Lee Gatch  (1902   -   1968)  Works

Lee Gatch (1902 – 1968)

Lee Gatch was an important modernist and abstract artist who spent most of his career in Lambertville, New Jersey. He was born in Baltimore and began his art studies at the Maryland School of Fine Art, under John Sloan and Leon Kroll.

Gatch then traveled to France, where he attended the American School in Fountainbleu and the Académie Moderne in Paris. While living in Paris, he studied privately with artist André Lhote. Gatch was also inspired by the works of Édouard Vuillard, Émile Bernard, André Derain, and Paul Klee. In 1935, Gatch met and married fellow artist, Elsie Driggs. They moved to Lambertville, New Jersey, where Gatch remodeled an old stone house and set up a studio. Gatch’s earliest work was representational. His style then evolved from precisionist to cubist and then from semi-abstract to abstract.

Gatch’s abstract works contain a uniquely personal symbolism. He often incorporated pieces of stone, twine, canvas, and sand into his compositions. Whether just paintings on canvas or incorporating found objects, Gatch worked slowly, usually only producing 10 to 12 works a year. As his friend and patron, Duncan Phillips said:

“Lee Gatch is a man of his own times…Amid the confusion of sophisticated trends and diversions, he has always steered his own course and remained true to his resolve to be himself and to draw his subject from his own experience…Gatch has always been essentially an expressionist, with a language of design closer to fantasy than to fact or formula.”

Gatch’swork is in the permanent collections of the Boston Museum of Fine Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the Detroit Institute of Art, among others. Gatch remained a resident of Lambertville throughout his life.

Source: New Hope for American Art by James Alterman

Photo Source: Lee Gatch, 1935. Lee Gatch papers, 1925-1979. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution