Martin Bloch: A Painter's Painter
30th Jan 2007 - 15th Apr 2007
This exhibition brings together a collection of works to reveal a painter whose images demonstrate a pure love of paint and intimate understanding of pigment and colour.
 Self Portrait with Red CapMartin Bloch |
 Thunderstorm, GardaMartin Bloch |
 All Souls and the BBCMartin Bloch |
Martin Bloch (1883-1954) was born in Neisse, Silesia (now Nysa, Poland). He initially studied music and architecture in Berlin, but later took up painting and was largely self-taught.
This exhibition charts the early years of Martin Bloch's career as a painter with his landscapes of Spain from 1914-20. Throughout the 1920s and early 30s, his work was characterised by images of Italy and the urban landscape of his adopted city, Berlin. An influential teacher, Bloch founded a school of painting, in Berlin, with the artist Anton Kerschbaumer and taught there until the rise of the Nazis forced him to flee to London, via Denmark, in 1934. That year he opened the School of Contemporary Painting with Roy de Maistre. As war began in 1939, Bloch's application for British citizenship was delayed and in 1941 he was interned as an enemy alien. Post-war, he resumed his teaching in London, at Camberwell School of Art.
Between 1947 and 1954, Bloch frequently visited Wales, travelling and painting with Joseph Herman in Ystragynlais, Bangor and Bethesda.
Throughout his career, Bloch invested his work with an emotional complexity that reflected both his response to his private domestic sphere and to the broader political upheavals of his time. His move to London represented an enormous inturruption to the career he had established in Berlin. Though German Expressionist painting was not well understood or critically received in London, Bloch was able to offer his students at Camberwell School of Art an alternative approach to teaching. He was to impress upon his students that 'it is not the drawing that leads to colour but the colour that leads to drawing'.
The exhibition is guest curated by Peter Rossiter, Bloch's grandson, in collaboration with the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts. A catalogue has been published to accompany the exhibition and is available in the Gallery Shop, priced �15.
Admission to this exhibition is free.
To see a short film about the Bloch exhibition produced by BBC website, go to Useful links on the Sainsbury Centre website menu and click on the link to the BBC website under the UEA section.
