Bohrod attended Crane Junior College, Chicago, 1925-26, before beginning his formal art studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 1926-28. In 1929 he was in New York continuing his training at the Art Students League, where John Sloan was among his teachers in the two years he took classes there. He then returned to Chicago to launch his professional career; the first of the great many prizes his painting have received was award by the Art Institute of Chicago in 1933.
From 1942 to 1945 Bohrod was an artist correspondent for the United States Army Corps of Engineers, and for Life magazine, working in both the Pacific and European theaters of World War II. He continued to do illustration work for major popular periodical such as Life, Fortune, Coronet, and covers for Time. In 1948 Bohrod succeeded John Steuart Curry as Artist in Residence at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
By the late 1940s Bohrod was said to have more honors and awards than any other painter of his age in the country. Among these were Guggenheim fellowships, 1936 and 1937; numerous prizes conveyed in exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago; an honorable mention in the Carnegie Institute International, Pittsburgh, 1939; prizes for watercolors from the California Water Color Society, 1940, and from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1942; and the Clark Silver Medal in the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C., Biennial, 1943. A frequent exhibitor in Academy annual exhibitions, Bohrod has received the Academy's Saltus Gold Medal, 1961, and Kirk Memorial Prize, 1965. In 1969 the Wisconsin Governor's Award for Achievement in the Fine Arts was conveyed upon him.
Bohrod's choice of subject matter was initially dominated by city scenes of city streets and the figures the populated them, their realism somewhat distorted to heighten their characteristic bleakness of aspect. However, in the mid-1950s he turned to concentration on still life subjects, in a style akin to trompe l'oeil, but with an exaggeration the reality of appearances and idiosyncracy in juxtaposition of objects suggestive of surrealism.
