Albert Bloch

Albert Bloch (1882-1961) was born in St. Louis, Missouri. He studied at the St. Louis School of Fine Arts, and between 1905 and 1913 he was a cartoonist, caricaturist, illustrator, and writer for the satirical weekly paper Reedy’s Mirror. In 1909 Bloch moved with his wife, Hortense Altheimer, to Munich, Germany, to study painting. By 1911 Bloch had befriended Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, who invited him to exhibit with Der Blaue Reiter, an association of avant-garde artists who pioneered one of the major branches of German Expressionism — Bloch was the only American artist accepted into the group. In Europe Bloch gradually developed his characteristic style of flattened forms, soft, bright palettes, and intensely expressive motion and line, often depicting Biblical narratives or characters of the Italian commedia dell'arte. Bloch remained in Munich until 1921, at which point he returned to the United States, taught at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts for a year, then accepted a position as professor and director of the Department of Painting and Drawing at the University of Kansas, where he taught until 1947.