September 6, 2017

The 5 Compass Bloch Collection

By roadsrus

On our way to St. Louis in July, Ruth and I stopped at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City to see the Bloch Collection that went on display last March.  It’s surely worth a stop and this museum, defying the times, is still free.

Henry and his brother Richard founded H & R Block.  This tax preparation company became a business empire with 12,000 offices. Their first was on Main Street in downtown Kansas City.  They reportedly changed the company’s name from Bloch to Block because BLOCH was hard to pronounce and spell.  Henry married Marion Helzberg.  They eventually had 4 children and began filling their home with great art.

Twenty years after the Blochs started collecting, their purchases were considered one of the most important blocks of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist masterpieces still in private hands.  Ten years ago the Nelson-Atkins added a Bloch building to its complex, and in 2015 the Blochs gave 28 of their best works to the Nelson-Atkins.  The museum bought another.  The Bloch Galleries now intermingle the 29 with other works of art from these 2 well-loved eras almost doubling what visitors see from such important Impressionists as Renoir and Posts like Van Gogh.    The Bloch gifts are identified with blue squares.

Henry’s favorite painting among the gifts was Gustave Caillebotte’s “Boat Moored on the Seine at Argenteuil”.   In addition to being a masterful painter, Caillebotte, member of an upper-class family, was also a French sailing champion and yacht designer.

The Bloch galleries contain some unusual works.  One that was not a Bloch gift is an etching by Edouard Manet called “Cat and Flowers”.  My favorite among their gifts is a magnificent Manet painting called “The Croquet Party”.  Not surprisingly, Nelson-Atkins is using the latter to promote its new collection to museum goers.  Ruth immediately went to the gift store to see if she could find a copy of the cat for my sister Martha, who dotes on felines.

Hank

ps  The windmill painting is by Piet Mondrian, who is far better known for his abstract works of eye-drawing squares.  Monet also loved to paint windmills.

 

About roadsrus

Since the beginning, I've had to avoid writing about the downside of travel in order to sell more than 100 articles. Just because something negative happened doesn't mean your trip was ruined. But tell that to publishers who are into 5-star cruise and tropical beach fantasies. I want to tell what happened on my way to the beach, and it may not have been all that pleasant. My number one rule of the road is...today's disaster is tomorrow's great story. My travel experiences have appeared in about twenty magazines and newspapers. I've been in all 50 states more than once and more than 50 countries. Ruth and I love to travel internationally--Japan, Canada, China, Argentina, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, etc. Within the next 2 years we will have visited all of the European countries. But our favorite destination is Australia. Ruth and I have been there 9 times. I've written a book about Australia's Outback, ALONE NEAR ALICE, which is available through both Amazon & Barnes & Noble. My first fictional work, MOVING FORWARD, GETTING NOWHERE, has recently been posted on Amazon. It's a contemporary, hopefully funny re-telling of The Odyssey. View all posts by roadsrus
This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 6th, 2017 at 10:30 pm and posted in Missouri. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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