Albert Bloch

Albert Bloch (St. Louis, 1882 – Lawrence, Kansas, 1961) was an American modernist painter and the only American artist associated with Der Blaue Reiter, the group of early twentieth-century European modernists. His work moves between Expressionism and Cubism, and it matters because it links the Central European avant-garde with the art scene in the United States.

The son of parents who had emigrated from Bohemia, he studied at the St. Louis School of Fine Arts from 1898 to 1900. Before settling in Europe he worked as an illustrator and caricaturist for the satirical weekly The Mirror, where he published more than 200 drawings with modernist traits. From 1908 he lived mostly in Munich, where he joined the circle of Der Blaue Reiter. The Sturm gallery organized exhibitions of his work across Europe, and he took part in the First German Autumn Salon with Der tote Pierrot. His subjects included landscapes, city scenes, portraits and circus motifs, and during this period his style shifted toward Cubism.

He returned to the United States in 1921 and obtained a professorship at the University of Kansas in 1923, where he remained until his death. He was highly self-critical and destroyed paintings he judged imperfect, so very few of his early works survive. His output also suffered under the Nazi campaign against degenerate art. As a writer and translator into English, he is remembered for his versions of Karl Kraus, Georg Trakl and Johann Wolfgang Goethe.