Bloom Hyman (Khiman) (29 March 1913, Brunavishki, Latvia) — artist.

Himan Bloom was born into an orthodox Jewish family. In 1920, he emigrated to the United States with his family and spent most of his life in Boston. Although initially prepared for a rabbinical career, his parents were unable to find him a teacher. He attended art classes at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. At the age of 15, he received a scholarship to Harvard University (together with fellow Jewish artist Jack Levine), studying under Professors Denman Ross and Harold Zimmerman. Bloom, Levine, and Karl Zerbe would go on to found the style known as “Boston Expressionism.”

From the late 1930s, Bloom's interest in mysticism began to manifest in numerous paintings centred on Jewish religious life: his works often depict rabbis, frequently holding the Torah, sometimes with a synagogue in the background, and later, themes relating to the Holocaust. In 1940, after viewing Bloom’s abstract paintings inspired by archaeological excavations, American art critic Clement Greenberg, along with artists Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, proclaimed Bloom “the greatest painter in America.”

In 1949, Bloom received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and in 1950, he represented the United States at the Venice Biennale, alongside seven other artists. In 1954, Pollock and de Kooning described Bloom as “America’s first abstract expressionist.” That same year, a retrospective of his work was held at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Bloom was a close friend of composer Alan Hovhaness and the Greek mystical artist Hermon di Giovanno. He resided in Nashua, New Hampshire, with his wife Stella. In 2006–07, a collection of Bloom’s work was exhibited at the Danforth Museum of Art in Framingham, Massachusetts. His best-known pieces are held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 2007, Bloom was once again acclaimed by critics as the most outstanding living artist in America.

H. Bloom. Painting: Rabbi with Torah