Albert Bloch

Duell (Duel)

The dreamlike colors of Albert Bloch's Duell (Duel) seem to shift and vibrate, a product of the invigorating cultural atmosphere in which the work was painted.

As a young man in St Louis, Bloch worked as a newspaper illustrator. After leaving America for Germany in 1909, the artist found himself immersed in the thrilling artistic innovations of Munich. Here, Bloch banded together with Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, and others, who, after rupturing with Neue Künstlervereinigung München (NKVM), formed the modernist group known as Der Blaue Reiter.

The collective used brilliant color and expressive shapes to explore spiritual ideas. Bloch embraced this approach in the unnatural background of Duell (Duel), with an iridescent-seeming palette and forms that border on abstraction. However, the spiritual is balanced by the worldly, and the artist’s training as an illustrator enabled him to dramatically capture expressions that convey the vitality of raw, human emotions.