London
The Art Newspaper announces with great sadness the death On 13 September of one of its first supporters and collaborators, Walter Goetz. Walter was by upbringing especially in tune in with the internationalism to which The Art Newspaper aspires. Born in Berlin in 1911 to a German father and French mother, he was the first German Jewish boy to be educated at an English public school, Bedales. From 1929 to 1931 he studied art in Berlin, but then left Germany forever and was later naturalised British. Throughout the Thirties he made his living by drawing cartoons for Vogue, Harpers, Punch and other magazines, as well as a long-running comic strip, "Colonel Up and Mr Down", for the Daily Express. His real love, though, was landscape painting. After working in the German and French propaganda sections of the Foreign Office during the war, he resumed his painting and cartooning, in England and in France. He had exhibitions at the Leicester and Redfern Galleries, and in 1954 he designed the costumes, with John Piper devising the sets, for the Sadlers Wells production of Bizet's "The Pearlfishers". Later, Walter was to marry a beautiful Scottish girl, Fiona Muir, and a side-line as a marchand-amateur of French drawings and paintings brought him financial security for the first time in his life. The first issue of The Art Newspaper was hardly out before Walter offered himself as a reader of European newspapers and general observer of the art scene. Walter was a witty, talented, discerning and self-critical man; also demanding and maddeningly self-centred, but he was the best of friends.
