In the 1930's Bloom was deeply influenced by the Jewish expressionist painter Chaim Soutine and the Catholic mystical painter, Georges Rouault. His early works have a surprising predominance of subjects that refer to his Jewish roots like The Synagogue (1940) painted when he was 27 years old. This particular painting, painted just two years after Krystallnacht, must have sent shivers up the spines of any Jew who saw it. The intense spirituality that emanates from the scene of song and prayer acts as a defiant challenge to the destruction of Jewish life already started in Europe. Its highly agitated surface, the lush handling of paint and the quivering light that affects everything from the swaying chandeliers to the ruby red Torahs summons the totality of community and Judaism as a cry of hope. The solidity and clarity of the composition affirms that the tradition Bloom has left behind is still deeply present in his consciousness.

Another examination of the traditional Jewish world is The Bride (1943-1945). Her gown is a lush abstraction of pale cream, green, turquoise and red that engulfs the apprehensive maiden. Woven into the swirls of the gown are a multitude of faces and life forms, perhaps representing the myriad dead relatives that are said to attend every bride's wedding. In this painting Bloom uncovers the emotional currents of spirituality that surround the chuppah. These were terrible years for the Jews and Bloom reflects the external reality by painting a series of corpses, male and female that he observed during autopsies and dissections he attended in Boston. These stark images reek of the Holocaust as the horrors were unveiled at the war's end. This grim fascination with death and decay was in a way a deep rejection of the Jewish tradition of utmost respect for the dead. The paintings are expressionistic desecrations of the human form and yet they are a perverse meditation on death and the absence of the immortal soul.

He paints many dissections of bodies, frequently seen from above with only the hands of the anatomist visible as if he is hovering above the site of death hoping for a last glimpse of that which has been extinguished.Then, from 1953, he concentrates on the occult, creating ghostly images of the materialization of spirits during séances. For his entire career he has been drawn to theosophy, astrology and the occult as part of a constant search to make sense of death and decay in the world. He feels that rebirth is the real message in all these harrowing images since "the paintings are emblems of metamorphosis."

Since the 1960's Bloom has turned to nature as a possible source of that life spirit that was so brutally suppressed in the Holocaust. Landscapes and drawings of twisted trees and fetid swampy woods teem with life struggling to burst forth. Likewise the paintings he has done of fish and fish bones and skulls address the blind, mindless drive to survive, to procreate and be born again out of the primal sea. In image after image the lush paint explores the possibilities of visual pleasure in light and color.

The only paintings shown from the 1990's are of two rabbis with Torahs. How did we get back here? Bloom had done some rabbi paintings in the 1940's but since then all the subjects have turned their back on the Jewish world. Now it seems to reappear in images of movement and struggle. The rabbi is ghostly pale, grasping a golden Torah. Behind him to the left is the ark with the Ten Commandments, a crown and rampant lions dominating the upper left. Opposite that image is a white presence in the upper right that the rabbi is gazing towards. The rabbi is pinned between the Torah and the ark, fixated on this whiteness that operates as a visual exit out of the painting. Has Bloom brought out the Torah again into his life? Is the search for meaning now between the glowing rabbi and his Torah and the mysterious white light, the ultimate exit? Hyman Bloom continues to paint in the determination to create visual pleasures of color and light in search of meaning and spirituality. He has served his audience well in this journey and remarks that "the artist's reward is pleasure, ecstasy from contact with the unknown." It is our reward too.