Born in St. Louis, Missouri on August 2, 1882, Albert Bloch was born to a Bohemian-Jewish immigrant father and a mother who was a German Jew. But Bloch was not raised in the Jewish faith and he later adopted a form of Christianity.

Bloch quit high school at sixteen to study at the St. Louis School of Fine Arts from 1898 to 1900 with Dawson Dawson-Watkins. Block began his art career as a caricaturist for a satirical newspaper, The Saint Louis Mirror under editor and publisher, William Marion Reedy. While Bloch's political cartoons were done in the standard manner, "his caricatures and cover illustrations were more advanced stylistically, displaying the bold simplifications and flowing lines of international Art Nouveau." Reedy became...