Albert Bloch was the American in the Blue Rider.

There were not many Americans wandering around Munich in 1911 making pictures with Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc while European painting was coming loose from its representational traditions. Bloch, born in St. Louis in 1882, had started out as a newspaper illustrator and caricaturist, then went to Germany in 1909 to become a painter. Two years later Kandinsky and Marc invited him into the circle that became Der Blaue Reiter—the Blue Rider—and Bloch would be included in the group’s landmark exhibitions of 1911 and 1912.

One of the pictures Bloch painted during that extraordinary period, the 1912 “Duell (Duel),” is included in “The Age of Anxiety: German Expressionism in Art and Film,” which opens Friday at the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts. The exhibition, which has toured Europe and arrives in Little Rock in an expanded version for its U.S. debut, brings together paintings, prints and other works with images from such Expressionist films as “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” “Nosferatu” and “Metropolis.” It remains on view through Jan. 10; admission is free.

“Duell” (Duel) was painted two years before the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand touched off World War I, worth keeping in mind because history has a way of making the past look more orderly than it felt in the moment. We can look at a painting from 1912 and see Europe moving toward catastrophe. Bloch was simply living in Munich, buying paint, worrying about money, arguing about art, and making pictures of a world on the brink.

That’s most useful to know when encountering “Duell” now.

The painting gives us two figures locked in confrontation, but Bloch does not arrange them in a sensible space and allow us to follow the action. Forms press against other forms; colors carry emotional weight........

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