William Pachner

• Name — William Pachner • Born — 7 April 1915 • Died — 17 November 2017 • Place of death — Woodstock, New York, U.S. • Birthplace — Brtnice, Austria-Hungary • Spouse — Lorraine Koolman

He studied art in Vienna and worked as an illustrator in Prague before coming to the United States in 1939 on the eve of World War II. During the war, his anti-fascist anti-Nazi illustrations appeared in the foremost national magazines. When he learned in 1945 that all members of his family had been exterminated by the Germans, he quit his commercial career and resolved never again to do a commercial job, but to paint what he felt. A former teacher at the Art Students League in Woodstock, Pachner has had numerous one-man exhibitions in New York City and Florida. In later life he had shows at the Tampa Museum of Art, the Florida Holocaust Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts (St. Petersburg, Florida). He turned 100 in April 2015. Pachner has two children: Ann Koolman Pachner (born 1944) and Charles Edward Pachner (born 1946). Pachner died in November 2017 at the age of 102.

Pachner was a colorist whose work included satiric drawings, erotic figurative pieces, biblical Judaic and Christian themes, photomontages, and paintings. Late in his career, he began working in black and white after losing sight in one eye. The works in this exhibition address themes of loss regarding sight, family, and homeland. While the drawings utilize movement and gesture, they also depict violence. These final works address various meanings regarding human life. About his paintings, Pachner said, "I want, in each work, the world, like my countryman Mahler, the whole pie, not just one triangular wedge of it, but all of it in all of its contradictions, paradoxes, ironies, unbearable sorrows, indescribable joys, tragic comedy, farce, pathos and drama, both authentic and fraudulent. The world, I say to myself, on which all this takes place simultaneously—the world so incomprehensible, so dear, so much in need of our care, of our embrace."