Martin Bloch

Beaux Arts Gallery, London, whence purchased by the present owner in 1955

London, Beaux Arts Gallery, Martin Bloch 1883-1954, February - March 1955, no.29.

Michael Podro et al., Martin Bloch: A Painter's Painter, Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich 2007, p.93, illustrated.

The edges and corners of the work are worn. There are various small scratches and scuff marks to the surface of the work but this is consistent with the artist's hand. Held in a chrome metal frame.
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Like many of his contemporaries whose lives were displaced by events in Germany in the mid-1930s, Bloch left behind a career of no small achievement when he arrived in England in 1934. His early career had been extremely successful, with a succession of exhibitions at Paul Cassirer's Berlin gallery, and by 1926 he had established the Bloch-Kerschbaumer School with Anton Kerschbaumer. When he died in 1931, Bloch's new partner in the School was Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. In 1932, he became secretary of the Reichsverbandes bildender Kunstler Deutschlands. However, the progression of political events forced Bloch to consider his position and in 1934 he fled Germany with his wife and daughter, first to Demark and then to England.

The present painting is a large-scale preliminary treatment of Afternoon in Bangor (Collection Tate) and is one of a group of paintings of Welsh subjects painted from 1947 onwards. Bloch knew Josef Herman well (he had taken over Herman's Kensington studio in 1944) and visited North Wales at his invitation. The landscape, so shaped by man, inspired him and the body of paintings that resulted from these trips have a level of involvement in the subject and in the actual technique of painting that marks a new development in his work.

Overlooked for many years since his death, Bloch's work has recently been the subject of detailed reappraisal, and a major retrospective of his work at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts has provided a focus for a long over-due resurgence of interest.