William Pachner at age 98.
In a corner of what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a five year old Jewish boy blinds himself in the left eye with a kitchen knife while sharpening a pencil. The surgeon, understanding the child yearns to be an artist, explains: “There is no hope for the eye, and no hope for a one-eyed artist. Drawing requires seeing three dimensions — for that you need two.” Sixty one years later a different surgeon botches a retina repair on the same patient’s other eye. Between these two blindings another set of extraordinary events provide the groundwork for the achievement of William Pachner.
First: in 1939, at the age of 22, Pachner is provided a three month visitor’s visa to the United States where his portfolio of European illustrations, though turned down by Esquire Magazine, provide him jobs elsewhere. Hounded by the FBI for working on a visitor’s visa, Pachner’s updated portfolio is submitted directly to the publishers of Esquire just as the artist is about to be deported. Now it all turns around: the job of his dreams is offered, a worker’s visa negotiated, a leggy beauty first seen in his own drawings is courted and married; in short — a hugely successful life at the pinnacle of the golden age of American magazine illustration, is his.
Second: In 1945, a diplomat-friend granted access to post-war Europe visits Pachner’s home sending back the following telegram: “There is no further hope Bill.” Pachner soon learns that in the course of a single afternoon two years earlier his entire family was marched to the edge of a pit, forced at gunpoint to strip, and excecuted with a bullet to the back of the each of their heads. At that time Bill was attempting to enlist in the U.S. army. He tried in three different states. Blind as he was in one eye, he was three times refused. Now, realizing he is the last of his line, Pachner resigns from his American dream, resolving to witness his truth in paint. Upon hearing that Juliana Force — founder of The Whitney — is dying of cancer and has put her house in Woodstock up for sale, Bill moves swiftly to purchase it. Now, 73 years later he’s in this same house. The irony of the Pachners settling in an art colony layered with “genteel” anti-semitism is nothing less than tragi-comedic.
Near the beginning of what will prove to be a four hour conversation on what he will eventually admit to be his 98th birthday, Bill Pachner informs me, “There were two painters here in Woodstock who I respected…Bud Plate — who died so young…just starting, really. And Phil Guston who left me his paints, brushes, canvas and paper — the very paper on which much of the work we discuss today was painted…”
“Why?” I ask.
“He never mentioned a word of this…When I visited his studio his paintings were always turned to the wall. I don’t want to discuss Phil Guston’s problems, I have enough of my own — he was a true friend, nonetheless. The facts are, after his death his wife Musa called and said that Phil had instructed her I was to have these things. You’ll have to look at my work to decide for yourself as to why…”
With the trappings of a success sufficient to maintain himself and his family put away in boxes he has neither the strength nor interest to retrieve, we can only look briefly on the main body of Pachner’s work. His first one-man show was hung in 1948 at the Weyhe Gallery in Manhattan. Inside of the next ten years small museums began to collect him, bigger galleries to represent him. Typical of this period is a painting called “The Truck,” which depicts a load of prisoners on their way to being gassed and burned. It traveled across America in a solo exhibition sponsored by the American Federation of Arts, before selling at the Ringling Museum in Florida circa ‘54. Bill remembers the painting as “honest and arduous,” one of many transitional works bearing him from the illustrative to the true. “Sentimental, but passionate. Of course — without passion there is nothing.” Through the afternoon Pachner will rail against many who came to Woodstock to create “decorative, empty-headed, hopelessly derivative paintings devoid of anything deeply felt…devoid of life itself.” Finally, with a hint of forgiveness he despairs, “But the rarest thing in the world is to find a singular painter.”
“As for me — I was criticized for not having a style — but my exact intention was to somehow avoid such a thing. With a style you go to work with a set of tricks of up your sleeve — exactly as I did as an illustrator — but once in Woodstock I was done with all that. Never again would I touch a commissioned work…When I painted the cover for Collier’s when FDR was re-elected to his fourth and final term, I was sent a thousand dollars. Such was my duty, my pleasure and my privilege. But with the news of the extermination of my family all such made-to-order stuff became meaningless…that life I’d worked so hard for…blew away like ashes.”
Three walls of Pachner’s living room teem with paintings he can no longer see — highly colorful works, abstracts and semi-abstracts all produced prior to 1981. He sold one such painting to The Whitney, won prizes including a Guggenheim, and for many winters became a much-loved teacher of art in Tampa, Florida. Pachner tells me his modernism is not Paris-based and does not spring from Cubism, that it is subtly but ineffably middle-European, which in turn is imbued with sensibilities traceable to the Northern Masters. Be that as it may, there is nothing here which — to my eye — urgently demands rediscovery.
In 1980 Bill Pachner had a studio finished in Tampa. He and his wife (their two children grown) returned to Woodstock for the summer. His first friends here — Eugene Speicher, Manuel Komroff, Walter Plate — were, by now, long dead. His friend and neighbor Yasuo Kuniyoshi had, in Pachner’s estimation, “lost his fire.” And Guston, who arrived simultaneous to Pachner in ‘45 at age 32, with little but fine reviews for his WPA murals, had already experienced tremendous fame and then scuttled this success by abandoning the Abstract Expressionism bearing it. Guston, who infamously re-embraced realism via cartoon, would himself be dead before 1980 was out. Outside of this group Bill Pachner was known locally as an abstract painter who took himself far too seriously, whose work started out morbid — and when it finally moved out of the Death Camp — could never again make up its mind.
In ‘81 the routine retina repair failed, with further operations proving futile. What the surgeon first told him at five years old, new surgeons were telling him at 66: “your life as an artist is over.” Pachner, unable to accept this simple fact, descended to the depths, his “colorful” life now a constant night. Yet a need to make paintings overrode reality and, some might say, sanity was briefly forfeit. The cruel absurdity being (as we shall see) and for whatever the reason, Bill Pachner becomes conduit of a profundity he is powerless to express. Quixotically, almost pathetically, he refuses to give in until, once again, a perverse, tenacious luck provided its rescue.