Albert Bloch, the Artist of the Blue Rider from Missouri
1:00 p.m., Monday, Sept. 15, 2008
Webster Hall Auditorium
Admission: free

Albert Bloch was born in St. Louis, where he was employed as a young man for several years to do illustrations for the St. Louis Mirror. Then he moved to Munich for about 10 years, and during that time became an active painter of German expressionism, exhibiting with the major painters of the modern era, Kandinsky, Marc, Klee, etc. After World War I he returned to the United States and became a professor of art at the University of Kansas. Because he was a writer and translator, the record of his achievements is a fascinating picture of the entire era of European modernism.

Frank Baron, director of the Max Kade Center for German-American Studies at the University of Kansas, has a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. He began teaching at the University of Kansas in 1970, after two years with the Peace Corps in Ethiopia and an additional two years conducting research in Munich on German Renaissance and Reformation literary history. Experiences as a child in Hungary during World War II prompted interest in the topic of the Holocaust and resulted (in collaboration with Hungarian journalist Sandor Szenes) in a book about Hungary and Auschwitz.