Albert Bloch Biography | Oil Painting Reproductions

Albert Bloch, whose parents emigrated from Bohemia, Germany to the USA in 1869, went to the St. Louis School of Fine Arts from 1898 to 1900. From 1901-03 he did funny cartoons for the St. Louis Star daily paper. In the years 1905 to 1908, he filled in as a caricaturist and artist for William Marion Reedy's political weekly The Mirror.

During the period from 1909 to 1921, Albert Bloch returned to Germany to live and work, an American Modernist painter who was the only American artist related to Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), an Expressionist gathering of early twentieth-century European art pioneers. Bloch met Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc who welcomed him to partake in the first Der Blaue Reiter exhibition at the Thannhauser Gallery. Bloch built up a fruitful career in Germany and kept on showing his work there through World War I. In 1912 he took part in the second Der Blaue Reiter exhibition and had one painting, The Duel, incorporated into the Sonderbund Exhibition in Cologne, the most famous exhibition of Modernist painting in Europe. The Duel recalls Edvard Munch's frightful and strange allegorical works.

After the finish of World War I, Albert Bloch came back to the United States, instructing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for one year, and afterward accepting a Departmental Head position at the University of Kansas until his retirement in 1947. Bloch was constantly very self-critical about his work and he destroyed any picture he thought defective. A considerable lot of his compositions succumbed to be called "Degenerate Art" amid the time of National Socialism in Germany before World War II, that is the reason so few of his early works can be found.

Art Movement: Expressionism.
Artists Influencing Albert Bloch: Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc.
He Traveled To Germany.
Artist's Biography compiled by Albert L. Mansour at The World's Artist, with text adapted from Wikipedia.