BOLD SIMPLIFICATIONS AND FLOWING LINES – Albert Bloch and the Modernist painting style

ALBERT BLOCH 1/3 – He was born in St. Louis (Missouri), to a Bohemian-Jewish immigrant father and a mother who was a German Jew, but he was not raised in the Jewish faith and he later adopted a form of Christianity. He studied art at the St. Louis School of Fine Arts. He was an American Modernist artist, the only American artist associated with Der Blaue Reiter (from 1909 to 1921, he lived and worked mainly in Germany, knowing that group of early 20th-century European modernists). He became well acquainted with Kandinsky and other members of the Blaue Reiter, forming an especially strong friendship with Franz Marc.

ALBERT BLOCH 2/3 – Between 1905 and 1908, he worked as a caricaturist and illustrator. Throughout his residence in Germany (1909-1922), he was active in painting, drawing, and printmaking. Kandinsky found Bloch’s work from Munich during the period between 1909 and 1921 to exude an attractive spiritual and primitive quality. Bloch favored abstraction, but resisted an abstraction that completely divorced itself from nature; his paintings always retain some sense of a representational form.

ALBERT BLOCH 3/3 – After the end of World War I, he returned to the United States, accepting a Departmental Head position at the University of Kansas until his retirement in 1947. Throughout his career Bloch destroyed any of his paintings that he regarded as unsuccessful. His caricatures and cover illustrations were more advanced stylistically, displaying the bold simplifications and flowing lines of international Art Nouveau. Later in life he was reticent about discussing his affiliation with Der Blaue Reiter and the work he produced in.

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