The son of Theordore and Emma Bloch, Albert Bloch was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1882. Bloch studied at the St. Louis School of Arts and the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts before starting his career producing comic strips for the St. Louis Star in 1901. In 1905, Bloch moved on to work as an illustrator for William Marion Reedy's The Mirror, a job he held until 1908.

In 1909, Bloch moved to Germany and soon joined Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), a group associated with the German Expressionist art movement. In this collective, Bloch worked alongside artists including Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, August Macke, Paul Klee, and Gabriele Münter, among others. In 1921, Bloch returned to the United States where he briefly taught at the Art Institute of Chicago before accepting a professorship at the University of Kansas in the Department of Painting and Drawing. Bloch worked as a professor and head of the department until his retirement in 1947.

Bloch had two sons, Bernard and Walter, with his first wife, Hortense (Altheimer) Bloch. Hortense passed away in 1949. Bloch later married Anna Bloch in 1951, with whom he lived in Lawrence, Kansas, until his death in 1961.