Martin Bloch
1920s
Bloch returned to Berlin and his work was recognised in 1920 with his first major solo exhibition, of 54 paintings at the Paul Cassirer Gallery. An early 'Self-Portrait as St Anthony' (1919) is in the Museum of Ein Harod, Israel. 1920 saw Bloch join the Freie Secession (1914-24), a group of artists which split from the Berlin Secession. In the same year he married journalist and theatre critic Lotte Zavrel (née Ruhemann 1886-1979), his friend Helmut's sister, and their daughter, Barbara, was born in 1922. Living in Berlin in the 1920s, Bloch found success both as a painter and as a teacher, co-founding a private art school in 1926 with the expressionist painter Anton Kerschbaumer (1885-1931). Like Bloch, Kerschbaumer had studied with Corinth and exhibited with Paul Cassirer. Every summer from 1924 onwards Bloch took his pupils from the art school to Lake Garda, in Northern Italy where they painted along the shores of the lake. Bloch's landscape paintings of Bavaria and Italy and his Berlin cityscapes of the 1920s and early 1930s strike a delicate balance between the influences of Munch and Cézanne. 'Bridge in Tiergarten, Berlin' (1920), now in the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, shares a typical freedom of angle and brushstroke with the Italian 'Casa Rigo, Lake Garda' (1925) in the Tate. His emphasis on colour links him back to the Delauneys, and to the Die Brücke group (1905- 1913), which had been founded by four Jugendstil architecture students from Dresden including Karl Schmidt-Rottluff (1884-1976) and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938).

Bridge in Tiergarten, Berlin
1920

Drawing Room, Berlin
1920

Head of the Artist's Wife
1920

Still Life on Yellow Ground
1921

Fields in Bavarian Fields
1922

Torbole Harbour, Lago di Garda
1924

Still Life with Jugs and Aubergines
1924-5

Casa Rigo, Lake Grado II
1925

Woman on a Terrace
1926

Evening in Torbole
1926

Self-Portrait with Pipe
1926

The Dolomites
1926-7

Val di Sogno
1927

Still Life with Green Bottles
1927

Baroque Angel on Red Ground
1927

Terraces, Lago di Garda
1928

Arancia
1928

Scuola di San Rocco
1927