Born to a well-to-do Jewish lumber dealer in Vilnius, Lithuania, Mirski was raised amid "pomp ... pogroms and persecution".
[4] His first job involved "lugging room molding on his shoulders", and linked both his father's field, and a key future source of his earnings as a framer.
[4] In between, Mirski studied sculpture, and found employment on a merchant vessel that allowed him to travel the world.
[4] Art New England writer Lois Tarlow called Mirski "a colorful figure who played an important and daring role in bringing young avant-garde artists to the Boston public, [who] was also a disarming and lovable rogue".
[8] Here, he opened a larger gallery, a frame shop and a school in the building he bought in 1945, at the depressed wartime price of $500.
In the fall of 1946,[7] the Mirski Gallery's first exhibition debuted with 53 paintings by the Guatemalan "Indian"[5] cubist Carlos Mérida.
[13] A week later, Time magazine commented that some critics already considered Mérida's work worthy of expanding "The Big Three of Latin American art" (Rivera, Orozco, Siqueiros)' to four.
[15] In critic Sydney Freedberg's Art News review, he called Bloom, "a painter of the first importance within his generation".
[16] After establishing the gallery on the main floor of his new building, Mirski subsidized it with a frame shop in the basement.
"He kept refinancing the building, which he bought for a song, but sometimes business was bad and the thing that held the gallery together was the frame shop, and so he managed.
[21] According to painter Ralph Coburn,[7] Mirski was also known for giving "wonderful parties" ... [t]here was a large mailing list.... that perhaps Hyman Swetzoff had brought over from the Institute of Modern Art, and it consisted of all kinds of museum directors and collectors especially in Boston.
The young Turks, Jews, and immigrants or their sons—like the Lebanese-American Gibran—showed with gallerist Boris Mirski or his former assistants Hyman Swetzoff and Alan Fink of Alpha Gallery.
[26]The gallery also hosted exchange shows with Edith Halpert's Downtown Gallery in New York,[27] serving as an important venue for the broader Northeast, as well as for local artists who were Jewish or foreign-born like Hyman Bloom, Giglio Dante (1914-2006) and Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931), Black like John Woodrow Wilson or female like Marianna Pineda (1925–1996) and Joyce Reopel (1932–2019).
In the case of Bernard Chaet, that included funding his first art tour of Europe, mounting his first show in 1946, and recommending him for his first teaching job at Yale.
[29][30] The latter's emphasis on individualism helped attract artists like David Aronson (1923–2015), Bernard Chaet (1924–2012), Reed Kay, Arthur Polonsky, Jack Kramer (1923–1984), Barbara Swan (1922–2003), Andrew Kooistra (1926–), and Lois Tarlow.
Several key figures in Boston Expressionism, with links to Mirski, have also given oral history interviews to the Archives, including Hyman Bloom, David Aronson, Jack Levine, Marianna Pineda, Arthur Polonsky, Karl Zerbe and Ralph Coburn.
Hyman, however, had also worked at the nearby Institute of Modern Art, and he ultimately served as Mirski's Gallery director.