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ESSAY
As a
character, Lee Gatch may have been the most vivid of The Ten’s
members. As an artist he was – for awhile – its most
famous. Born in 1902, Gatch lived most of his life in rural New
Jersey, in an old stone house that doubled as his studio. Far from
the New York art scene, almost a recluse, Gatch joined The Ten for
one year only: 1937.
By the ‘40s, Gatch was becoming famous. The great collector
Duncan Phillips wrote to Gatch of “the witchery of your color”
and bought this exhibit’s Orientals at the Races in 1942,
a painting which, in 1950, represented America at the Venice Biennale.
Gatch was featured there again in 1956. He won major prizes and
had a 1960 retrospective at the Whitney in tandem with one honoring
Milton Avery. The New York Times, reviewing both, called Gatch “an
altogether more complex and profound artist, mixing visual perception
with emotional insight into nature.” Gatch was inducted into
the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1966.
Gatch worked methodically, completing at most 10 paintings a year.
Yet by 1960, the Phillips Collection already owned a dozen; the
Hirschhorn, even more. Fourteen museums owned Gatches, not including
university galleries.
“Increasing recognition,” wrote Perry Rathbone, Director
of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, combined with “limited
output, has laid such a premium on Gatch’s paintings that
they are usually bespoken before coming on the market. Not a single
work remains in the possession of the artist himself” (1960).
Yet Gatch’s commercial success did little to dim his demons.
“I asked him what he thought about when he was painting,”
says his daughter, Merriam, an actress. “He said he thought
about all the things that made him angry – the hurts I suppose,
the things that he was frightened of. He’d curse and rail
at the canvas, always ending, for some reason, with: ‘You
louse of the world!’ The canvas was his enemy, apparently.
Yet he worked all the time – hung over, sick, even as he was
dying.”
There was another side to Gatch, however, the one on which novelist
Joyce Cary based the artist-hero of The Horse’s Mouth, Gully
Jimson (Alec Guinness in the movie). This was the Lee Gatch who
wrote of his “one constant hope; the reconciliation between
nature and abstraction,” the man who believed that art “is
for rejoicing.”
Indeed, Jacob Kainen’s review of Gatch’s debut with
The Ten said he “possesses a strange magic and distinction
which reflect his joy.” Francis Steegmuller, the noted writer
and literary scholar, wrote 34 years later of a similar painting:
“Much in little; nothing crowded – a jewel.”
“In the 1950s,” wrote Eliza Rathbone, curator of the
Phillips (introducing a Gatch exhibition she mounted in 1988), “Gatch
introduced the technique of canvas-collage.” “The simplification
of form and neutral hues of these works,” Rathbone concluded,
“anticipate the stone collages which were soon to follow.”
Woman Stone, 1967, is an example of his final, “Jurassic”
phase.
Written by Paul Solman, 1998
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