Pach, Walter, 1883-1958

Pach: Artist, critic, historian, writer, art consultant, curator; New York, N.Y. Instrumental in organizing the Armory Show, 1913. Winthrop: patron; New York, N.Y. His collection, left to Harvard University, included early American portraits, drawings by English and French artists, and Chinese sculpture.

American artist and author.

Artist.

Pach was an alumnus of City College, Class of 1903.

Walter Pach (1883-1958) was an artist, critic, historian, writer, art consultant, and curator from New York, N.Y.

He was a promoter of modernist art and was instrumental in organizing the Armory Show, 1913. He wrote extensively on modern art.

Artist, critic, lecturer, art adviser, and art historian Walter Pach (1883-1958) wrote extensively about modern art. Through his numerous books, articles, and translations of European art texts, such as Elie Faure's 5-volume History of Art and The Journal of Eugène Delacroix, Pach was able to bring an emerging modernist viewpoint to the American public. He wrote the first article published in America on Cézanne in 1908 and until his death fifty years later continued to champion the cause of modernism in this country. Pach organized exhibitions of contemporary art for important New York City galleries of the period, as well as the landmark exhibition of 1913, "The International Exhibition of Modern Art," commonly known as the Armory Show. Along with painters Arthur B. Davies and Walt Kuhn, he was able to bring together leading contemporary European and American artists. Pach helped to form major collections for John Quinn and Walter Arensberg. He was also instrumental in securing individual works of art for museums, such as a portrait for the Louvre Museum by American master Thomas Eakins, and Jacques-Louis David's Death of Socrates for the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Walter Pach was born in New York City, July 11, 1883. His father, Gotthelf Pach, was a prominent commercial photographer who, along with his family, ran the New York firm of Pach Bros. The company did the bulk of the photographic work for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the young Pach often accompanied his father on museum assignments. In 1903, Pach graduated from the City College of New York with a degree in art. He also studied with Robert Henri at the New York School of Art and went abroad to paint with William Merritt Chase in the summers of 1903 and 1904.

In 1907, Pach moved to France and soon became part of the Gertrude and Leo Stein circle. As an artist and critic, he moved among the Parisian avant-garde, exhibiting with them and writing about their work and new artistic vision. Pach also wrote on such established artists as Claude Monet, whom he interviewed in 1908 for Scribner's Magazine.

Pach married artist Magdalene Frohberg in February 1914, and their son Raymond was born at the end of that year. The Pachs lived primarily in New York, but spent time abroad from 1928 to 1932. Intermittently, they lived on the West Coast, where Pach taught at the University of California at Berkeley. In the 1920s he taught at the University of Mexico on a Schilling Fund grant, lecturing and writing on Native American art. He took an active interest in organizing exhibitions and raising money for a museum to be dedicated to the indigenous art of the Americas. In addition, he was a friend of José Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera and helped organize the Mexican chapter of the Society of Independent Artists, the New York-based organization he founded in 1917 with Walter Arensberg and Marcel Duchamp.

While not well known today as a painter, Walter Pach devoted much of his creative effort to painting. He considered himself both an artist and a writer, even though friends like art historian Bernard Berenson urged him to devote all his time to writing. Among his writings are monographs on a wide range of subjects, social commentary on the art world, and a book on museum structures. Among is first publications were a series of brochures produced for the 1913 Armory Show, including Odilon Redon; and, in the same year, A Sculptor's Architecture, a book about the work of Raymond Duchamp-Villon, a close friend whom he admired greatly. In 1923, Pach wrote Georges Seurat, a book later cited by art historian John Rewald as an important early text on the artist. Masters of Modern Art and the monograph Raymond Duchamp-Villon were published the following year, and in 1928 Pach's well-known indictment of opportunistic artists and corruption in the art world, Ananias, or The False Artist, created a stir in art circles. Pach considered Vincent Van Gogh to be a seminal figure in the development of modern art and was the first historian to lecture on him in America. In 1936, he published his well-received monograph, Vincent Van Gogh. His recollections of a life spent in art, Queer Thing, Painting appeared in 1938. Ingres was published in 1939, as well as Masterpieces of Art, written for the 1939 New York World's Fair, for which Pach was exhibition director. His Art Museum in America, published in 1948, called into question the relevance, responsibility, and future direction of the American art museum. He long championed the artists of Mexico and published an essay on Diego Rivera in 1951 for the National Museum of Fine Arts, Mexico, for its 50-year retrospective exhibition on the artist. The Classical Tradition in Modern Art, Pach's la st book, was published posthumously in 1959.

Pach's fluency in French, German, and Spanish allowed him to understand and interpret new avant-garde ideas developing in Europe and to translate them for an English-speaking audience. His language skills also allowed him to communicate personally with many noted artists in Europe and Mexico and to mediate between gallery dealers and museum curators on their behalf. His correspondence with major figures in 20th-century art are a fascinating and important source of information, not only about the artists themselves but about the art world in general during the first half of this century.