Stella Bloch: A Unique Artist In A Unique Time

By Jan Howard

A dancer and artist whose artistic career spanned an extraordinary 80 years will be featured in a slide program on May 15 at 7 pm at the Cyrenius H. Booth Library.

The lecture and slide presentation by Michael Coleman, director of the Beaux Arts Gallery in Woodbury, will feature the works and development of Stella Bloch (1897-1999), a longtime resident of Newtown.

Mr Coleman said the slide show will introduce the newcomer to the wide range of accomplishments of Miss Bloch in the field of dance as well as art. It will also provide new information for those already acquainted with her works.

The slide show, which lasts for a 45 to 60 minute period, covers the years from her childhood through 1995, Mr Coleman said. He said her earliest sketches were done when she was five or six years old, and she was actively involved in her career until she suffered a stroke.

“She did tons of sketches. She was constantly drawing people from all periods of her life,” Mr Coleman said.

While she was most prolific with crayon drawings, she also worked in pencil, chalk, pastels, and oils on canvas and collages.

The slide program will include photographs of her at different times in her life intermixed with her artwork. It will also include pictures of her during her career as a dancer, from 1915 to 1930.

She taught dance at Carnegie Hall during the 1920s and performed on Broadway and off-Broadway. “It was a timely period for dance and how it was changing,” Mr Coleman said.

According to Mr Coleman, Mrs Bloch responded through her art to the expansive and rebellious era in American culture, 1914-1950. “She played her part in the birth of American dance from 1919 through the late 20s, and she created images of art which were an energetic, naturalistic, and seemingly effortless capture of the human spirit,” he said.

“She was independent and rebellious in a certain sense, as opposed to the Victorian sense of doing things,” Mr Coleman said. “In her early years, she made her living from dance. She didn’t make a lot of money but she stayed with her career even when she was married.”

At the same time, she stayed with her art. Though women artists did not have many exhibition possibilities in those days, she had several successful shows in 1920 in New York City and Boston, he said. “For a woman artist of that time, it was very good.”

“She lived through extraordinary times,” Mr Coleman said. “She was there during the birth of modern dance as well as painting.”

Miss Bloch did not start any major new movement, he said, nor does she fit into any specific category. “She was individual and unique. She had her own vision and kept to it.

“Some would call her a social realist,” Mr Coleman said, with her emphasis on people and how they react to their environment. “She pares things down to essential details.

“She was her own person amid a time of great change,” Mr Coleman said. “She was one of the first American dancers to show Asian dance to Americans. She had contacts and gravitated to people who were movers, such as dancer Isadora Duncan.”

 Miss Bloch’s drawings and paintings have been celebrated for the way they conveyed the movement of dancers, the mood of late night jazz clubs, and life on Harlem streets.

She was born on December 14, 1897, in Poland and raised in Manhattan. She was married in 1930 to the late Edward Eliscu, an award-winning song lyricist and writer. They had two sons, David Eliscu, who lives in Newtown, and Peter Eliscu.

Before moving to Newtown in 1964, Miss Bloch and her husband lived in Hollywood, Calif., and New York City. In Newtown, she found a new artistic renewal for her work and a growing recognition by museums, historians, and collectors of the importance of her works, Mr Coleman said.

At the time of her death in January, 1999, her son, David Eliscu, said, “She felt she was a historian, a documentarian, recording what she saw to pass on to others. She was recording a time in history.”

“She painted African-American people in a compassionate sense, grasping for their humanity and the wonderful qualities they have,” Mr Coleman said. “She sees the value that is there. In the 1950s, she already saw that the different cultures and each civilization had great value. She presented a photograph of them and who they are, and that their lives were deep and rich.”

Miss Bloch was married briefly during the 1920s to Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, the first curator of the Far East collection at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. With him, she traveled to the Orient, where she studied dance. She was later among the first dancers to introduce authentic Far Eastern dance to New York and Boston audiences.

Mr Coleman said that Miss Bloch’s artistic and cultural development came through the influence of such figures as Miss Duncan, Mr Coomaraswamy, art historian Richard Offner, and photographer Mortimer Offner.

Miss Bloch was the first American pupil of the Isadorables, the six original students of Miss Duncan, who she first saw perform in 1914. She brought her understanding of dance and dance movements to her art.

A self-taught artist, Miss Bloch’s career began in 1918. Harlem jazz, Duncan dance, and pictorial photography contributed significantly to the method and subject of her paintings.

Since 1983 she had been represented by Beaux Arts Gallery in Woodbury. At the time of her death, Mr Coleman described her work as poignant and characteristic of human life. “She came into art through her dance. Both American art and dance were beginning to find their place at that time. She developed in that culture. Her work is very American, very straightforward,” he said.

Mr Coleman said this week that he believes her work will increase in importance as it appears in more collections. “I see continued interest of bigger institutions, like Harvard, in her work.”

He noted her sons recently presented Harvard with another of her works. “Harvard was ecstatic about getting it. To see that kind of recognition is good,” Mr Coleman said. “She has to get out in the public, and that’s happening more and more.”

Miss Bloch’s artwork has been in private collections dating to the 1920s. Major examples of her works are in the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the Harvard Theatre Collection, Harvard University, and the Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York.

Several of her works are currently being displayed in the C.H. Booth Library.

Her paintings have been in many exhibitions and shows over the years, including “The Theatre in Arts” at the Sidney Ross Gallery in New York in 1932; the first International Jazz Festival in Washington, D.C., in 1962; and “The Art of Jazz” in 1982 at the Schomburg Center.

Mr Coleman, a recognized authority on the artworks of Miss Bloch, organized and was the curator of three exhibits on Miss Bloch, entitled “Dance the World Over” in 1995, “Stella Bloch – A Lifetime in Art” in 1997, and “Influences and Influencing” in 1995, all at the Beaux Arts Gallery.

In the 1950s, Dance magazine published her drawings of dancers in choreographer George Balanchine’s ballets.

Among notables captured through her art were dancer Josephine Baker, blues singer Bessie Smith, jazz pianist and composer Thelonious Monk, and jazz pianist Oscar Peterson.

Owners of her work have included Katharine Hepburn, Dorothy Gish, and George Cukor.

Michael Coleman is the archivist and keeper of the works of Miss Bloch. He has held this position since being selected by her in 1995. He holds a master of arts in art from Columbia College, Chicago, and studied fine art, painting, and art history at SUNY College at New Paltz, N.Y. He has been the director of Beaux Arts Gallery since 1993. He worked closely with Edward Eliscu from 1995 until Mr Eliscu’s death in 1998 to bring Miss Bloch’s artwork to a wider recognition and importance.