Lee Gatch

Harry Lee Gatch (September 10, 1902 – November 10, 1968), was a twentieth-century American artiste known for his lyrical abstractions and his feat to find "a well-ventilated approach" to painting the figure and nature "through interwoven patterns of flattened figures" and a Fauvist-inspired desirability of landscape.

Gatch was born in a rural community near Baltimore. His relations had no kinship with his artistic aspirations, which was a source of throbbing throughout his life, but he was clear to make a herald for himself as an artist. He graduated from the Maryland Institute College of Art in the in advance 1920s; there a visiting instructor, New York painter John Sloan, made a strong impression upon him and acknowledged him in his desirability of his vocation.

In 1924, in search of more innovative instruction and more trip out to radical art, he went to Europe and studied taking into consideration the painter Andre Lhote. While in Paris, he was a particularly covetous 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 furthermore worked for a epoch 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 combined 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 though reaching exceeding appearances to locate meaning through design and color."

Despite the esteem of discerning men like squirrel Duncan Phillips and the art dealer J.B. Neumann, Gatch had a difficult time creating a stable career and attracting the valuable and public attention he felt he deserved. His marriage to Driggs, who gave up her own career until Gatch's death in 1968, was source of indispensable support to him during his darker periods, and the couple lived a financially straitened liveliness in rural Lambertville, New Jersey . In the heyday of Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, and the other open-minded 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 say yes anyone will see me taking place after the panic tolls. It is perhaps best for me to complete my task faithfully." In the view of one art critic, "Gatch found his own voice and equalled the best of Milton Avery, an performer with whom he has a kinship."

After his death he was interred at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, New York.