This site presents selected public records from an in-progress catalogue raisonné — currently comprising more than 2,000 paintings, drawings, and prints — of the complete works of Hyman Bloom (1913–2009). The records presented here document Bloom’s works held by museums and public institutions, and works whose current locations are unknown.
The copyright to all works by Hyman Bloom is retained by the Estate of Hyman Bloom.
Hyman Bloom was born in Latvia in 1913 and emigrated to Boston in 1920, where his artistic gifts were recognized early through studies at the Museum of Fine Arts and with teacher Harold Zimmerman. His career was launched at the age of 28 when Dorothy Miller included him in the landmark MoMA exhibition Americans 1942, from which MoMA purchased two of his paintings. Over the following decades Bloom developed a fiercely personal vision — rooted in mysticism, mortality, ecstatic color, and virtuoso draftsmanship — that placed him among the most distinctive American painters of the twentieth century. He died in Nashua, New Hampshire in 2009. His works are held by MoMA, the MFA Boston, the Whitney, the Hirshhorn, and numerous other institutions.
This catalogue raisonné was begun in 2015 and is independently researched and developed. Records document medium and support, dimensions, provenance, exhibition history, auction history, and publication references where known. The platform is built entirely on open source software (MySQL and PHP). A listing of major resources used in compilation appears in the Selected Bibliography of Modern Mystic: The Art of Hyman Bloom (Distributed Art Publishers, New York, 2019), pp. 180–181.
