Lucienne Bloch
American, born Switzerland, 1909 - 1999The Barn, 1940
Not on view
Tempera on board
Dimensions8 × 9 in. (20.3 × 22.9 cm)
Framed: 13 3/4 × 14 7/8 in. (34.9 × 37.8 cm)
Gift of Mrs. R. Spencer Bishop, 1948.1
Born in Geneva, Switzerland, Lucienne Bloch was the third child of the celebrated composer Ernst Bloch and his wife, the musician Margarethe Augusta Schneider. Raised in privileged circumstances, Lucienne immigrated to the United States with her family in 1917, where they settled in Cleveland. It was there that she had her first instruction in art, as a scholarship student at the Cleveland School of Art. Her work attracted the attention of Frank Lloyd Wright, who invited her to teach sculpture at his school, Taliesin, in Spring Green, Wisconsin.
In the early 1930s, she met Mexican artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, who were in New York preparing for an exhibition of Rivera's work at the Museum of Modern Art. Taken with Rivera's painting, Bloch enthusiastically offered to grind his colors. She accompanied the couple to Michigan, where Rivera was commissioned to paint large frescoes at the Detroit Institute of Arts. It was while working with Rivera that she fell in love with the artist's chief plasterer, Stephen Pope Dimitroff. Bloch and Dimitroff eventually married and collaborated as an artistic team, he handling the plaster and she the painting.
In 1940 Bloch and Dimitroff left New York for the Midwest, where they settled in Flint, Michigan, Dimitroff's hometown. There they continued their artistic endeavors and also taught at the Flint Institute of Arts. The Barn, painted during Bloch's residence in Flint, includes a portrayal of her young son, most likely George, who was born in 1938. Curatorial files mention that the boy is modeled on Pencho, but he was not born until 1941, a year after the painting was created.
