SUZANNE PERLMAN

(1922-2020)

Portrait of Isidore Bloch

Footnotes

The authenticity of this work has been confirmed by the Estate of Suzanne Perlman.

Provenance
Peter Fischer Collection, UK.
Private collection, UK (a gift from the above in June 1986).


Suzanne Perlman's Portrait of Isidore Bloch distils everything that made her one of the Caribbean's most electrifying post-war colourists: an instinctive command of chromatic drama, an empathetic attentiveness to the world around her, and an emotional fluency shaped by exile, reinvention, and artistic conviction. Born Suzanne Sternberg in Budapest in 1922, Perlman fled Europe on the eve of World War II, settling with her husband in Curaçao in 1940. On the island she discovered a visual language as vibrant and fiery as the tropics themselves. Her Curaçao works — landscapes, street scenes and portraits alive with women washing clothes, vendors, dancers and the rhythms of daily life — were expressions of love and respect for the people that formed her newfound community.

The present work exemplifies the height of this creative period. Bloch, a Paris-born journalist who arrived in Curaçao in 1936, was a pivotal figure in the island's press world: a correspondent for Reuters, the New York Times and the ANP; a co-founder of the Antillean Press Association; and an active member of the island's Jewish community. Perlman depicts him with the dignified reserve of an intellectual, his gaze turned slightly away, as if contemplating his next line of copy.

The handling is quintessentially Perlman — bold yet astonishingly sensitive. Her palette spans an impossible spectrum of mauve, lilac, teal, crimson, navy, vermilion, forest green and yellow, which is harmonised by her rapid and confident brushwork. This is expressionism sharpened by close observation: Bloch's features are precisely articulated and animated by the chromatic daring she absorbed from the Fauves and refined in her studies with Oskar Kokoschka in the 1960s. The work's psychological acuity owes much to this lineage, while the radiance of its colour is entirely Perlman's own.

The background is divided into two luminous planes: an upper field of gold, and below it a backdrop of sea-green and turquoise that seems to shimmer with the Caribbean light. It reads as both setting and atmosphere — a tonal echo of the coastal world that became Perlman's refuge after the upheavals of war. By placing Bloch within this distilled environment, she folds sitter, artist and island together in one personally charged space.

Perlman relocated to London in the 1980s, where she continued to paint with undiminished force until shortly before her death in 2020. Her oeuvre is only now receiving overdue critical attention: in 2009 she was made an Officer in the Order of Orange-Nassau for her cultural contributions to Curaçao, and in 2018 the Dutch Centre in London mounted her first ever retrospective, when she was 95 years of age. In February of 2026, the Singer Laren Museum in the Netherlands will present her first solo museum exhibition since 1982, coinciding with a major monograph that will be published by Skira in 2027 and feature texts by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Jennifer Higgie and Klara Kemp-Welch. Such reconsideration invites a return to the qualities that defined Perlman's practice: an artist who forged her own path, painting from feeling, memory and a profound sense of belonging. Those impulses animate the present portrait, which, beyond capturing an eminent journalist, serves as a souvenir of a life remade in dazzling colour.