NEWSLETTER DECEMBER 2006 -

SAINSBURY CENTRE for Visual Arts

Martin Bloch: A Painter's Painter
30th January 2007 - 15th April 2007

The following details have been taken from the SCVC website:

A celebration of the work of German émigré artist Martin Bloch.

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 Cap 1942 Oil on canvas 40.6 x 30.5 cm Private Collection © The Estate of Martin Bloch
		Thunderstorm, Garda 1930 Oil on canvas 89 x 63.5 cm Private Collection © The Estate of Martin Bloch
		Edwardes Square in Spring 1937 Oil on canvas 63.5 x 98 cm Private Collection © The Estate of Martin 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.

The exhibition will chart the early years of Martin Bloch's career as a painter with his landscapes of Spain in 1914. 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 in 1933. 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 is to be published to accompany the exhibition.