BEYOND THE OBJECT (RE: WALTER MURCH)

Roasting Rock

MAG’s Resting Rock (98.78) painted in 1961 is an example of Murch’s mature style.  He creates an altar-like setting for a rock, a rock fragment and a small block of wood resting on an oriental carpet.   He illuminates the objects with light that seems to come from above and in front of the picture plane.  The rectangle of the rock is echoed by the implied rectangle in the carpet.  He uses a muted color palette of grays, gold, rose, pink, blue, cream.  Nothing is clearly defined.  The edges of the rocks blur, meld into the background, the colors of which echo those of the carpet. The rock takes on the quality of a gemstone, a jewel shimmering in diffused light.   The painting evokes a mood of nostalgia, of mystery, of events long past.

BEYOND THE OBJECT (Re: Walter Murch)

by Sandra Koon

“I think a painter paints best what he thinks about the most.  For me, this is about objects, objects from my childhood, present surroundings, or a chance object that stimulates my interest, around which accumulate these thoughts. ……I am  concerned with the lowly and forgotten object, the one people discard because they are finished with it or see it in a certain logical automatic way that I would like to break.”

This general statement about his work explains Walter Murch’s career-long interest in the commonplace of everyday life -- machines, fruit, vegetables, clocks, eggs, architectural ornament -- most often fragments in juxtaposition of the natural and the man-made.  For Murch the object is a starting point not an end.  As he explains, “Once I have selected an object to paint and have worked out the background and technique of transferring the object to the canvas, I forget about the object and try to paint the best painting I can…..which means that it will not be just paint on canvas but a re-created image.”

 It’s difficult to categorize Murch amid the movements of 20^th- century American art.   By choosing objects as his focus he positioned himself within the tradition of American still life painters.  He rejected the direct reproduction of objects as seen in MAG’s  Still Life Number 26: Silver Basket of Fruit by Rubens Peale or  the fool-the-eye explicitness of John Haberle’sTorn in Transit.  Murch set himself apart by his application of paint and by his commitment to transforming the object into something poetic, unreal or mystical.  His objects are volumes which give shape to light.

Above all, Murch was interested in the act of painting, an interest that places his work securely in the second half of the 20^th century.  He preferred a thick, irregular surface and painted the texture of objects via thin layers of paint loosely applied, sometimes with a brush, a rag, a palette knife, even his hand.   He said,  “If I use a brush at the outset, I get too damn self-conscious.  I want to put paint on – like Pollock did – and see what happens.” This trust in the act of painting developed slowly over the course of his career.  A quiet, unassuming man who dressed

and spoke conservatively,  Murch forged his own path in the ever-changing art world of New York City.  A Canadian by birth, Murch came to New York in 1927 at the age of 19 and happened into a job with the Montague-Castle Stained Glass Company as an assistant designer.  He had studied at the Ontario College of Art for two years, but found the course work a bit dull.  In New York he studied at the Art Students League and with Arshile Gorky for several years.  He became a close friend of Joseph Cornell with whom he shared an interest in mundane objects portrayed in unusual ways.

 In 1930 he married Katharine Scott, a fellow Canadian, and the family grew to include a son and daughter.  To support his family Murch worked first in the design department of Lord & Taylor for five years, then as a free-lance artist designing book covers, painting murals in private homes, illustrating advertisements.  His paintings of technical subjects were featured on the covers of Fortune and Scientific American magazines and often found their way onto the walls of major corporations. 

His first two one-man shows were arranged by Betty Parsons, in 1941 and 1947, the second one hung by Barnett Newman.  Parsons continued to feature his work in shows over the next two decades.  Following a 1957 exhibit, Stuart Preston, a critic with the New York Times, wrote, “So adventurous is the general run of exhibitions at the Betty Parsons Gallery that it always surprises one to find Walter Murch’s exquisite, slightly sleepy still lifes hanging on walls usually devoted to trail blazers.  No disparagement is meant here.  Murch’s precise and poetic realism probes as deeply into the mystery of placing color and shape as any abstract.”

By the 1950’s Murch’s work was included in group shows throughout the U.S. Beginning in 1951, he taught at the Pratt Institute, New York, Boston and Columbia universities, becoming a highly respected teacher.  He was a frequent juror of museum shows including a stint as a juror of the 1966 Finger Lakes exhibit at MAG.  In 1966 the Rhode Island School of Design organized a retrospective of his work which subsequently traveled to Montreal, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington and the Brooklyn Museum of Art among others.  He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1966 which went unused due to his untimely death in 1967 at the age of 60. 

(Murch’s son, Walter, is an Academy Award winning film editor and sound mixer.  He won an Oscar for the sound mix of Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now.”  Murch’s film work can also be seen or heard in The English Patient, The Godfather, and Cold Mountain.)