NORWICH, UK.- A comprehensive exhibition of the paintings of German émigré artist Martin Bloch (1883-1954), offers a special opportunity to celebrate an artist whose pure love of pigment and colour makes him the ‘Painter’s Painter’. The exhibition opens at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts on 30 January 2007 and runs until 15 April 2007.

Martin Bloch: A Painter’s Painter will bring together 70 paintings from public and private collections, revealing a painter with an abiding interest in the landscape and whose career reflects and responds to the great turmoil of mid-twentieth century Europe. Martin Bloch’s work reflects his experiences including how he observed the rise of Fascism in Germany and Italy, and how as a Jew, he fled Nazi Germany in 1933 only to be interned as an enemy alien 5 years after arriving in England. The show also includes 30 drawings by the artist.

The exhibition is guest curated for the Sainsbury Centre by Martin Bloch’s grandson, Peter Rossiter. Peter is a painter and has an MA in Art History from the Courtauld.

“You have to see Martin Bloch’s work to truly appreciate it. He was a brilliant technician, he was a subtle colourist with a stunning knowledge of pigment and colour that gives his paintings a beauty and level of technical success that any painter would admire.”

Still Life on Yellow Ground shows Bloch’s love of colour and his willingness to tackle the challenges it can offer. Yellow is notoriously difficult to control in painting and yet he masters the problems it presents. The still life depicts both ‘fine art’ pieces and more rustic items and these are united by the yellow ground. Bloch made colour the focal point of his teaching, stating that “building up one’s palette for a picture is almost conceiving it”. Throughout his career Martin Bloch was a dedicated and inspiring teacher and is known to many later 20th century artists for his teaching at Camberwell School of Art in London. Here Bloch was a radical teacher, challenging established teaching at Euston Road.

Whilst there is little evidence that most of Martin Bloch’s paintings were intended as a socio-political comment or that there was any attempt to create a historical document, there is no doubt that many have gained weight and patina for a contemporary audience.

“Bloch’s development as a painter ran side by side with his response to wider events, migrating from one country to another across Europe through the upheavals of the first half of the century.” – Michael Podro.

Martin Bloch was born in 1883 in Neisse, Selesia (formerly in Germany, now Nysa, Poland). He worked in Paris in 1912 when the turmoil of the first modernist movement was as its height. Looking at his early landscapes it is easy to surmise that Martin Bloch was inevitably influenced by well known artists such as Matisse and Cezanne. He then spent the whole of World War I in Spain developing his own approach and technique.

Paintings in the exhibition at the Sainsbury Centre reflect the huge upheaval in Europe at the time. Thunderstorm Approaching and The Italian Butchers Shop reflect the apprehension Bloch felt as he witnessed the rise of fascism in Germany and Italy. The medallion on the wall outside the butchers shop is Mussolini of whom adulation had become obligatory. This is the closest Bloch gets to making an open anti-Fascist statement. These were painted during the 1920s when Martin Bloch taught at the Bloch-Kerschbaumer school in Berlin and took his family and pupils to Lake Garda in Italy each summer.

Other works will also give visitors to the Sainsbury Centre insight in to the events which influenced Bloch. He was Jewish and was forced to flee Nazi Germany in 1933. Despite having fled from Germany, Bloch arrived in London and was very positive, setting up The School of Contemporary Painting with Roy de Maistre and producing a body of new work. When war broke out Bloch’s papers had not been fully processed and he was interned as an enemy alien, first at Huyton and then at Sefton on the Isle of Man. This experience had a huge effect on him. The painting, Miracle in the Internment Camp, and the intense drawings of the Internment Isle of Man, reflect both his enduring sense of humour and the horror of these camps.

Bloch’s pre-war paintings of London and those of London during the Blitz are particularly interesting when looking at his work today. Martin Bloch: A Painter’s Painter includes beautiful images of familiar places such as All Souls and the BBC and Red Lion, Barnes. Visitors will be able to draw comparison between these everyday scenes from the 1930s and how these places look today. The paintings of war-time London are both stunning and emotive, with works such as Survival which reflects his feelings of hope and optimism during the Blitz and Scorched Trees that highlights his sense of the devastation.