a handful of Bloom’s paintings remain unlocated, dozens of major drawings are still missing. The rediscovery and publication of these works would be an invaluable contribution to understanding the full scope of Bloom’s achievement.
End Notes
- It’s unfortunate that the catalogs of these two Bloom drawing shows were printed in black and white. Lost were the subtle variations in the red and brown conte crayon works and the rich, almost velvety, texture of many of the charcoal works, as well as the color introduced through the use of dark toned colored papers used with white ink drawings. The majority of the works included in the galleries of this essay are improved images over what has been published previously.
- Chaet, Bernard. “Drawing Techniques: Interview with Hyman Bloom.” Arts, March 1958, 66-67.
- Bookbinder, Judith A. “Figurative Expressionism in Boston and Its Germanic Cultural Affinities: An Alternative Modernist Discourse on Art and Identity.” PhD diss., Boston University, 1998 (UMI Number: 9823222).
- Rosamond was married to the artist Carl E. Pickhardt Jr. who had also studied with Zimmerman. Her father, Edward Waldo Forbes, was the director of the Fogg Museum of Art at Harvard University and a Boston MFA trustee.
- The footage is not publicly available, but a portion of Nina’s explanation was included in the final edit of the film.
- Eight Drawings by Hyman Bloom With a Note by Hyman Swetzoff. The Massachusetts Review, Vol. 3, No. 3 (Spring, 1962), pp. 543-554\
- Letter from Halpert to Swetzoff dated August 23, 1961, Swetzoff Gallery Records, 1941-1968,Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC
- French, Katherine. Hyman Bloom: A Spiritual Embrace. Exh. cat. Framingham, MA: Danforth Museum of Art, 2006.
- Bloom and Bohlen would spend 3 weeks every August in Lubec, when Bohlen’s parents would travel and the Lubec house was available. Bloom would spend days at a time in the deep woods of the Bold Coast area with both large and small format cameras. He would later view transparencies in his studio before undertaking works using the Zimmerman method of drawing from memory and imagination.
- Thompson, Dorothy Abbott. Hyman Bloom: The Spirits of Hyman Bloom: The Sources of His Imagery. Exh. cat. New York: Chameleon Books, in association with the Fuller Museum of Art, 1996.
- Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, Kirk Askew Papers, 1928-196
- Terry Dintenfass recounts her initial meetings with Bloom in “Interview with Terry Dintenfass, Conducted by Paul Cummings”, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Read the online transcript.
- The Swetzoff Gallery sales ledgers show a good number of these studies were sold. As with Bloom’s student drawings, these studies provided a price point that was quite a bit lower than Bloom’s larger, fully rendered drawings
- Thompson, Dorothy Abbott. Hyman Bloom: The Spirits of Hyman Bloom: The Sources of His Imagery. Exh. cat. New York: Chameleon Books, in association with the Fuller Museum of Art, 1996
- The numbered and dated Landscape charcoals, along with 7 Astral Plane pictures:
- 1962: 1, 2, 3, 5
- 1963: 4, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14
- 6 & 7 were never completed
- 1964: 16, 18, 19 (two versions)
- 15 & 17 were never completed
- 16 & 18 are currently unlocated
- 1965: 3 Astral Planes
- Self Portrait with Spider
- On The Astral Plane: In A Cave
- On The Astral Plane: On The Dung Heap
- 1966: Landscape #22 and 4 Astral Planes
- On The Astral Plane: Beelzebub
- On The Astral Plane: Beelzebub, Half Length
- On The Astral Plane: Cold Anger
- On The Astral Plane: Up To Their Necks
- 1967: 20, 21, 23, 24
- NOTE: in 1979, on request from collector Phillip Isaacson, Bloom completed one additional large charcoal landscape. It was not numbered as part of the original series.
- Hyman Bloom Paintings and Drawings, Terry Dintenfass Gallery, New York, 28 March-22 April,1972.
- The Pan Orient Arts Foundation was co-founded by Bloom and James Rubin in 1960 and was devoted to the collecting, recording, and study of South Indian classical music. The Steak and Chop House stationary came into use as sketch paper sometime after 1972, the year Bloom moved to Inman Square in Cambridge. The Steak and Chop House was a business run by relatives of the Berkowitz family just prior to the opening of the original Legal Sea Foods in 1968 by George Berkowitz. Per Roger Berkowitz, excess supplies of the Steak and Chop House business were stored above Legal Sea Foods in the same space that George Berkowitz invited Bloom to use as a secondary studio. Bloom put the obsolete business stationary to good use.
Selected Bibliography for Works on Paper
Online (click on the publication image or author name to read the essay)
Sigmund Abeles,
The Drawings of Hyman Bloom: An Artist's Appreciation, Color & Ecstasy: The Art of Hyman Bloom, The National Academy of Design, 2002
Bernice Davidson
Drawings by Hyman Bloom - Introduction, 1957
Marvin Sadik
The Drawings of Hyman Bloom,The William Benton Museum of Art, School of Fine Arts, University of Connecticut, Storrs, 1968
Hyman Swetzoff
Eight Drawings by Hyman Bloom, with a note by Hyman Swetzoff, The Massachusetts Review, Vol. 3, No. 3 (Spring, 1962), pp. 543-554.
Offline
- Chaet, Bernard. “Drawing Techniques: Interview with Hyman Bloom.” Arts, March 1958, 66-67.
- Carl E. and Rosamond Forbes Pickhardt Papers concerning Harold K. Zimmerman, ca.1932-1943, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC
- Swetzoff Gallery Records, 1941-1968, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC
- Harold K. Zimmerman Papers, 1930-1954, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC