Walter Tandy Murch

Walter Tandy Murch (August 17, 1907 – December 11, 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 Scott Murch and Louise Tandy Schablein.

Murch was born and grew up in Toronto, Ontario, the son of Clara Louise (Tandy) and Walter Murch. He attended the Ontario College of Art in the mid-1920s, 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 City in 1927 and studied at the Art Students League of New York under Kenneth Hayes Miller and later, with Arshile Gorky at the Grand Central School of Art.

In 1929 he married Katharine 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-1940s, 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 from a heart attack on December 11, 1967.

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