Arnold Blanch

Who was Arnold Blanch?

Arnold Blanch, 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. Blanch met his first wife the painter Lucile Blanch, 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. During the 1930s in New York, Blanch worked in the WPA on various mural projects, including "The Harvest" at the United States Post Office in Fredonia, New York.

In 1939 Blanch remarried and for many years he lived in Woodstock, New York with his second wife Doris Lee also an artist.