Julius Bloch Papers

Julius Thiengen Bloch was born in Kehl, Germany in 1888 and immigrated with his family to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1893. He trained to be an artist at the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art and then at the Pennsylvania Academy for the Fine Arts. Bloch was heavily influenced by realist painters from previous generations, such as famed Philadephian painter and PAFA art instructor Thomas Eakins. Realist painters depicted everyday scenes of life, such as the working class, scenes of cafes and city streets, revealing the lives of people who did not have upper class and bourgeois luxuries that were typically depicted in art in the past. Influenced by this movement yet coming into his artistic career in the early 20th century, Julius Bloch mainly created social realist work representing his subjects as persistent, willful, and strong in the face of oppression, violence, and hardships. He created various prints, lithographs, etchings, and paintings between 1912 and the 1950s. In the 1930s following his service in World War I, Bloch began creating works of mostly African American peoples, contrary to many of his white contemporaries, as well as depicting the working class and immigrants. He mainly created portraits of his subjects, but he also drew people in everyday situations and gestural positions. Through his art, Bloch turned public attention to the people not typically depicted in white, Anglo- and Euro-centric artwork. His art portrayed an array of peoples and emotions--the worn but resolute faces of miners in Coal Miners, the violence and horrors faced by the Black communities in America in works such as The Lynching in 1932, and a dignified and affecting portrait of Horace Pippin in 1943. His work was shown often at the Pyramid Club in Philadelphia, a prominent arts and cultural space started by a group of Black businessmen and lawyers, as well as various museums such as the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Additionally, Julius Bloch was one of the first artists to work under the funding of the Public Works of Art Project. The PWAP was the first U.S. federal funded art program and was created as part of the New Deal following the Great Depression. He gained a strong foothold in the arts nationally when in 1934 Eleanor Roosevelt chose Julius Bloch’s painting The Young Worker c. 1934 to be part of the White House collection. He also had strong relationships with various directors of the Philadelphia Museum of Art; he left a majority of his artwork to the museum following his death in 1966.