NEW YORK, NY.- Donald Baechler was part of one of the most exciting moments in postwar art in New York, the early 1980s, when talented artists, if usually male and young, were popping up all over the landscape.

Many of them — including Baechler, Julian Schnabel, David Salle, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Philip Taaffe — were combining painting and collage in new ways while also using existing images, often enlarged. Their talent for drawing vividly handmade art objects, as well as recognizable images, fueled a trend that was greeted by some as the second coming of pop art.

These artists and many others who arrived in the early 1980s solidified the return of painting as both an aesthetic endeavor and a market phenomenon. Baechler’s art certainly did its share. But he didn’t quite get the same respect as others of his generation. His work was inaccurately associated with graffiti art and considered ingratiating. No American museum ever staged a large survey of his work.

And if such a show were now to be mounted, it would have to be a posthumous event: Baechler died April 4 in Manhattan at 65.

The cause was a heart attack, according to Cheim & Read, the New York gallery that represented him from 1999 to 2019. His family said that Baechler had just left a benefit dinner for the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture at the Rainbow Room at Rockefeller Center when he collapsed on the sidewalk. He was taken by ambulance to Mount Sinai West hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

Baechler, who lived in Manhattan and Stephentown, New York, was a versatile, prolific artist who made paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures and exhibited them nearly around the world. He could seem at once intimidating and shy. Articulate and opinionated, his face was often set in a small smile, as if he were amused by something not readily apparent.

He was known for a beguiling two-level way of making paintings. The top layer consisted of familiar, often cartoonish or crudely drawn images — preexisting, usually outlined in black and sometimes filled in with color. They included crowds of balloon-like faces or skulls, figures with their backs turned, beach balls, flowers, globes or ice cream cones. The thick, wobbly black lines were evidence of constant repainting, and could suggest ruination or collapse.

These large images were painted atop backgrounds, dense with collage and paint, that he sometimes referred to as “white noise.” These lush, uneven accumulations were relatively knowing, worldly and attended to with visible care, which gave them a kind of warmth.

They were built over layers of images cut from newspapers, books and magazines, scraps of fabric and wallpaper, stationery, copies of children’s drawings and photocopied photographs, some presented in multiple, like Warhol repetitions. A signature motif, single red roses, were usually based on photographs of tattoos. Almost everything was a generation or two removed from its source.

Baechler referred to this layered process as “editing.” Rather than scrape down something that he felt didn’t work, he would cover it with a collage of fabric or paper, building up the crusty surface, which he saw as a kind of relief that he liked to paint on.

The separation of foreground and background elements was a formula that he had settled on in art school. It served him his entire career, in different variations and combinations. Sometimes the backgrounds might be solid white and sparse, as with a series of paintings, from the 1990s, of birds (mostly owls) that he surrounded with bright blocks of colored paper. He titled them “Abstract Painting with Bird.”

Sometimes the backgrounds were dense fields of related elements, like the Americana in a 1999 painting that, once he completed it, he realized should be titled “Farmstead Lane,” after the suburban street he lived on from ages 7 to 14. And in the last decade of his life he started painting over the collages with a full spectrum of colors and a new vocabulary of brushstrokes, splats and drips, as he did with “The Ordinary Song” (2017).

The works Baechler first exhibited in New York, around 1980, were drawings and paintings on paper of anonymous suburban American houses, cars and people, all copied in ink or pencil from photographs; on or around them he painted swaths of pale enamel. The combination was in step with the appropriation-prone artists of the Pictures Generation who were also emerging in the early 1980s, like Robert Longo, Sarah Charlesworth and Jack Goldstein.




For his first solo gallery show in New York, at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery in SoHo in 1983, Baechler derived his large images from a book of drawings by the mentally ill, painting them in slurry lines of dark gray or fields of lighter gray.

Around this time Shafrazi was beginning to show artists like Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf and Rammellzee, and the gallery soon emerged as one of the city’s graffiti art epicenters. Baechler became associated with the trend because his work was extremely appealing, involved much drawing and was also often mistakenly seen as “childish.”

But he disavowed the connection and insisted that his work had nothing to do with graffiti. He was a painter, he insisted, and he frequently cited his chief influences as postwar gestural painter Cy Twombly; the foundational Italian Renaissance painter Giotto; and Robert Rauschenberg, a master at juxtaposing images from different sources.

In a 2000 interview with painter David Kapp for Bomb magazine, Baechler said, “I always used to tell people, ‘I’m an abstract artist before anything else,’ and I still say that occasionally.”

Donald Edward Baechler was born Nov. 22, 1956, in Hartford, Connecticut, the second of four children of Henry Jules Baechler, an accountant for the state, and Marjorie (Dolliver) Baechler, a journalist for a local newspaper and a frustrated quilter who found an outlet in devising crafts projects for her children.

Donald showed an interest in art from an early age, and when his mother died, he inherited her large collection of fabric scraps, most of which went into his paintings. His maternal grandmother was a painter, and his foray into painting was a collaboration with her.

As a Quaker family the Baechlers attended monthly meetings in Hartford. Donald spent his last three years of high school at Westtown, a Quaker private school in West Chester, Pennsylvania, which had an active art department (as well as a large painting by N.C. Wyeth in the dining room). It was there that his intention to be an artist became firm.

Upon graduation, he attended the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore from 1974-77 and the Cooper Union in New York from 1977-78, but he was disheartened by the school, finding it bland, and by New York itself. He decided to take the advice of German exchange students, who recommended a school in the Frankfurt Museum that, they said, was easy to get into. He got in.

While in Germany, Baechler grew to admire the work of older artists like Gerhard Richter and especially Sigmar Polke, whose habit of painting everyday images on found fabrics was known to only a few American painters at the time.

Baechler is survived by his brother Robert and his sister, Margaret. Their eldest brother, Bruce, died in 2000.

Baechler worked from a bottomless supply of images. He collected them, copied them from books and took photographs himself. He always carried a sketchbook and a Magic Marker and often, while sitting in a bar, would ask someone to draw a specific image for him. Everything was carefully labeled and organized in filing cabinets in his studio. Generally, he tended toward accumulation and never threw anything out, assiduously collecting books, rare books and artworks by children, outsider artists and his contemporaries.

Among the works of New York artists that Baechler admired was a neon-light wall piece by conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth, who was one of his art school heroes and later a friend. In his interview with Kapp for Bomb, he praised Kosuth for “his wonderful pictorial sense,” adding that his wall pieces “provoke a visceral sense that is undeniable.”

“He always used to tell me that I would be a really good artist if I just stopped painting,” Baechler said. “I never knew what to do with that statement.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.