Walter Pach

Walter Pach (July 1, 1883 – November 27, 1958) was an American artist, critic, lecturer, art adviser, and art historian who wrote extensively about modern art and championed its cause. Through his numerous books, articles, and translations of European art texts Pach brought the emerging modernist viewpoint to the American public.

Pach married artist Magdalene Frohberg in 1914, and their son Raymond was born at the end of that year. He began advising Walter and Louise Arensberg on their art collecting and introduced them to Marcel Duchamp in 1915. The following year, with Duchamp and the Arensbergs, he was a major force in the creation of the Society of Independent Artists. In the summer of 1918 Pach taught two classes, including one on modern art, at the University of California at Berkeley. In the summer of 1922 he taught at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, where he lectured and wrote about Native American art. He helped organize exhibitions and raised money for a museum to be dedicated to the indigenous arts of the Americas. He was also a friend of José Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera and helped organize the Mexican chapter of the Society of Independent Artists. In 1923 he began an affiliation with New York University, where he taught periodically.

While he is not remembered today as a painter, Pach devoted much of his creative efforts to painting. He thought of himself both an artist and a writer, despite advice from friends like art historian Bernard Berenson who urged him to devote his time to writing.

His writings include monographs on a wide range of subjects, social commentary on the art world, and a book on museum structures. His first publications included brochures for the 1913 Armory Show, including Odilon Redon, and a book about the work of his close friend Raymond Duchamp-Villon titled A Sculptor's Architecture.

In 1923, Pach wrote Georges Seurat, a book art historian John Rewald later cited by as an important text on the artist. Masters of Modern Art and a monograph on Duchamp-Villon in French were published the following year. The first solo exhibition of his own art took place in 1925 at Joseph Brummer Galleries, New York.

He created a stir in 1928 in the art world with Ananias, or The False Artist, a well-known indictment of opportunistic artists and corruption in the art world.

Pach considered Vincent van Gogh a seminal figure in the development of modern art and was the first historian to lecture on him in America. He published his well-received monograph, Vincent Van Gogh, in 1936, and translated the journals of Eugène Delacroix in 1937. 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 he was the exhibition director. His 1948 The Art Museum in America called into question the relevance, responsibility, and future 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. His last book, The Classical Tradition in Modern Art, was published posthumously in 1959.

He died on November 27, 1958, in Manhattan, New York City.