Ruth
Bloch

Bloch finds art quite innocent: not at all absolved, but rather, untouched, and to inhabit an unsullied state of grace, like our inmost hearts. She feels a rending sorrow to see the cureless bun done unto any of the inhabitants of her time, those her human fellows on the globe, divided from her but by habit or chance.

She feels these, as all of us, united in all else, humanity especially, and people all, joined best when joined by common feeling. This feeling, pronounced in an, educes, and never imposes, such unity as the seamless spree she gives to those stretching shapes she lends the leaping into life. She does not want the bitter hand of ferocious extremity to clutch in palsy at her work, or suffer its grime and rank dirt to stain the burnish, Instead, she believes that life and light, bright when far from that polluted grip, must recall people to their common humanity, and share of feeling; and that the free instinct upon and in the work of art, both for one who makes it and all free to see, liberates to human life, starting, as matter must, with mind made form, all joyous in its thought to jubilation, its breath beating in our clay.