Winter, Albert Bloch

Episode 247. I’m David Cateforis with another Art Minute from the Spencer Museum of Art. We often think of winter as cold and bleak, but Albert Bloch’s vision of that season in a 1918 painting is warm and cheerful, filled with bright reds, pinks, and yellows. Bloch’s whimsical mountain landscape, painted in an abstracted style influenced by cubism, features a doll-like man and woman who climb toward a little house, surrounded by several wild animals who mingle fearlessly with them. Presiding over the scene is a living snowman, who raises his arms in a friendly greeting. Overhead, bright stars and planets glow in the night sky. The happy atmosphere of Bloch’s picture may surprise you given that it was painted in Germany in the last year of World War I. Yet art made in dark days does not have to be dark; perhaps Bloch imagined this world of innocent joy to counteract the grim reality of his time. A native of Saint Louis, Albert Bloch lived and worked in Germany for ten years, and was the sole American member of the famous expressionist group, The Blue Rider. After returning to the US he became head of the art department at the University of Kansas, where he taught for 24 years. From the Spencer Museum of Art, I’m David Cateforis.

Winter. The name brings to mind the numbing chill that begins to seep in every available crack in your home as Autumn draws to a close. It brings to mind playing in the snow as a young child and celebrating the holiday season. It brings to mind the beautiful quiet mornings where the rising sun reflects a soft orange or pink on the new fallen snow, which is smooth and perfectly untouched except for the tracks of a few animals. It reflects the first trek out into a world frozen and silent, as if the whole of nature is sleeping soundly. Winter is also the name of a beautifully constructed oil painting by Albert Bloch from the year 1918. Albert Bloch was born in St. Louis, MO in 1882 where he worked as an artist until 1909 when he moved to Munich, Germany, a great center of art. It was here in Europe that Bloch discovered an interest in contemporary art in paintings by artists such as Van Gogh and Picasso. Bloch began painting artwork with a cubic style and became the only American in the Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), a group of fringe artists who strove to express themselves with an emotional truth through symbolic color and a cubic style. The group showed in several places across Europe. In 1921, however, Bloch returned to the Midwest to avoid the war and what Germany had become. He settled in Lawrence, KS, where he became an art professor at the University of Kansas. Bloch taught painting until 1947 and died in Lawrence in 1961. Winter is a good example of the spiritual expression that Bloch strove for while working with other Der Blaue Reiter artists. Unlike paintings from earlier periods, Winter seems to defy reality and special relationships, giving way to Bloch’s emotional addition to the piece. The color and images seem to melt into each other, almost like snow melts as the earth warms under the sun and flows off of bare branches in small droplets. The colors Bloch uses, soft pastel reds, blues, yellows as well as stretches of white, give a feeling of calm, the kind of cold, sleepy feeling that you get when you wake up on a winter morning. At the bottom of the painting, there are two figures, a man and a woman, who appear to be hiking up the mountain, perhaps trying to get to the cozy looking house near the top of the painting. Around the two people are animals: a fox, a hound, a bird, possibly a dove, and a horse. Further along on the path is a deer. The animals, unlike the humans, seem to blend into the mountain, almost as though they were part of the scenery, and their transparency adds a touch of mystery to the friendly-looking painting. This foreboding feeling is intensified by the scraggly bits of brush that appear every so often on the snowy mountain slope and the dead tree in the bottom left hand corner of the painting. They seem to signify the death and frozen wasteland that winter creates for nature when it arrives. Dark shadows lurk in the sky at the top of the painting, arcing over the mountain slopes, creating a black feeling, a sense of impending doom. Also in the heavens is a snowman, standing on the highest peak and looking down on the snow-enveloped world beneath him with his arms spread out wide. What is he saying?