Since 1903, members of Arts and Letters have delivered commemorative tributes to fellow members who have passed away. These remarks celebrate and reflect on the lives and work of the members being honored and acknowledge their contribution to the arts. A selection of tributes is now available in the digital archive below. As we prepared this archive, we were reminded that these tributes reflect their times, and, in some instances, include terminology and social and moral judgments we do not endorse.
For results outside of Tributes please use the general search or click here.
I wish I had seen more of Lee Gatch and known him better. His work I knew—always the sensitive, very delicate and poetic expression of an unpretentious, deeply searching, and even religious love of the visual world around him. Modesty and complete lack of "side" or pretense characterized him, as I remember the few times we talked together and had beer and lunch together at a bar on First Avenue, when we met at Benevy's frame shop.
His visits to New York were perhaps more rare than mine. When we met, it was very much two country-men together. I was glad for his success: his work being so quiet and unpretentious, so easily overlooked. With so much that is blatant and self-assertive, it is good to know that his work found such sympathetic understanding. John Canaday wrote of his last show:
His current exhibition continues the series begun in 1960 incorporating large slabs of natural flagstone into compositions involving paint and collage. Nothing could sound much more gimmicky; nothing could be further removed from gimmickry than the results Mr. Gatch achieves.
The stones are not so much the centerpieces of his compositions as they are the perfectly integrated major elements in arrangements where all parts are interdependently supporting—a general definition of good picture-making, whether you are dealing with the Italian Renaissance, the New York School or with an artist like Mr. Gatch, who is connectable with half a dozen post-cubist directions but resists identification with any one of them.
I find in his work a close kinship with the early Chinese landscape painters, probably a kinship of which he was unaware. "The beauty of landscape has never ceased to fascinate the Chinese painter. The expression of its infinite variety has been his permanent quest. He may see it from far off as a vast panorama or he may be on intimate terms with a small part of it. It remains an inexhaustible source of mystery."
This appreciation by Peter Swann in Introduction to Chinese Painting might well have been written of Lee Gatch's accord with his world as we know it through the poetic vision of his paintings.