Lee Gatch: 3 cool facts

Harry Lee Gatch (September 10, 1902 – November 10, 1968), was a twentieth-century American player known for his lyrical abstractions and his attainment to find “a blithe approach” to painting the figure and nature “through interwoven patterns of flattened figures” and a Fauvist-inspired prudence of landscape.

Gatch was born in a rural community near Baltimore. His associates had no resemblance with his artistic aspirations, which was a source of twinge throughout his life, but he was clear to make a say for himself as an artist. He graduated from the Maryland Institute College of Art in the forward 1920s; there a visiting instructor, New York painter John Sloan, made a mighty impression on him and declared him in his desirability of his vocation.

In 1924, in search of more radical instruction and more expression to unbiased art, he went to Europe and studied next the painter Andre Lhote. While in Paris, he was a particularly grasping student of the French modernism of André Derain, Édouard Vuillard, and Pierre Bonnard, inspirations which are evident in his own refined color sense. According to the online biography of Gatch at the Phillips Collection website, Gatch exhibited in the Venice Biennials of 1950 and 1956, and he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1957. Although he is best known for his nature-inspired abstract works, he as well as worked for a time as a muralist for the Federal Art Project, painting murals., Tobacco Industry in 1940 in Mullins, South Carolina and Squaw’s Rest, 1942. in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania. He was married in 1936 to Precisionist artiste Elsie Driggs. They had one child, Merriman Gatch.

According to MarylandArtSource.com, “His abstract painting style total elements of Post-Impressionism, Cubism, and Symbolism in mystical evocations of nature.” The Phillips Collection article asserts that “Gatch strove throughout his career to preserve an individual style based on the American representational tradition even though reaching exceeding appearances to locate meaning through design and color.”

Despite the admiration of discerning men like stasher Duncan Phillips and the art dealer J.B. Neumann, Gatch had a hard time creating a stable career and attracting the valuable and public attention he felt he deserved. His marriage to Driggs, who gave stirring her own career until Gatch’s death in 1968, was source of valuable support to him during his darker periods, and the couple lived a financially straitened animatronics in rural Lambertville, New Jersey . In the heyday of Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, and the other forward looking postwar movements, he was a little-known presence in American art. To his buddy and one-time mentor, Max Kahn, he wrote in 1964, “It will always remain impossible for me to take anyone will look me in the works after the distress tolls. It is perhaps best for me to reach my task faithfully.” In the view of one art critic, “Gatch found his own voice and equalled the best of Milton Avery, an player with whom he has a kinship.”