He's influenced Jackson Pollack and Willem de Kooning, been credited with founding an entire artistic movement and, at the age of 93, is still creating art.
Yet Hyman Bloom isn't a household name.
Director Katherine French of Framingham's Danforth Museum of Art is hoping to change that with a retrospective of the Boston Expressionist's work, ``Hyman Bloom: A Spiritual Embrace.'' The show, which runs through March 11, features nearly 50 paintings, drawings and prints by Bloom, including recent paintings and sketches that have never before been exhibited.
``Hyman Bloom is a major figure in American art,'' French said. ``He was very influential as a Boston Expressionist and, strangely enough, he never considered himself a religious man.''
Bloom is best known for his portraits of rabbis and cantors holding the Torah, which he has painted throughout his career, using them as a metaphor for his own spiritual questioning. The paintings, all done from Bloom's imagination rather than models, show Bloom's questioning of life and afterlife.
``I decided to paint what I knew,'' Bloom said in an overview of the exhibition, dismissing the idea that his paintings might be considered religious. ``It was a good subject to paint.''
``Hyman is really poised for renewed recognition of his work,'' said Angelica Allende Brisk, an independent filmmaker who is in the process of finishing a documentary on Bloom. She shot interviews with many of his peers at the Danforth, and hopes to screen a rough cut of the film before the exhibition's end.
``It's really a fantastic show and it's exciting to have a show featuring a 93-year-old artist that you're doing a film about. That worked for me,'' said Brisk, who took on Bloom as a subject on the suggestion of a family friend who was acquainted with his family.
``I didn't know very much about him when I started and he's someone who should be known,'' Brisk added. ``That attracts me as a filmmaker - here's someone who was so instrumental, yet there hasn't been a lot done on him.''
Born in Brunoviski, a Latvian village not far from what is now the Lithuanian border, Bloom and his parents immigrated to the United States in 1920, settling in the Orthodox Jewish community of Boston's West End. He enrolled in drawing classes at the West End Community Center and was taught by Howard Zimmerman, who encouraged drawing from the imagination, French said.
``His family spoke Yiddish at home and he was living in a very strong Jewish community, but he was part of a generation that only wanted to be American,'' French said. ``He wanted to be assimilated.''
Together with his friend and fellow artist Jack Levine, Bloom's talents were encouraged early on by Denman Ross at Harvard University, and the pair studied works at the Fogg Museum as well as at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
``You had these immigrant kids, who were really working class, who were getting the best quality, high-end education, and they were getting free access to some of the best art collections in the world,'' French said.
Bloom joined the Public Worlds of Art Project and the Massachusetts Works Progress Administration. Declared unfit for military service in World War II, Bloom continued painting and was included in an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1942 to immediate critical acclaim, French said.
His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of Art, the Jewish Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts and numerous others. He taught at both Wellesley College and Harvard University.
While Bloom never abandoned representational art, de Kooning once said that he and Pollack considered Bloom ``the first Abstract Expressionist in America,'' French said. The two artists considered Bloom a major influence on their own work.
``Painters know who he is,'' French aid. ``The average person might not know him, but painters are aware of who he is and his contributions. Bloom was setting the gold standard.''
In addition to the rabbis, Bloom frequently featured chandeliers and Christmas trees as his subjects. One series features seances, a fascination of his in the 1950s.
``He says he's not religious, but he's very involved in spiritual mysticism,'' French said. ``What you need to realize (with the seance pictures) is he truly believes it. He truly believes you can communicate with the dead through seances.''
Several of his paintings show apocolyptic visions, with one charcoal of a nuclear nightmare dubbed ``The Cure.''
``He's not really horrified with the idea that the world might end, because he believes the world will rejuvenate itself,'' French said.
Bloom now lives in Nashua, N.H., and continues to sketch and occasionally paint. His rabbis, once younger men, have aged with him, and his latest sketches show demonic figures in conversation.
``It was amazing to go into his studio and see his work,'' French said. ``He would work on six paintings at a time, because he doesn't consider them individual paintings.''
Along with the Bloom exhibition, the Danforth is showing paintings by Boston Expressionists from its collection.
``Hyman Bloom: A Spiritual Embrace'' is on exhibition at the Danforth Museum of Art, 123 Union Ave., Framingham, through March 11. Museum hours are noon to 5 p.m. Wednesday through Thursday; 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Friday and Saturday; and noon to 5 p.m. Sunday.Admission is $8 for adults, $6 for students and senior citizens, free for children under 12 and Danforth Museum of Art members. A catalog of the exhibition, with a forward by Rabbi David Sears and an essay by Katherine French, is on sale at the museum and costs $17 for non-members, $12 for members. For information call 508-620-0050 or visit danforthmuseum.org.
