Divisive painter who paid drunks and prisoners to draw for him
Donald Baechler
DONALD BAECHLER, who has died of a heart attack aged 65, was a New York artist and sculptor whose combination of painting and collage, often incorporating crudely drawn images of faces and everyday objects, was hailed by some in the 1980s as representing a reflowering of Pop Art, but dismissed by others as glib and childish.
His style was wilfully naive and typically involved cartoonish images, blown up then crudely outlined in wobbly black or grey and sometimes coloured in, superimposed on encrusted collages featuring scraps from newspapers and magazines, fabric, wallpaper, children’s drawings and photocopies of photographs.
These were culled from a huge collection of ephemera Baechler kept in trunks and storage units – all mingling with gestural flourishes of paint.
The strength of Baechler’s work, one critic ventured, “lies in the simplicity of its imagery, which is often pointed up by the subtlety of textures in his painting and collage techniques”.
Sources for his images included a book of drawings by the mentally ill, which featured, enlarged and given the Baechler treatment, in his first solo show, at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery in New York’s Soho district in 1983.
In the 1990s he paid jail inmates and street-corner drunks to make drawings which he would then blow up and paint in a roughhewn style that, one British critic observed, “somehow managed a sort of horrible, brutalised grandeur”.
Most of his works revolved around solitary figures – a pizza chef (modelled on an advertisement found in Yellow Pages), a child with a toy, a chair, an ice cream cone, a skull, a vase with flowers. He described his work as “a kind of diagram of isolation”.
He was little known in Britain, but examples of his work can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum and Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, as well as museums in Amsterdam and Paris.
Donald Edward Baechler was born on November 22 1956, in Hartford, Connecticut, to Henry Baechler, an accountant, and Marjorie, née Dolliver, a local journalist who made quilts as a hobby. When she died her young son inherited her collection of fabric scraps, many of which would find their way into his paintings.
His family were Quakers and Donald attended a Quaker school in Pennsylvania which had a thriving art department. He enrolled at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, then the Cooper Union in New York, before travelling to Europe to attend the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste Städelschule, an art school in Frankfurt.
There he got to know the work of artists such as Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke, whose paintings of everyday images on fabric scraps inspired him, though he would claim as his chief influences the American artist Cy Twombly, the Italian Renaissance painter Giotto, and Robert Rauschenberg, best known for his “Combines” – works which incorporated everyday objects and blurred the distinctions between painting and sculpture.
Baechler returned to New York in 1980,working as a guard at the New York Earth Room, a large interior sculpture by Walter De Maria. He became part of the burgeoning Lower Manhattan arts scene, and with artists such as Ross Bleckner and Julian Schnabel came to define New York’s dominance of the contemporary art world in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
One critic observed of Baechler’s technique that “images and layers are added and subtracted as if to show what a day of indecision looks like.” Asked whether a particular work was finished, Baechler would reply: “When do you stop?”
Donald Baechler was unmarried.
Donald Baechler, born November 22 1956, died April 4 2022