Hyman Bloom

A prominent figure of the expressionist movement that developed in Boston in the 1940s, Bloom established his reputation with depictions of religious and mystical rituals, brightly colored corpses, and fantastic landscapes. This drawing, made when Bloom was a student, is an example of a particular method of teaching drawing in the United States in the early twentieth-century. Bloom's teacher was Harold K. Zimmerman, who promoted drawing from memory and imagination rather than from observation and from the model. He stressed the philosophical dimension of drawing as an expression of knowledge and thought. Bloom's studies and Zimmerman's teaching were subsidized by Harvard professor and prominent collector Denman Ross.