The Internee's Letter

Bloch was born in Neisse, Silesia, in Poland (now Nysa, Poland). He studied music and architecture and later art in Munich and Berlin. He ran an art school in Berlin from 1923 to 1933 where he exhibited his work including elsewhere in Germany. Bloch left Germany in 1933 and visited Denmark for a year before settling in England in 1934. In 1934 he opened the School of Contemporary Painting in London with Roy de Maistre (1894-1968). When the war began in 1939 his application for British citizenship was delayed, and in 1941 he was interned at the Huyton Internment Camp. Bloch eventually became a naturalized British citizen in 1947 and after the war he taught at Camberwell School of Art, London. Between 1947 and 1954 he frequently visited Wales, travelling and painting in Bangor and Bethesda. Bloch's artistic career was greatly interrupted when he was forced to leave Berlin to come to England, and his German expressionist painting was not well received in London. He taught his students at Camberwell School of Art that "it is not the drawing that leads to colour but the colour that leads to drawing."