Walter Pach

An avid collector, art critic, historian, exhibition organizer, lecturer, practicing artist, art dealer, and translator, Walter Pach helped to shape the dissemination of modern art in the United States, Mexico, and Europe. Through his extensive writings and exhibitions—including the 1913 Armory Show, co-organized with Arthur B. Davies and Walt Kuhn—he sought to broaden the appreciation of modern art to general audiences. His own extensive art collection, which included works by Jean Charlot, George Constant, Eugene Delacroix, Marchel Duchamp, Thomas Eakins, Frida Kahlo, and Odilon Redon, remained unknown for decades, stored in an abandoned apartment in Athens, Greece, until its rediscovery in the 1980s.

Pach encountered art and artists from an early age. As noted in his autobiography Queer Thing, Painting (1938), he made frequent visits as a child to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, then located at 128 West 14th Street. He came from a family of photographers who groomed him to head the Pach Brothers Studio, a prestigious family firm that became the official photographer to many US presidents and to The Met. He studied painting in the United States with William Merritt Chase and Robert Henri, and in Europe under Maurice Denis, Henri Matisse, and Paul Sérusier.

Pach lived in Paris between 1907 and 1913, and became the central node of a transatlantic artistic and intellectual network that laid the foundation for the Armory Show in 1913, an exhibition that shaped the history of modern art. During a trip to New York in 1908, he met Arthur B. Davies, President of the Association of American Painters and Sculptors, and Walt Kuhn, both practicing artists. Together they selected the international works included in the 1913 Armory Show. As part of his work for the exhibition, Pach wrote artist biographies; built relationships with French artists and dealers; arranged for the shipping of works to New York; served as spokesman, salesman, and publicist; and produced pamphlets and translations.

Throughout his career, Pach organized groundbreaking exhibitions in the United States. He was among the founding directors of the Society of Independent Artists, an organization founded in 1917 to promote modern art, which hosted an annual un-juried show. He also helped to organize the first monographic exhibitions of works by Paul Cézanne and Henri Matisse in the United States. His career as a curator and exhibition organizer culminated with his appointment as director general of the Masterpieces of Art exhibition at the New York World’s Fair in 1939.

Pach deployed his writing to promote and defend modern artists. One of his earliest articles, “Cézanne—An Introduction,” was the first review of the artist in an American publication, appearing in Scribner’s Magazine in 1908. In his books The Master of Modern Art (1925), The Art Museum in America (1948) and The Classical Tradition in Modern Art (1959), Pach challenged himself to explain modern art and its history and intellectual environment to a public still largely hostile to new artistic modes. He wrote monographs on Georges Seurat (1923),Raymond Duchamp-Villon (1924),and Vincent van Gogh (1936), and translated The Journal of Eugene Delacroix andElie Faure’s five-volume History of Art (both 1937).

As a transatlantic art dealer, Pach sold modern European art to American collectors and galleries. Acting as a broker between artists and buyers, he secured the sales of Cézanne’s View of the Domaine St. Joseph (late 1880s) to The Met; Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912; Philadelphia Museum of Art) to Walter and Louise Arensberg (and also commissioned its famed copy in 1916); and Henri Matisse’s Blue Nude (1907) to the Baltimore Museum of Art. With a letter of support from former President Theodore Roosevelt, Pach acquired works by André Derain, Raoul Dufy, Matisse, Picasso, and many others for collections in the United States. During a self-imposed exile in Paris after the poor reception of his book Ananias, or the False Artist (1928), he intervened to have a painting by Eakins, whom he had interviewed for an article in 1923, accepted by the Louvre. Pach facilitated The Met’s acquisition of many works; in 1931, he arranged the sale of Jacques Louis David’s The Death of Socrates (1787) to the Museum. He also served as the European representative for the Carroll and Bourgeois galleries in New York City.

Pach played a fundamental role in introducing Mexican and Latin American artists to American audiences. In 1922, he spent a year in Mexico City teaching at the Universidad Nacional, where a young political cartoonist, José Clemente Orozco, attended his lectures. Pach exhibited Orozco’s painting Street in Mexico City at the Society of Independent Artists exhibition in 1923 and was instrumental in securing the participation of numerous artists working in Mexico, including Emilio Amero, Abraham Ángel, Rosario Cabrera, A. Cano, Jean Charlot, Manuel Rodríguez Lozano, Adolfo Best Maugard, Carlos Mérica, Nahui Olin, Orozco, Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Rufino Tamayo. In 1933, when Rivera’s mural Man at the Crossroads was covered up at the Rockefeller Center in New York because of its political content, Pach intervened personally, without success, to negotiate a settlement between Rivera and John D. Rockefeller Jr.

Despite his success as a writer, curator, and dealer, Pach considered himself first and foremost an artist. He never stopped painting and exhibiting his work, much of which was found after his death within his extensive art collection, which remained abandoned for decades in an unoccupied apartment in Athens owned by his widow. Small justice can be found in the New York Times obituary of November 28, 1958: “Walter Pach, 75, Painter, Is Dead.”