Marc Pachter, who revived the National Portrait Gallery, dies at the age of 80
Marc Pachter, who transformed Washington’s National Portrait Gallery from a collection of mostly solemn paintings of old white men to a more modern museum that now includes illustrations and interviews with several living celebrities, died Feb. 17 in Bangkok. He was 80.
The cause was cardiac arrest, his son Adam said. Mr. Pachter, who lived on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, died in a hospital while on vacation in Thailand.
As director of the Portrait Gallery from 2000 to 2007, Mr. Pachter led a $300 million renovation that reshaped the museum while maintaining its artistic integrity.
In 2001, he was instrumental in ensuring that Gilbert Stuart’s famous and unique 1796 painting of President George Washington – known as the Lansdowne Portrait, after one of its first owners, the first Marquis of Lansdowne in England – would be released to the public in the would remain the country’s capital. put on display rather than being auctioned off by its contemporary owners, as was threatened.
“If there is an American icon, this is it,” Mr. Pachter said in 2001.
The life-size painting shows the president urging Congress to adopt the unpopular Jay Treaty, which resolved the new nation’s remaining problems with Britain. Washington personally posed for the head and face. Stuart made three copies of the full-figure painting – one of which hangs in the White House – and five other versions.
The painting was loaned to the Portrait Gallery in 1968 by its then owners, who lived in Great Britain. But in 2001, they arranged an auction at Sotheby’s unless the gallery raised $20 million.
When Mr. Pachter publicly appealed for funding, a Las Vegas foundation founded by media mogul Donald W. Reynolds sprang into action. It donated the $20 million to purchase the painting for the gallery’s permanent collection, another $6 million to guarantee its exhibition on a national tour, and $4 million for renovation work so it could be properly displayed .
Mr. Pachter also notably revoked a gallery policy that required the subjects of portraits to be dead for at least 10 years, bringing the collection into the 21st century.
But Mr. Pachter often said he was most proud of another innovation, what he called “living self-portraits” — his penetrating interviews of prominent cultural figures in front of a live audience.
He began an interview with Steve Martin by saying, “It is said that all comedians have unhappy childhoods. Was yours unhappy?’ To which Mr. Martin countered, “How was your childhood?”
“And I said,” Mr. Pachter recalled, “‘My father was loving and supportive, and that’s why I’m not funny.’ And he looked at me, and then we heard the big, sad story.
Mr. Pachter’s expertise was in political science and history, which attracted him to the Smithsonian and earned him his doctorate there. Lonnie G. Bunch III, the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, which oversees the Portrait Gallery, described Mr. Pachter as “a gifted scholar and visionary historian.”
“It is very instructive,” said Adam Pachter of his father, “that his title had nothing to do with art, and even when he took charge of the National Portrait Gallery he was always most interested in what portraits said about the time and the people. they have depicted, instead of the brush strokes.”
Marc Jay Pachter was born on May 7, 1943 in the Bronx to Jack and Ferle (Greenfield) Pachter. His family moved to California when he was one year old after his mother was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. His father trained as a lawyer, but after his wife became ill, he opened a five-and-dime store in Gardena, east of Manhattan Beach, to make money faster, relatives said.
Mr. Pachter graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1964 with a bachelor’s degree in political science. Without ever taking a history course, he said, he was accepted into a doctoral program at Harvard as a Woodrow Wilson Fellow and a Five-Year Prize Fellow in American History.
The Portrait Gallery hired him in 1974, after he received his master’s degree. (He never received a doctorate.) His first exhibition, “Abroad in America,” proved so successful that he was hired as the gallery’s chief historian, launching a three-decade career at the Smithsonian Institution.
Along the way, he chaired the Smithsonian’s 150th anniversary celebration in 1996, served as deputy assistant secretary for external affairs, led the Portrait Gallery from 2000 until his retirement in 2007, and came out of retirement to become acting director to become the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, from 2011 to 2012. It was his second stint as the museum’s acting director; he also served in that capacity from 2001 to 2002, becoming the first Smithsonian official to hold two directorships simultaneously.
Mr Pachter’s marriage to Elise Forbes ended in divorce in 1989. In addition to their son, Adam, his survivors include a daughter, Gillian; his sisters, Sharon Elstein and Beverly Beckman; and four grandchildren.
Mr. Pachter edited several books, including “Abroad in America: Visitors to a New Nation, 1776-1914” (1976), “Champions of American Sport” (1981) and “Telling Lives: The Biographer’s Art” (1979) , which was inspired by a biography conference he organized.
A biography, he told Brian Lamb in a interview on C-SPAN in 2007, was “written by an indecent person, because the idea that you can understand someone else’s life is ridiculous.”
He added: “So a biographer looks back and decides, ‘I’m going to impose a form on this life that has a deeper and more important meaning to life than the individual would have suspected.’”
When Mr Pachter retired, the National Portrait Gallery commissioned a portrait of him painted by Robert Liberace. It hangs in his apartment on the Upper East Side. After his death, his family has not yet decided exactly where the painting will go next, but Adam Pachter said he was confident “it will hang in a place where my father liked to hang.”
“A bar in a museum would be a nice place for my father,” he added, “while sipping a drink named after famous Americans.”