Walter Tandy Murch
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Walter Tandy Murch (1907-1967) was a painter whose still life paintings of machine parts, brick fragments, clocks, broken dolls, hovering light bulbs and glowing lemons are an unusual combination of realism and abstraction. His style of painting objects as though they are being seen through frosted glass has been compared to 18th century painters such as Chardin, while his oddly marred and pitted surfaces tend to evoke the 20th century's abstract expressionists. He is the father of sound designer and film editor Walter Murch.
Murch was born and grew up in Toronto, Canada where he attended the Ontario College of Art in the mid 1920's, studying under Arthur Lismer, a member of the Group of Seven, a group of Impressionist to Post-Impressionist painters mostly active from 1910 to 1940. Murch moved to New York in 1927 and studied at the Art Students League under Kenneth Hayes Miller and later, with Arshile Gorky at the Grand Central School of Art.
In 1929 he married Katherine Scott, and from then until 1950 Murch supported himself and his family through a number of jobs on the fringes of the art world including department-store window design, book illustration, restaurant murals, freelance illustrations (notably covers for the magazines Fortune and Scientific American) and advertising commissions while he continued painting and studying contemporary art. In 1941 Betty Parsons presented Murch's first one-man exhibition at the Wakefield Gallery in New York City. When Parsons established her own gallery in the mid 1940's, Murch moved with her, mounting one-man shows every two years until his death in 1967. After 1950, he also began teaching at Pratt Institute and later at New York University, Columbia University and Boston University. Daniel Robbins at The Rhode Island School of Design organized Murch's first major retrospective in 1966, a year before his death.
Murch's style remains difficult to classify, although he has been variously described as a Magic Realist, Surrealist, Romantic Realist or just plain Realist. For subjects, he favored motors, tools and scientific equipment which would often be incongruously arranged with more traditional still life elements such as fruit, bread and fragments of rock. These mysterious and eccentric juxtapositions seem to imply poetic associations although Murch himself tended to dismiss this sort of interpretation of his work, saying of the objects he chose to paint that they were simply an excuse to paint. This response seems perfectly appropriate because his muzzy distortions give the surface of his work a visibility equal to the virtual image (the objects depicted). This creates a fascinating ambiguity, and as Clement Greenberg said, "ambiguity is precisely one of the largest sources of pleasure in art," from "Cézanne: Gateway to Contemporary Painting" in Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism Vol. 3, John O'Brian ed., The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1995, p. 117.
