Stella Bloch

Stella Bloch (photography by Arnold Genthe , 1921)

Stella Bloch (born December 17, 1897 in Tarnów , † January 10, 1999 in Bethel , Connecticut ) was an American journalist , author , illustrator and dance historian.

Youth and education

Stella Bloch was the daughter of an American mother who emigrated to the United States from Galicia, but returned home for the birth of her child. The mother, Charlotte Bloch, was a single parent and turned to her sister and brother, who lived in New York . The two ran the well-known tailor shop Heller & Offner ; Charlotte Bloch and her daughter lived above the business in a house that belonged to the sister. Stella Bloch herself later attributed her successful artistic career to the benevolent and stimulating atmosphere in the family, among other things.

As a teenager Bloch began dance training with Isadora Duncan and belonged to the Isadorables group ; she was also interested in Spanish dance. She also took art classes with the Art Students League of New York . Preferably she drew dance scenes and dancers, she also worked as a journalist .

First marriage and relationship with Asia

In 1922 Bloch married Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy , 20 years his senior , curator of Indian and Muslim art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston ; it was Coomaraswamy's third marriage. Coomaraswamy became aware of her in 1917 through drawings by Bloch. When they got to know each other personally, a love affair had developed that the mother Charlotte Bloch tried to prevent at first. Under the influence of Coomaraswamy and his numerous publications, Stella Bloch turned to Buddhism . The couple traveled to the Far East , where Bloch studied the dances in Bali , Cambodia , the Republic of China , India , Japan and Java . During this time she spent a year in the palace of the Sultan of Solo to learn Javanese dance under the guidance of a dance master. She documented the costumes and dances of different cultures in drawings.

After her return from Asia, Stella Bloch gave lessons in Javanese dance in Boston and New York and gave lectures on life there, and later opened her own dance studio. She wrote articles for magazines and, in turn, has been featured in newspapers and magazines. In 1922 she published the book Dancing and the Drama East and West , in which the drama from the East and the West were juxtaposed and which contained some of her drawings. It has been reissued several times to date, most recently in 2009.

In 1930 she was divorced from Coomaraswamy.

Diverse activities

Before 1923, Stella Bloch danced in Ballet Intime , a company founded by Adolph Bolm , Michio Ito and Roshanara , an Indian dancer. She has also appeared in revues on Broadway , at the Eastman Theater in Rochester and with the Garrick Gaieties at the Guild Theater in New York. In 1931 she married the actor and screenwriter Edward Eliscu ; they had two sons. In the 1930s and 1940s she also wrote scripts for films herself.

It was also during this time that Bloch came into contact with the Harlem jazz scene at the Cotton Club and the Alhambra Theater . She preferred to go to clubs that were not normally visited by whites. She was the first white woman to document and draw the Harlem Renaissance . Among the artists she portrayed were Josephine Baker , Bessie Smith , Dusty Fletcher, and Thelonious Monk . She learned the authentic version of the Charleston from the Cotton Club dancer Elida Webb and performed it, highly praised by viewers and the press.

Stella Bloch's drawings have been shown in many exhibitions, mainly in New York, but also in California , where she lived with her husband for several years. Her work is also shown at exhibitions by African-American artists, where she was accepted as the only white artist.

In the mid-1960s, Stella Bloch and Edward Eliscu moved to Connecticut . During this time Bloch wrote a play in four acts about Isadora Duncan called Sundown , about which nothing more was known. She remained creatively active into old age.

Eliscu died in 1998, Stella Bloch the following year. Her estate is in the Houghton Library at Harvard . In the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections of Princeton University some 650 letters from her first husband Coomaraswamy be kept at his wife.

Fonts

• Dancing and the Drama East and West . Orientalia 1922

literature

• Sylvia Görke: Bloch, Stella. In: General Artist Lexicon . Supplement, Volume 3, KG Saur, Munich and Leipzig 2008, ISBN 978-3-598-22863-6 (Supplement 3), ISBN 978-3-598-22740-0 (complete works), p. 200
• Kimberley Dawn Croswell: Stella Bloch and the Politics of Art and Dance. MA thesis, University of Victoria, 2006 ( digitized as PDF file, 13.4 MB )

Web links

• Literature by and about Stella Bloch in the bibliographic database WorldCat
• Entry on Stella Bloch at the Houghton Library, Harvard College Library
• Guide to the Stella Bloch Papers, 1907–1999, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts (PDF; 211 kB)
• Photo by Stella Bloch on flickr.com

References and comments

1. ↑ Birth register of the Jewish community Tarnów, tom. XI, fol. 176 ; the birthday given by Croswell (p. 4) and in the Allgemeine Künstlerlexikon December 18, 1897 refers to the date of the name settlement. Other sources give December 14, 1897 as the birthday.
2. ↑ ^{a b} Entry on Stella Bloch at the Houghton Library, Harvard College Library ( Memento of the original from July 3, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
3. ↑ Other sources say that Charlotte Bloch only emigrated after the birth of her daughter.
4. ↑ ^{a b} Kimberley Dawn Croswell: Stella Bloch and the Politics of Art and Dance. MA thesis, University of Victoria, 2006 ( digitized as PDF file, 13.4 MB )