Dali House

Another of my university art-course efforts, but this one’s a copy, from Hyman Bloom’s “Old Woman Dreaming”. I just saw the picture in a book and went at it with charcoal, and it wasn’t until this here blog came along that I made the effort to find out who the hell Hyman Bloom is. Click the image to see it full size.

He’s still alive, I was amazed to learn, at 92, and was one of the early American expressionists, and in fact, in 1954, the larger lights Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock called him America’s “first abstract expressionist”, though it’s not clear why they’re both quoted as saying exactly the same thing.

But Pollock and de Kooning must have got the inkling four years earlier when they exhibited their goods at the Venice Biennale alonside Bloom, Arshile Gorky, John Marin and two other Yanks everyone seems to have forgotten about. By ‘54, Bloom was the subject of a major retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, but “he willfully remained on the periphery of the Abstract Expressionist movement in New York and slowly drifted out of public notice and the New York art world”, says one online tribute.

He next did a series on séances, then trees and fish, then seascapes and lurid still-lifes and landscapes. In 1999 he created two paintings of rabbis with a Torah, and it was off down a lively Judaic path Hyman Bloom went. Bloom has spent his life since tracking down his Orthodox Jewish roots in Latvia, and for this reason his presence on the Internet is Judaic-intensive, not least at the blog run by a fellow named Tzemach Atlas that has the catchy title “Mental Blog” (why didn’t I think of that?) and was the only one site I found that has a picture of “Old Woman Dreaming”, and a big one at that.

Atlas paid the old boy a visit in December and found him in fine fettle. He mentions that Bloom, discussing this drawing, interjected “dying”, as in “Old Woman Dying”, but Atlas then goes on about Bloom spending time poking corpses in a morgue, so it’s not clear whether the old woman is dying, dreaming, dreaming of dying, dying to dream, or what. Artists. Huh.

At Bloom’s own website there’s a short biography by John Updike, who apparently studied art with Hyman at Harvard, then disobediently became a writer. Hey, that’s what I did!