Textual description of firstImageUrl

Albert Bloch (1882-1961)

Albert Bloch è nato a St. Louis, nel Missouri. Ha studiato prima arte alla St. Louis School of Fine Arts.
Nel 1901-03 ha prodotto fumetti e cartoni animati per il quotidiano St. Louis Star.
Tra il 1905-1908 lavorò come caricaturista ed illustratore per il settimanale letterario e politico The Mirror di William Marion Reedy.



Dal 1909-1921 Bloch visse e lavorò principalmente in Germania.
Dopo la fine della prima guerra mondiale, Bloch tornò negli Stati Uniti, insegnando all'Accademia di Belle Arti di Chicago per un anno, e poi accettando una posizione di capo dipartimento presso l'Università del Kansas fino al suo ritiro nel 1947.

Bloch è stato un artista modernista Americano e l'unico artista americano associato a Der Blaue Reiter - The Blue Rider, il gruppo di modernisti europei dell'inizio del XX secolo.














Bloch was an American modernist artist and the only american artist associated with Der Blaue Reiter - The Blue Rider, a group of early 20th-century European modernists.
He was born in St. Louis, Missouri. He first studied art at the St. Louis School of Fine Arts. In 1901-03 he produced comic strips and cartoons for the St. Louis Star newspaper.
Between 1905-1908 he worked as a caricaturist and illustrator for William Marion Reedy's literary and political weekly The Mirror.
From 1909-1921, Bloch lived and worked mainly in Germany. After the end of World War I, Bloch returned to the United States, teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts in Chicago for a year, and then accepting a Departmental Head position at the University of Kansas until his retirement in 1947.























The Blue Rider was a german expressionist movement that was established in December 1911 by Kandinsky, Marc and Gabriele Münter. Painters Kandinsky and Marc worked on an almanac in which they showed their artistic conceptions.
The title of the almanac, which then became the name of the group, Der Blaue Reiter The Blue Rider, came from the painting by Kandinsky.

The Blue Rider - Wassily Kandinsky

His Blue Rider was an adventure in the simplification and stylization of forms and the connection between music and painting.
The Blue Riders believed that colors, shapes and forms had equivalence with sounds and music, and sought to create color harmonies which would be purifying to the soul.
Although in this very earliest works, the impressionistic influence was recognizable, the artists who took part in The Blue Rider were considered to be the pioneers of abstract art or abstract expressionism. Their work promoted individual expression and broke free from any artistic restraints.
These Nietzsche's words sum up the group's motto, "Who wishes to be creative must first blast and destroy accepted values".
The first exhibitions of The Blue Rider included works by Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, Henri Rousseau, Robert Delaunay, and Arnold Schönberg.
These artists, who early in their careers broke from the mainstream, were later to become the driving force behind modern art as we know it today.