Pach Back

With the autumnal equinox safely past, art dealers all over the U. S. were taking down their shutters last week preparing for a new season. As guarantee that the season will not be a dull one Walter Pach ended a voluntary three-year exile in Paris, rented a studio in New York, announced a series of lectures at the Art Students' League.

Artist Pach has a slanting Slavic forehead, a fiery eye, a mustache like an unravelled hawser. A native New Yorker, he studied painting under Leigh Hunt, William Merritt Chase and the late great Robert Henri. He has exhibited frequently with the Independents in Paris and New York. Not so well known is the fact that he is one of the Pachs of Pach Bros., commercial photographers, a business now carried on by Brother Alfred. Persuasive Elie Faure, French critic, is Walter Pach's best friend. In 1930 he finished a translation of Faure's vast and authoritative History of Art. To the general public Walter Pach is not a painter at all but a mustache attached to a vivid, exciting personality. He was one of the organizers of the historic Armory Show of 1912 that introduced Matisse. Picasso and Cezanne to the bewildered U. S. For years he has blazed a defense of modern painting up & down the columns of a dozen newspapers and magazines in language that would have pleased a frontier editor in gold rush days.

Walter Pach does not lack courage. The complacency of academic painters and museum directors has long been his special target. In 1928 he published his best known book Ananias, or the False Artist, in which he performed the not too difficult feat of denting the reputations of such painters as Edwin Howland Blashfield, Ignacio Zuloaga, Sir Laurence Alma-Tadema. Emanuel Leutze, the creator of Waslington Crossing the Delaware, and the society portraits of John Singer Sargent (like most critics Walter Pach has respect for the Sargent water colors). He tore into the critics who had praised them, the museums, particularly the Metropoli- tan Museum of Art, that bought them. A week later he gave an exhibition of his own paintings and invited the enemy to do its worst.

In 1929 in Paris, Walter Pach continued to bombard the critics and the Metropolitan from a distance. The Museum accepted its chastening humbly. Several months ago the Metropolitan bought four Pach canvases and invited Artist Pach to lecture there this winter.

''I love the Metropolitan Museum of Art!" said Pach last week. "My bitterest reproaches are intended to spur it on to a fuller realization of its important destiny."

Academicians have been much on the defensive in recent years. Fortnight ago before bald James Monroe Hewlett sailed to take up his duties as Director of the American Academy in Rome he announced that teaching students to copy classic remains was "not the Academy's idea at all" (TIME, Sept. 26). This statement was hailed with gusto by hawser-lipped Walter Pach. He announced that that was just what he was going to do at the Art Students' League, hold a course in Tradition which will teach art students how to look at Old Masters, insulating them at the same time from imitation.

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