Albert Bloch

Albert Bloch ( born August 2, 1882 in St. Louis, Missouri, † December 9, 1961 in Lawrence, Kansas) was an American painter, writer and translator.

Life and work

Bloch, whose parents emigrated from Bohemia in 1869 in the United States, attended from 1898 to 1900, the St. Louis School of Fine Arts and worked part-time as an illustrator for the satirical newspaper The Mirror, with its more than 200 cartoons wore characteristics of Art Nouveau. Since 1908 he lived in Munich, where he joined the circle of artists of Der Blaue Reiter. The gallery " storm" organized exhibitions for him in Europe, he was involved with the painting " The Dead Pierrot " at the First German Autumn Salon. His subjects were landscapes, cityscapes, portraits, and circus images, his style passed into cubist. Bloch returned back in 1921 in the USA and in 1923 took over a professorship at the University of Kansas, where he died in 1961.

Bloch was always very self-critical. He destroyed every image that he thought was imperfect. Many of his paintings were in the Nazi era of "degenerate art " to the victim. That's why a few early works are thus obtained.

His literary activity is characterized by translations from the work of Karl Kraus, Georg Trakl and Johann Wolfgang Goethe into English.