Biographical/Historical Information
Born in 1910, Floss, Bavaria, David Ludwig Bloch lost his hearing as a child. He began to study porcelain painting in 1925, and was employed at this until 1934. He then studied at the state school for applied painting in Munich. By this time the artist had already taken part in exhibitions of the "Jewish Culture Federation of Bavaria". Bloch became a commercial artist and decorator with the department store Sallinger in Straubing, but subsequently was fired for being Jewish. He was excluded from studies in Munich for the same reason. During Kristallnacht Bloch was arrested and was in Dachau for 4 weeks, after which he found work with the master painter Heinz Voges in Munich. In 1940 the artist emigrated to Shanghai, where he married Lilly Cheng Disiu, who was also deaf. At that time he worked among other things in inks and water colors. He moved to New York in 1949, and worked there for 26 years as a graphic artist. After a visit to Germany in 1976, the Holocaust became an intense focus of his art. A book published in 1997, titled "David Ludwig Bloch: Woodcuts. Shanghai 1940-1949," is trilingual (English, German and Chinese) and presents Bloch's collected woodcuts created in the years of his exile in Shanghai (which had become a refuge for some 20,000 European Jews). Bloch created a rich oeuvre of more than three hundred woodcuts, which bear witness to his meticulous and affectionate observance of his Chinese surroundings and the daily life of lower class people in Chinese society. He received the Kulturpreis from the Deutsche Gehörlosen Bund in1997. In 1999, he had an exhibition of his works at the Jewish Museum in Furth, Germany, another "Flight and Rescue in Shanghai, 1938-1949," at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, 2000, and a one-man retrospective at the Jewish Museum in Munich, Germany, 2000. That show celebrated the occasion of Bloch's 90th birthday.
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Citation
Bloch, David Ludwig: Never Again, Leo Baeck Institute, 83.12.