Peter Bloch (art historian)

Peter Bloch (born July 11, 1925 in Berlin ; † November 5, 1994 there ) was a German art historian and museum director.

Career

Peter Bloch the Younger was born in Berlin as the son of the Berlin local politician Peter Bloch and his wife Charlotte (née Straßenbach). Her ancestors included well-known publishers, such as Eduard Bloch , who published the “Berliner Bilderbogen”, as well as historically important personalities such as Leopold Müller , who had worked in the 19th century as a Prussian military doctor in Haiti and as Tenno's personal physician in Japan (the historically important diary Müller is in the Peter Bloch estate in the Berlin State Archives). The Peter Bloch sen. lived in Kleinmachnow near Berlin until she was expelled after the Second World War . Peter Bloch was drafted into military service after graduating from high school in 1943 and was taken prisoner of war in 1945. Here he was used for the hardest work in mines and suffered severe physical injuries.

After his release from captivity, he returned to Berlin in 1948 and studied philosophy and art history from 1948 to 1950 under Richard Hamann and Willy Kurth at the Berlin University. Because of the increasing political and ideological narrowing of the students and teachers at what was now the Humboldt University in Berlin , he went to Basel to continue his studies , where he worked with Joseph Gantner (1896–1988) in 1954 with the work The Hombach Sacramentary and its position within Reichenau book painting to the Dr. phil. received his doctorate . From 1954 to 1958 he was assistant to Heinrich Lützeler at the University of Bonn . Then he began a traineeship at the Kupferstichkabinett Berlin . At the invitation of Hermann Schnitzler , after eight months he moved to the Schnütgen Museum in Cologne, which specializes in medieval art .

Act

In 1962 Bloch received his habilitation under Heinz Ladendorf at the University of Cologne . His research focus was the Christian and Jewish art of the Middle Ages. His essay "Aftermath of the Old Covenant in Christian Art" was published in the catalog of the 1963 exhibition "Monumenta Judaica" in Cologne. He carried out particular research on Carolingian, Romanesque and Gothic sculpture and painting. He held lectures as a private lecturer at Cologne University. As a consultant to private art collectors, he sharpened his knowledge of the distinction between real medieval works and their imitations in the 19th century. He made a decisive contribution to clearly separating the concept of recreation from “forgery for the purpose of deception” and thus to rehabilitate a number of Rhenish sculptors who worked in the neo-Gothic style. In 1967 he was appointed head of the sculpture collection of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin in Berlin-Dahlem as the successor to Peter Metz . He taught art history at the Free University of Berlin .

As a specialist in medieval art (including Romanesque bronze crucifixes and medieval aquamaniles ), he also researched the afterlife and the resumption of medieval themes and motifs in the late 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. Based on this, Peter Bloch became one of the most important experts in the sculpture of historicism and is considered to be the rediscoverer of the 19th century Berlin school of sculpture. He devoted numerous essays to this topic (such as the important essay “Style-Quotation and Logic of Function”) and books, the best known of which is the standard work Das Klassen Berlin, published in 1978 with the sculptor Waldemar Grzimek . The Berlin school of sculpture of the nineteenth century is. In the 1970s and 1980s he and his students carried out a systematic record of the sculptures on the (West) Berlin burial grounds. Here, too, he is considered the founder of a research tradition that is very lively today.

With the exhibition Ethos and Pathos, organized in 1990 at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin together with Sibylle Einholz and Jutta von Simson . The Berlin School of Sculpture 1780–1914 , Peter Bloch retired as director of the sculpture collection. It was published by Christian Theuerkauff and Hartmut Krohm , a commemorative publication for Peter Bloch, which contains numerous biographical and bibliographical references to Bloch's life and work. His 19th century sculpture collection brought together for the sculpture collection was transferred to the Alte Nationalgalerie a little later . The sculptures of the 19th century that Bloch bought for the sculpture gallery include the Amor and Psyche group by Reinhold Begas (Rome, 1854) and the discus thrower by Rudolf Schadow (Rome, 1821–1822).

Until his death in 1994, Peter Bloch looked after his students and took doctoral exams. He was buried in the forest cemetery in Zehlendorf , Wasgensteig, near the grave of his parents not far from the funeral chapel.

The estate of Peter Bloch and the estate of his father Peter Bloch the Elder. Ä. are located in the Berlin State Archives .

Honors

• 1983: Cross of Merit on Ribbon of the Federal Republic of Germany

literature

• Hartmut Krohm, Christian Theuerkauff (ed.): Festschrift for Peter Bloch . Verlag Philipp von Zabern, Mainz 1990, ISBN 3-8053-1120-6
• Yearbook Preussischer Kulturbesitz , vol. 31, 1994, p. 44 ff
• Heike Schroll: The Berlin State Archive and its holdings. Overview of the bequests , part 4, edition 3, Berliner Wissenschaftsverlag, Berlin 2006, ISBN 9783830511441 , p. 79.

Web links

• Literature by and about Peter Bloch in the catalog of the German National Library
• Dictionary of Art Historians