Martin Bloch (1883 Neisse, Germany – 1954 London, England)
Self-portrait with Pipe, 1926
Oil on canvas
64 x 54 cm
Private Collection
© The Estate of Martin Bloch
Immigrated to England (via Denmark) 1934
This confident Self-portrait was completed in 1926, the year that Bloch co-founded a painting school with Anton Kerschbaumer in Berlin. After initially studying architecture, he had taken drawing lessons from the German impressionist Lovis Corinth but was largely self-taught as a painter, having studied old master techniques intensively, then later, in Paris, he learned much from looking at Matisse. Bloch’s own painting combined the instinctive, emotional approach of German Expressionism with a Fauvist love of colour; for him - as for many of his fellow émigré artists – ‘what was seen by the eye and felt by the heart was inseparable’.
This tenet was central to his success as a radical and effective teacher, both in Germany and in England, where he worked both outside and, later, inside the art establishment, though often in opposition to its more conservative elements. His life classes were always packed, and he continued to place colour at the heart of painting, rejecting the didacticism of the dominant Euston Road School of painting with its muted palette and precise system of measurements in favour of a broader illustration of ‘the character of things’.
