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).