Arnold Blanch | |
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![]() Arnold Blanch (1934), bronze sculpture by Eugenie Gershoy | |
Born | June 4, 1896 Mantorville, Minnesota, US |
Died | October 3, 1968 |
Known for | Painter |
Movement | Social Realism |
Arnold Blanch (June 4, 1896 – October 3, 1968), was born and raised in Mantorville, Minnesota. He was an American modernist painter, etcher, illustrator, lithographer, muralist, printmaker and art teacher.
His modernist paintings are associated with the Social Realist movement.[1] Blanch met his first wife the painter Lucile Blanch, (born Lucile Lundquist), at the Minneapolis School of Art.
After the end of World War I, Lucile and Arnold Blanch moved to New York City and enrolled at the Art Students League of New York, studying with John Sloan, Robert Henri, Kenneth Hayes Miller and Boardman Robinson. Eventually by 1923 they settled in Woodstock, New York, which was then beginning to become an important art colony for young artists. By the 1920s Blanch began to achieve recognition for his paintings and lithographs of landscapes and still lifes.[2][3] During the 1930s in New York, Blanch worked for the Section of Painting and Sculpture on various mural projects, including The Harvest at the United States Post Office in Fredonia, New York.[4]
In 1939, Blanch remarried and for many years he lived in Woodstock, New York with his second wife Doris Lee, also an artist. Blanch taught at the Art Students League's branch in Woodstock for several decades from the 1930s until his death in the late 1960s. His paintings are in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art in New York City; the Cleveland Museum of Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Smith College Museum of Art; the Sheldon Museum of Art; the Woodstock Artists Association and Museum (WAAM); one of the oldest American artists' organizations, and dozens of others.
Among Blanch's pupils was the painter and printmaker Bertha Landers.[5]