William Pachner, oil on canvas, 42 by 50 inches, signed and dated lower right.
I have been working on Florida art for over forty years. My task has always been to define Florida art, from statehood in 1845 to 1960, the year I graduated from college. My interest has been Florida subject art, art that reveals the Florida landscape that is rapidly disappearing. That interest has resulted in neglect to an important group of Florida artists that began working in a more modern, abstract style, after World War II. The list is long and includes important artists like William Pachner, Syd Solomon, Karl Zerbe, Hiram William, and Harrison Covington. They, and many more, are covered in my Dictionary of Florida Art, but it is time to bring them here. Over the next year I will publish more on abstract art in Florida beginning today with William Pachner. Happy New Year, Fred Frankel
William Pachner, Clearwater, Tampa
As a child growing up in Vienna, Austria, William Pachner loved to draw. One day while sharpening a pencil the knife slipped and he lost sight in his left eye. Pachner was told by a famous eye doctor to forget being an artist; artists need two eyes. Pachner kept on drawing. At fifteen his family sent him to a business school in Vienna; with no interest in business Pachner secretly registered for training in drawing and fashion design at the Kunstgewerbeschule. Later his family permitted him to remain at the school of applied art where, in 1933, he won first and second prizes in fashion design.
At the age of eighteen Pachner was working in Prague as a magazine staff artist doing fashion illustration. With a subscription to Esquire Magazine, Pachner began to fall in love with the United States. Early in 1939, with a six-month visitor’s visa and drawing samples under his arm, Pachner came to the U.S. and Chicago with plans to work for Esquire. He presented his work to the art director of Esquire who told him “No, the magazine could not use anything he had prepared.” As a visitor Pachner was not permitted to work; his money running out, and a return to Nazi occupied Czechoslovakia impossible, he wandered the streets, living day to day, close to starvation, when a commercial agent asked to exhibit his folio of illustrations. Esquire’s publisher, David Smart, saw the work and was so excited by it that he wanted to see the artist right away. The magazine’s legal department brought Pachner back into the United States from Canada under the Czech quota. He was given a job as the new art director for Esquire, remaining there for three and a half years. Pachner tried to enlist in the U. S. Army but was rejected, likely because of the loss his eye.
William Pachner, cover for Colliers, January 27, 1945
In 1945 Pachner learned that his entire family, his parents and grandparents, his brother, 80 relatives in all, were lost in Nazi concentration camps. Try to imagine the grief. Pachner left for New York City, where he did some work for Collier’s and Cosmopolitan magazines but resolved to leave the well-paid world of commercial art and use whatever talent he had to bear witness to his experience, his emotional reaction to the inhumanity of World War II.
In the beginning he needed a place of peace, and in 1946, with earning from his time at Esquire, purchased a home in the Woodstock, the Art Colony in New York’s Catskill Mountains., from Juiana Force, then Director of the Whitney Museum. Pachner began to paint.
Pachner came to Clearwater in 1951 at the invitation of Georgine Shillard Smith, the founder of the Florida Gulf Coast Art Center, as a full-time instructor. Pachner’s transition from illustration to non-commercial art was long and arduous. His intention was to communicate to the spectator his emotional reaction to inhumanity, the tragedy of the innocent victim, and the intense need of one human being for another. He studied philosophy and read the Bible for the first time. An intense, serious person, his art was noted for unusual power and sensitivity. By mid-1954 Pachner had found his way toward direct emotional statement. He materialized the human figure and allowed his forms and colors to move freely on the canvas in response to his emotional reactions.
William Pachner, Mirage, 1972-73, 44 inches square, signed and dated verso.
In 1957 Pachner left the Florida Gulf Coast Art Center to open his own art school, the William Pachner Clearwater School of Art, and to join the teaching staff of the Tampa Art Institute. Pachner received widespread recognition. He was chosen as one of the four Florida painter’s whose works were circulated in 1958 by the American Federation of Arts. He was invited to participate in the Whitney Annual, the Corcoran Biennial, and other national exhibitions. He received the highest awards, in 1958, at the Delgado Annual, and in 1959, at the Butler Institute of American Art Annual.
William Pachner, Window #14, 1981, acrylic on canvas,
Kenneth Donahue, director of The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, Florida, in a detailed catalogue reviewing William Pachner’s life and celebrating a retrospective exhibit of his work, noted: “Pachner had to take but one step to arrive at his mature style; to allow his forms and colors to move freely on the canvas in response to his fierce emotional reactions to the subject in the process of painting. His original themes …united in a single motif. The subjects are crucifixions and depositions, Pietas, martyrdoms and flagellation…. The human indications are simplified, primitive beings, the descendants of the figures with masklike face…. humanity stripped of tis affectations…. There are no longer solid forms, only light and color…. The themes are similar, but it is now the emotion, induced by the circumstance, rather than the fact of the physical event, which haunts the spectator.”
In a 1966 exhibition in Tallahassee at Florida State University, Pachner described his work Landscapes, as “the living tissue of my painting…a kind of topography of my life’s experiences….”
In 2012 the Tampa Museum of Art, and in 2015, the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, organized exhibits of Pachner’s work. In writing about Pachner’s 2012 Tampa Museum show Paul Smart of the Woodstock Times, commented, “The works are abstract on the surface, and yet narrative in the ways the artist uses his mastery of the medium to relate internal stories and experiences that are less emotional outbursts, as seen in classic Abstract Expressionist works, and more like psychological essays, or spiritual contemplations in paint.”
Robert Martin art critic for Tampa Times once remarked that Pachner’s work evidence, “an existential vision of life lived on the trembling brink of pain, and the knowledge of one’s own mortality.” He further noted that Pachner’s “… central European cultural roots have given this artist, as it did so many of America’s most humanistic artists when they came here during and after world war II, this ability to experience life in an existential way, always leaving himself open to pain and joy. It is unlikely that the experience of two very different cultural environments will ever again so profoundly influence artists as they did at that particular moment in history.”
William Pachner, oil on canvas, 42 1/2 inches square.
Born: April 7, 1915, Bntnice, Austria-Hungary. Died: November 17, 20177, Woodstock, New York. Education: Kunstgewerbeschule, Vienna. Membership: Florida Gulf Coast Art Center, Belleair; Clearwater Art Group; Tampa Art Institute; Florida Artist Group; Sarasota Art Association. Exhibits: Weyhe Gallery, New York City, first one man show; Carnegie International, 1948; Whitney Museum Annuals, 1949-53; Corcoran Biennials, 1949, 1951; St. Petersburg Junior College, Backstage Gallery, November 1951; Associated American Artists Gallery, New York City, 1951; Florida Gulf Coast Art Center, Belleair, one man exhibit, November 1951; Florida Gulf Coast Art Center, Faculty Exhibit, February 1952; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts Annuals, 1949-52; Daytona Beach Art League, February 1954; Ringling Museum of Art, Fifty Florida Painters, 1955, polymer tempera, Theme of Earth; Sarasota Art Association, Explorations in Art, 1st prize, Annual Members Show, February 1956; American Federation of Arts, Four Florida Painters, circuit, 1956-1957; Florida State Fair, Fine Arts Exhibit, January 29-February 9, 1957, The Return; Clearwater Art Group, 8th Annual Member’s Exhibit, Gulf Coast Art Center, March 1957, oil, Face; Florida Artist Group, annual exhibit and symposium, Morse Gallery, Rollins College, Winter Park, May 1957, Variation on the Avignon Pieta; Florida State Fair, Tampa, February 1958, 1st prize, The Gate, purchased by Walter Chrysler Jr., also exhibited New Orleans Art Association Annual, Delgado Museum; Florida State Fair, 2nd award, Variation on the Avignon Pieta, February 1958; Krasner Gallery, New York City, February 1958, one man show, (Two paintings purchased by Joseph Hirschhorn); Painting of the Year, 4th Annual, Atlanta Art Association, May 1958, first purchase prize, Night Event; Sarasota Art Association, 8th Annual National Exhibit, March 1958, 2nd purchase prize; Fifty Artists of the South Atlantic States, Charleston Museum, Charleston, South Carolina, April 1958; Barry College, Miami, two man exhibit with Joe Testa-Secca, November-December 1958; Tampa Art Institute, December 1958, Mother and Child; Society of The Four Arts, 20th Annual, Contemporary American Paintings, December 1958, oil, View of My Birthplace; Corcoran Gallery, Washington, D.C., 26th Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary Paintings, January 1959; Sarasota Art Association, one man exhibit, 1959; American Federation of Art, Retrospective Exhibition, 1959; Florida State Fair, Tampa, 2nd prize, February 1959, Variation on The Avignon Pieta, purchased by Sarasota Art Association, exhibited Ford Foundation Retrospective and circulated nationally by American Federation of Arts; Clearwater Art Group, 10th Annual, Municipal Auditorium, February 1959, 1st prize, View of my Birthplace; Episcopal Church of the Redeemer, Sarasota, March 1959, Art and Holy Week Exhibit, prize, Fragment, (An abstraction on part of the crucifixion); Butler Museum of American Art, June 1959, Variation on The Avignon Pieta, 1st prize; Whitney Museum, New York City, 1959; Ringling Museum of Art, November 1959, one man exhibit, toured the south as part of a Ford Foundation Grant; Florida Federation of Art 33rd Annual Exhibit, Tampa, November 1959, an oil, Night Event #3; Sarasota Art Association, 9th Annual, March 1959, Ringling Museum, 2nd purchase prize, Variation on the Avignon Pieta; Society of The Four Arts, 21st Annual, Contemporary American Paintings, December 1959, oil, Family; Florida State Fair, Tampa, January 1960, honorable mention for View of My Birthplace, also exhibited Society of The Four Arts; The Gallery, Ybor City, February 1960, oil, Face; Sarasota Art Association Annual, April 1960, Ringling Museum, Train; Governor’s All Florida Art Show, Ringling Museum of Art, January 9-February 2, 1960, wash, Sketch for Deposition, brush and India ink, landscape, Figures in Flight; Butler Museum of Art, Youngstown, Ohio, 1960; Tampa Art Institute, Retrospective Exhibit, December 1960; Florida State Fair, 1961, Chiaroscuro, also exhibited New Orleans Art Association, Delgado Museum; New Orleans Art Association, 1st prize, 57th Annual Spring Exhibition; Guggenheim Fellowship 1961; Included in book, Prize Winning Oil Paintings, and Why They Won the Prize, 1961; Corcoran Biennial of Contemporary American Painting, 1961; Guggenheim Traveling Fellowship to Europe, 1961; Pennsylvania Academy of Art Annual, 1962; Florida State Fair, Tampa, February 1964, prize, oil, Woodstock #4; Florida State University, 1st Annual Symposium, Tallahassee, 1966, Native Landscape; Holocaust Museum, St. Petersburg, February 2005, one-man exhibit, William Pachner: Imagined Landscapes; Tampa Museum of Art, March 18, 2012, one-man exhibit, Works from the 1960’s; Tampa Museum of Art, 2012; Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, 2015; National Institute of Arts & Letters Award, 1st prize, Night Event; Painting of the Year, Atlanta; Milwaukee Art Institute; Witte Museum of Art, San Antonio, Texas; Milwaukee Art Institute; Brandeis University, Rose Gallery of Art, Waltham, Massachusetts; Iowa State University, Cedar Falls.
