ALBERT BLOCH (1882-1961)

Executed in 1912 during the height of the artist’s involvement with Der Blaue Reiter, the present work offers a rare insight into Bloch’s working style at the beginning of his career. Having moved to Munich from his native Kansas City in 1909, it was there that he was introduced to Der Blaue Reiter, the revolutionary art movement led chiefly by Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc. ‘Almost by accident’, Henry Adams writes, ‘Bloch took part … in one of the formative moments of modern art – in a gathering of extraordinary talents at a time when the artistic and spiritual possibilities of the future seemed unlimited.’ (H. Adams, ‘Albert Bloch: The Invisible Blue Rider’, in exh. cat., Albert Bloch: The American Blue Rider, Munich, 1997, p. 17).
Das grüne Gewand is a critical and elaborate study for Bloch’s famous 1913 oil painting of the same name, now at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City (there titled The Green Domino). Attesting to his origins as a caricaturist, the oil represents a wide-eyed, smiling figure dressed in green, surrounded by a host of commedia dell’arte characters and set against rhythmic, splintered red and yellow ground. One of the most famous works of his early career, The Green Domino captures the spirit of the enthralling, radical and sordid underbelly of the German city during the early 1910s, alluding to the illustrious contemporary Munich cabaret group, “the Eleven Executioners”. With its graphic execution and expressing pure emotion though the rhythm of line and form, the present work reveals Bloch’s working process as he created perhaps his most seminal painting of the 1910s.