 Harry Lee Gatch is primarily known as Lee Jr. Gatch
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Biography from AskART:
| Born in a rural community near Baltimore in 1902, Lee Gatch spent his
childhood in the Chesapeake Bay area. His abstract painting style
combined elements of Post-Impressionism, Cubism and Expressionism in
mystical evocations of nature based on this early experience, bearing
some resemblance to the work of Paul Klee. Both artists used
deeply personal religious and philosophical symbolism.
Gatch
studied at the Maryland Institute under John Sloan and Leon
Kroll. In 1924, he won a fellowship in France to the American
School in Fontainebleau. He then went to Paris, studying at the
Academie Moderne with Andre L'hote and Moise Kisling. Gatch was
also influenced by the paintings of Andre Derain, Edouard Vuillard and
Pierre Bonnard.
Gatch returned to America in 1925, working in
New York. His work was essentially Cubist in style during this
period, becoming more personal and symbolic around 1930. During the
1940s, large areas of color-dominated many pictures, leading, during
the 1950s, to an increasingly non-objective approach in which color
dominated subject. He experimented with a variety of textures in his
work, including thick paint, collaged pieces of canvas and thin slabs
of stone in the 1960s.
In 1935, Gatch and his wife, the painter
Elsie Driggs, established a studio in Lambertville, New Jersey, living
in relative seclusion until his death in 1968. Writer, James
Michener, recalled as a young man spending long hours in the home and
studios of Gatch and Driggs. He described them as a "marvelous
couple" and Gatch as "a crusty buzzard who built his 'canvases' around
huge slabs of unpolished limestone and made heroic works from the mix
of canvas, stone and subdued paints". (Folk, 10)
Gatch was a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.
Sources include:
Michael David Zellman, 300 Years of American Art
Mathew Baigell, Dictionary of American Art
Thomas Folk, The Pennsylvania Impressionists. (Introduction by James Michener)
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