"...unlike other Israeli artists who dwell on, amplify or pointedly deny the conflicted context of their work (such as Avigdor Arikha, Sivan Hurwitz or Yaacov Agam, respectively) Ludwig Blum, who lived through some of the greatest upheavals in modern Jewish history, seems to largely skate over the wars and tragedies of the 20th century. Many of his paintings were lost in the inferno of the Second World War. Those that remain are mostly technically adept landscapes whose luminous simplicity often comes across as simple-minded. Born in Brno, Moravia, in 1891, Blum lived through both world wars, serving for Austro-Hungary from 1914 to 1918. He was active in the Israeli War of Independence, in which he lost his son, Elie, and lived in Israel through the Suez Crisis, the Six Day War and the Yom Kippur War. After immigrating to Israel in 1923, he continued to be a frequent and committed traveler back and forth between Israel/Palestine and Czechoslovakia in the 1920s and 1930s. This was partly in order to sell paintings in Europe but also, significantly, because he continued to think of himself as a Czechoslovakian artist as well as an Israeli one. By 1932, Blum and his family were firmly settled in Jerusalem. Although a contemporary of the pioneers of the first kibbutz, Degania Aleph, Blum came to the Holy Land as an adult artist and was deeply moved, but unchanged, by his adopted home. Photographs of Blum at his easel, painting en plein air, illustrate what one might expect, given the placid mastery of his work: His hat and overcoat, his entire manner even, seem directly transplanted from Vienna, where he had trained. The brightness of the pictures and their competent composition make them desirably decorative, but they remain cheerfully aloof and stylistically conservative. In fact, the recent increase in interest in Blum’s work seems more related to ..." http://forward.com/culture/137491/flowers-that-spring-in-the-blum-have-nothing-to-do/ undefined

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