Walter Tandy Murch

I have been a fan of Walter Tandy Murch (1907-1967) since I discovered his paintings on the covers of Scientific American magazine in the Art Department library of Central Technical High School (CTS) in Toronto, where I was a student in the early 1960s. CTS had adopted the Bauhaus program based on a practical relationship between fine art, applied art, craft and science. Murch graduated from CTS in the early 1920s, years before Bauhausian theories arrived in Canada and years before Scientific American became famous for its covers. Nevertheless, Murch’s art reflected the balance between fine and applied art, as well as between art and science, that appealed to Scientific American.

At age thirteen I knew nothing about Murch beyond the 11 issues I’d seen of Scientific American. Before the recent exhibition, “Walter Tandy Murch: The Spirit of Things,” curated by Ihor Holubizky and Bill Jeffries, I had seen only one real Murch painting. An obvious explanation is that like many young Canadian artists, he moved permanently to New York City around 1927, after completing studies at CTS and half of the four-year program at the Ontario College of Art. While Murch is represented in many public, corporate and private collections in the United States, there is only one painting by Murch in a Canadian art gallery. It is little wonder that he is unknown here.

Murch’s exhibition included works from the late 1930s to the late 1960s. There were several commissioned pieces among the many paintings, as well as sketches in graphite and watercolour, and pen-and-ink book illustrations. Printing Symbols is an excellent example of the introspective and speculative atmosphere of most of Murch’s paintings. From just above an eye-level view of the surface of a board with a green-gold metal surface, two tall precarious stacks of lead type in several different fonts and orientations rise like the skeletal remains of skyscrapers in a future city. The board supporting this still life is itself disconcertingly cantilevered off the front edge of a vaguely delineated table or plank. On the left corner, a seemingly abandoned engraver’s awl seems about to fall away. On the right, a more stable radio vacuum tube announces the arrival of the impersonal information age. In the far corner, a jar of something red tends to flatten the composition into colour shapes. The grey-blue and green background suggests a cold twilight sky at the cusp between an equally distant past and future. The work relates to the practice, during the Golden Age of Dutch painting, of inserting morality lessons in still life paintings of ordinary objects. Murch was interested in the colour and light effects of Rembrandt and Vermeer and the atmosphere of the mundane that pervades the domestic subjects of Chardin.

Although Large Doll is unusual in that Murch was not a figurative painter, where it is typical of his work is in the subject’s being saturated with the angst, nostalgia and transience of the human condition. It is a sense that underlies much of his art. As in many of his later works, Murch nearly submerges the subject in the heavily textured, sepia-coloured ground, suggesting both an indefinable and simultaneously atmospheric and solid presence around the figure. I speculate that the legless doll, sitting precariously on a small block of wood on the edge of indefinable space, is the artist looking away from the present world, toward a perhaps preferable past time. He could have been referring to himself and this painting when he wrote, “I am concerned with the forgotten object that people discard after they are finished with it.” As his period commentary on a long, grim list—the Korean War, the rise of the Cold War, the construction of the Berlin Wall and the developing space race between the Soviet Union and the United States—Murch’s Large Doll can be read as a melancholic and perhaps pessimistic response to the lost promise of civilization in the 1960s.

Information regarding Murch is slowly increasing. A retrospective exhibition of Murch’s work was organized by the Rhode Island School of Design in 1966. Accompanied by a catalogue, it travelled to seven major museums in the United States. The 11 commissioned covers of Scientific American are available for study in many library collections. There are several websites on Murch. Several catalogues of his work have been published, though these are still difficult to find. Now, with this recent touring exhibition and comprehensive catalogue, Murch’s work will be available to a Canadian audience. ❚

“Walter Tandy Murch: The Spirit of Things” originated at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in 2009, and after travelling to the Confederation Art Gallery and the Owens Art Gallery, its final showing took place at the Simon Fraser University Gallery from July 7 to July 30, 2010.

Brian Grison is an artist living in Victoria.