CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 5/16/2019

Art Historian Henry Adams to lecture on the art of Hyman Bloom at Sotheby's

Sunday, May 19 at 11AM, Henry Adams, Ruth Coulter Heede Professor of Art History at Case Western Reserve University and lead author of Modern Mystic: The Art of Hyman Bloom, the new monograph from D.A.P. Publishing, will present a lecture on the artist at Sotheby's, New York. Admission to this event, which will take place in Sotheby's seventh-floor bidding room, is free. Book signing to follow.

ABOVE: "Rocks and Autumn Leaves" (1949).

This important publication, the first of its kind, presents the paintings and drawings of an aesthetic and mystical searcher in the tradition of William Blake, Albert Pinkham Ryder and Odilon Redon, who strove for the moment when, in his own words, “the mood is as intense as it can be made.” Hyman Bloom’s work, influenced by his Jewish heritage (whose impression on his painting he described as a “weeping of the heart”) and Eastern religions, touches on many of the themes of 20th-century culture and art: the body, its immanence and transience, abstraction and spiritual mysticism. Bloom was admired by leading figures in the art world of his time, including Alfred H. Barr Jr. and Dorothy Miller; Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning hailed him as “the first Abstract Expressionist.” The poet Robert Lowell praised Bloom, writing in a letter to Elizabeth Bishop, “Hyman is awesomely consistent, brilliant, ascetic—more and more people say he is the best painter in America, and so he is.” The book’s illustrations include ten previously unpublished masterworks, plus images of the figure as powerful and provocative as the paintings by Francis Bacon that were once exhibited alongside them.

ABOVE: Hyman Bloom in his Huntington Avenue apartment, ca. 1946. Collection of the Stella Bloom Trust.

Hyman Bloom (1913–2009) was born in Lithuania, now Latvia. He and his family immigrated to the United States in 1920, escaping anti-Semitic persecution. He lived and worked in the Boston area until his death. His work is held in many public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where it will be the subject of a major exhibition opening July 13, 2019, and running through February 23, 2020.

Henry Adams on the Art of Hyman Bloom
Sunday, May 19: 11AM
Sotheby's New York
1334 York Avenue
New York, New York 10021
Tel: 212 606 7000