unheralded accomplishments of Walter Tandy Murch

Monograph on Walter Tandy Murch (2021)

Recently I became aware of the paintings of an extraordinary Canadian-born artist named Walter Tandy Murch (1907-1967). I am amazed to think that I had never heard of him before. I am drawn to his work in part because it has so much to do with styles and “ways of seeing” that I myself feel compatible with.

His work has the seemingly effortless charm of collages and assemblages, in which familiar components are recognizable—up to a point—yet disarmingly strange and beclouded. His paintings are not collages of course. They are unforced yet purposeful patterns of paint. The mystery that they induce comes partly from the struggle between the clarity of the thing portrayed—a bowler hat, gears and scientific tools, the backside of a manikin—and a half-rhyming, impending surrounding that threatens to merge. But it doesn’t.

Murch’s very finest works traverse a tight rope on the cusp of genuinely excellent gallery art (not easily found at the moment) and the best magazine illustration. Somehow he excelled at both, and we should not be surprised to find that his work remains formidable whether mounted on a gallery wall, or printed in full color on a magazine cover. Among his most powerful paintings are works that were commissioned as illustrations for the covers of Fortune Magazine and Scientific American.

Walter Tandy Murch / Cover Illustration

In researching Murch’s origins, I was more than pleased to find that he was student of Arthur Lismer (of the Canadian Group of Seven), one of my favorite painters, and one whose well-known works include a masterful depiction of the RMS Olympic, dressed in dazzle camouflage. As in Murch’s own paintings, Lismer is good at inviting us to participate in hide-and-seek. Murch moved from Canada in 1927 to New York, where he later studied with Arshile Gorky, another favorite artist of mine, who taught civilian camouflage during World War II. He was also greatly interested in the dream-like box collages of Joseph Cornell, of whom he painted a portrait in 1941.

While he was always prolific, Murch was never widely known, perhaps in part because he dared to be a “fine artist” when exhibiting at the Betty Parsons Gallery, and yet to apply the very same skills in illustration, advertising, graphic design, restaurant murals, the design of department store windows, and teaching. He lived for only sixty years. In the year before he died, his work was exhibited in a major retrospective at the Rhode Island School of Design. In 2021, Rizzoli USA published a full-color book about his life and work, titled Walter Tandy Murch: Paintings and Drawings, 1925-1967. At the top of this post is the cover.

Walter Tandy Murch / painting

Those who are immersed in vision and art—whether fine art or design—are nearly always prone to be devotees of cinema. I certainly fall within that group. Among the films that I admire are The Conversation, The English Patient, Julia, The Godfather series, and many more. That said, as I was basking in the pleasure of having found the artist Walter Tandy Murch, imagine my further exhuberance when I also learned that Murch’s son is the celebrated filmmaker and sound designer Walter Scott Murch. Among his many remarkable films are the few that I have listed above, but there are many more of equal or greater distinction.

RELATED LINKS    

Dazzle Camouflage: What is it and how did it work?

 Nature, Art, and Camouflage

 Art, Women's Rights, and Camouflage

 Embedded Figures, Art, and Camouflage

 Art, Gestalt, and Camouflage

 Optical science meets visual art

 Disruption versus dazzle

 Chicanery and conspicuousness

 Under the big top at Sims' circus