Library To Celebrate The Life And Works Of Stella Bloch

A tribute to the late artist Stella Bloch and a dedication of her works will be held on Sunday, April 9, from 1:30 to 3:30 pm at the Cyrenius H. Booth Library.

Eighteen works by the celebrated artist and Newtown resident have been donated to the library’s permanent collection by her sons, David Eliscu of Newtown and Peter Eliscu of Manhattan.

Stella Bloch Eliscu died at the age of 101 on January 10, 1999, at the Bethel Health Care Center, after spending her lifetime scrutinizing the world around her, distilling what she found into dance or visual images. Her drawings and paintings have been celebrated for the way they conveyed the movement of dancers, the mood of late night jazz clubs and life on Harlem streets. Ms Bloch worked in pencil, chalk, pastel, oil on canvas, and collage.

Born in Poland and raised in Manhattan, she was married in 1930 in Hoboken, N.J., to Edward Eliscu, an award-winning song lyricist and writer. Before moving to Newtown in 1964, Mrs Eliscu and her husband lived in Hollywood, Calif., and New York City, where he worked as a screenwriter, playwright, and lyricist.

David Eliscu said his mother’s legacy is the unique quality of her vision and her commitment to show that vision to others.

“She was a chronicler of her time, a documentarian, recording what she saw to pass on to others,” he said. “I think my mother would be very pleased to know that her work will be part of the permanent collection of the library.”

Nearly 5,000 items of her work have been catalogued by Michael Coleman, director of the Beaux Arts Gallery in Woodbury, which represented Ms Block since 1983.

Stella Bloch’s passion for dance began in 1914 when she saw Isadora Duncan perform at the Metropolitan Opera House. She then became the first American dance student of the Isadorables, the six original students of the dancer. Ms Bloch danced and taught the Duncan technique throughout the 1920s. During those years she also traveled to the Far East to study Balinese, Japanese, Hindu, and Javanese court dances. She was among the first dancers to introduce authentic Far Eastern dance to New York and Boston audiences.

Her love of dance became a recurrent theme in her early work. Her desire to find the origins of other artists’ inspirations drew her to Harlem in the late 1920s, where she began to sketch and paint notable jazz entertainers in the Cotton Club and other nightclubs.

“She had an appreciation of African-American culture and the depth, richness, and seriousness of it that she got from visiting the Orient and seeing their culture,” David Eliscu said. “She was a chronicler of Harlem in the 1920s when no one else was recording these things. Some of these works are in Schomburg Center [for Research in Black Culture in New York].”

His mother accumulated a collection of nearly 500 78 rpm recordings of the jazz artists at a time when they were referred to as “race records.” Columbia Records later purchased the collection and gave her tapes made from them.

Stella Bloch also recorded street life in the 1950s in New York. “She recorded a period in history,” Mr Eliscu said. “I went back recently and the neighborhood where she lived no longer exists – it was torn down.”

“She was always very political too, concerned about justice, racism, world peace, women’s rights,” he said. “She demonstrated against the Vietnam War on the steps of Edmond Town Hall in Newtown. She was always a nonconformist. As a child, I never understood why she couldn’t be like other people’s moms.”

A published writer and a playwright, Stella Bloch was married during the 1920s to Ananda Coomaraswamy, curator of East Indian art at the Boston Museum, with whom she both wrote and traveled.

“She had an Eastern concept of the artist that downplayed the Western concept of ego,” Michael Coleman said. “You can tell that from her writing. She felt everyone had talent and that art should be accessible to everyone. She felt she was a historian.”

“What she had inside to say comes out in her work,” he said. “Her work will increase in importance. She is gaining more recognition. Her work is beginning to arrive in larger collections.”

“Because of the era in which she lived, she lived in [my father’s] shadow because he was the breadwinner,” David Eliscu said. “But he always was a strong supporter of her work. Near the end of his life he felt he had a mission to promote her work and get the collection into order.”

Stella Bloch’s artwork is in countless private collections dating from the 1920s. Major examples of her works are in the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the Harvard Theatre Collection, Harvard University, and the Schomberg Center.

Her paintings have been in many exhibitions and shows over the years, including “The Theatre in Arts” at Sidney Ross Gallery in New York in 1932; the first International Jazz Festival in Washington, DC in 1962; and “The Art of Jazz” in 1982 at the Schomburg Center.

In the 1950s, Dance magazine published her drawings of dancers in choreographer George Balanchine’s ballets. Some of the drawings were purchased by the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center and exhibited in the 1993 celebration of Balanchine, who died in 1983.

In 1995, when Beaux Arts was planning a large exhibition of her work, Michael Coleman began to catalogue and classify it. That year Stella Bloch suffered a stroke and moved into the Bethel Health Care Center, where she died last year.

“I would take works to her to get them identified,” Mr Coleman said. “It took six to eight months to separate the subject matter. There were wonderful things that hadn’t been shown in 80 years.”

The public is invited to attend the reception that will be held in the meeting room of the library.