Albert Bloch
1882-1961
Albert Bloch was an American Modernist artist and the only American artist associated with Der Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider), a group of early 20th-century European modernists.
Bloch was born in St. Louis, Missouri to a Bohemian/German-Jewish immigrant parents. He was not raised in the Jewish faith and he later adopted a form of Christianity. He spent his formative years in the Midwest.
Albert Bloch quit high school at sixteen to study at the St. Louis School of Fine Arts with Dawson Dawson-Watkins. In 1905 Block began his art career as a caricaturist for a satirical newspaper, The Saint Louis Mirror under editor and publisher, William Marion Reedy. Noticing Bloch’s artistic talent, Reedy provided him with a monthly stipend to study abroad. At the beginning of 1909, Bloch sailed for Europe.
Between 1909 and 1921, he lived and worked mainly in Germany and took lessons from painters working in the academic style outside the academy. Initially he had little interest in the revolutionary aesthetics, but a 1910 trip to Paris opened his eyes to the works of van Gogh, Picasso, and Redon. While in Germany, Bloch met Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, founders of the Blue Rider (Der Blaue Reiter), group that broke away from Neue Künstlervereinigung, and invited him to participate in the group’s first exhibition in 1911. Bloch was the only American represented in the show.
The Blaue Reiter artists had no formal manifesto, but they shared a desire to express emotional and spiritual truth through painting and, in particular, through symbolic use of color. The group, active from 1911 to 1914, represents one current in the broader expressionist impulse that spread through Germany and beyond in the first half of the twentieth century.
Bloch established a successful career in Germany and remained there, exhibiting his work through World War I. In 1912, he showed at the second Blaue Reiter exhibition, and he was included in the 1912 Sonderbund Exhibition in Cologne, the most famous exhibition of modernism in Europe at that time. Bloch’s acclaim also reached the American art world. At Kandinsky’s recommendation, Arthur Jerome Eddy, the Chicago collector and tireless promoter of modernism, began buying Bloch’s.
In 1921, disheartened at what Germany had become after the war, Bloch returned to the United States, where he lived until his death in 1961. He decided to become a teacher. From 1923 until his retirement in 1947, Bloch was Professor and Head of the Department of Drawing and Painting at the University of Kansas, Lawrence.
Albert Bloch led a full life of painting, writing, and teaching and found contentment far from the art centers of Europe and America. He frequently chose biblical subject matter or sweeping emotional themes of anguish or exaltation.
