John Koch (August 18, 1909 — April 19, 1978), (pronounced "KŌK") was an American painter and teacher, and an important figure in 20th century Realism. He is best known for his light-filled paintings of urban interiors, often featuring classical allusions, many set in his own Manhattan apartment.
His works are in the collections of prominent American museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and many others.Museums for John Koch from askART.
Life and career
Koch was born in Toledo, Ohio, to Marian Joan and Edward John Koch, and grew up mostly in Ann Arbor, Michigan. During his high school years he spent two summers at an artists' colony in Provincetown, Massachusetts. He moved to New York City in 1928, where he met and became friends with Dora Zaslavsky, a talented piano teacher, four years his senior.Grady Turner, "Enigmatic Intimacy: The Interior World of John Koch", catalogue essay in John Koch: Painting a New York Life (New York Historical Society, 2011). He moved to Paris, where he spent five years studying on his own, copying paintings at the Louvre and other museums, and supporting himself by painting portraits.
He returned to New York City in 1934, where Zaslavsky was teaching at the Manhattan School of Music and waiting for her divorce to be finalized. They were married on December 23, 1935. The Koch marriage was childless, which may have been a cause of regret—his 1955 painting Father and Son depicts him turning from his easel to see himself as a boy lying on the floor and sketching.Father and Son from Heritage Auctions.
Koch was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1943, but wound up doing alternative service in New York veterans hospitals. He taught at the Art Students League of New York, 1944–1946.Instructors and Lecturers of the Art Students League (Past and present), from ASLNY. After World War II he became a featured artist at Portraits Incorporated, which managed commissions and charged up to $10,000 for a group portrait by him.
In 1953, John and Dora Koch bought a 14-room apartment on the tenth floor of The El Dorado, a building at 300 Central Park West. They soon bought the adjacent apartment to house Dora's piano studio. Following the death of Koch's mother, his father came to live with them. Koch painted individual portraits of his father, and featured him in several of the group portraits.
Koch suffered a stroke in 1975, that paralyzed his right hand and forced him to use a wheelchair. He recovered some use of his hand, but died in 1978, following a second stroke.
Art Koch's early work may be considered Impressionist. A review of his 1943 one-man show at Kraushaar Galleries praised his "throwing off his Renoirish tendency and asserting himself on his own".Biography Yearbook, Volume 26 (New York: H. W. Wilson Company, 1966), p. 232. Much of his mature work is composed of portraits and social scenes, including cocktail parties and scenes with the artist at work with his models. The models are often but not always nude. Koch has developed a soft and luminous style of underpainting in egg tempera and glazing with misty oils to create a cool and ingratiating effect vaguely reminiscent of the seventeenth-century Dutch master Vermeer. He paints mostly portraits of wealthy New Yorkers, at $3,000 and up, set in the elegant interiors that best become them.Alexander Eliot, Three Hundred Years of American Painting (New York: TIME Incorporated, 1957), p. 242. His Portraits Inc. commissions included Family Group (1951, Smithsonian American Art Museum), John and Barbara Wood and their two sons; Roosevelt Ladies at Oyster Bay (1953, private collection), Mrs. Quentin Roosevelt II, her three young daughters, and another girl; and a 1954 double portrait of composer Richard Rodgers and his wife, designer Dorothy Rodgers. Publisher Malcolm Forbes commissioned two group portraits: The Forbes Family (1956, private collection) The Forbes Family and The Forbes Family at Dinner (1966, private collection).Judith Price, Executive Style (Fresno, CA: Linden Press, 1980), p. 220. The Forbes Magazine Collection also purchased numerous paintings by Koch.Exhibition: In the Face of Abstraction: The Work of Paul Cadmus, John Koch, Edward Melcarth and Walter Stuempfig, The Forbes Magazine Collection, New York, August 20 – November 4, 1998. Both Koch's 1955 portrait of Great Britain's Princess Margaret and his 1966 portrait of actress Julie Andrews are in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery.
Cocktail Party (1956), is perhaps Koch's most famous work. "The party he portrayed occurred only in his imagination, although its attendees were all acquaintances of the Kochs in the mid-1950s. Each was painted from life at separate sittings, and placed by Koch into his immaculate new living room at the El Dorado, with the painter and his wife as the consummate hosts. John stands at the bar, self-consciously reflected in a mirror as he pours one of his famous martinis; Dora bends forward to attend to the seated music critic Noel Strauss." The painting also is an example of his games-playing with spaces and objects: "Koch often shifted the location and appearance of his precious objects in his paintings. A couch might be burgundy in one work and navy blue in another. A door might lead to a bathroom or a bedroom, depending upon the needs of the composition. In this instance, the painting over the mantle is a Tiepolo entirely of Koch's creation. Tiepolo never painted it, and the Kochs never owned it. Nonetheless, Koch thought it was a fine placement for a Tiepolo such as this one, and so here it is."
In his personal works, Koch created unusual and complex compositions, sometimes through the use of mirrors, as in Interior of Studio (1956).Interior of Studio from MMA. The painting at first appears to be a casual genre scene, with a handsome young bodybuilder, Ernest Ulmer, one of Dora's piano students, relaxing on a sofa, center, while Dora is on the phone, left. Reflected in the large mirror behind Ulmer is the opposite end of the room, where piano student Don Edmans and Koch's father are engaged in conversation before the glare of a window. Also semi-obscured by the glare is Koch standing at his easel, gazing intently at Ulmer (and at the viewer via Koch's reflection). Koch seems to have given the painting to Ulmer, "which hung in his own living room for many year."Donald Isler, "Obituary for Pianist Ernest Ulmer", The Classical Music Guide, August 13, 2012. Ulmer donated Interior of Studio to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2007.
Ulmer posed for Koch's "most self-revealing painting", The Sculptor (1964, oil on canvas, 80" x 59 7/8", Brooklyn Museum). Its original title was Prometheus, the god who stole fire from Mount Olympus. A full-length standing male nude seen from behind, Ulmer towers over the seated Koch and holds a cigarette lighter at hip level, while the artist leans in to get a light. The lighter illuminates Koch's face and its flame is vividly reflected in his glasses, "a sexually loaded reference to Prometheus's gift of fire to mankind".
As punishment for the theft of fire, Zeus chained Prometheus to a rock and sent an eagle each day to tear out his liver. Koch was an occasional sculptor, and modeled Prometheus and Hercules, a work depicting Hercules wrestling with the eagle to rescue the chained Prometheus. A large version of this sculpture appears in the background of The Sculptor, and Ulmer may have posed for the sculpture as well as the painting.
Koch's most frequent model was his wife Dora, who appeared in dozens of his paintings, including tender double portraits painted for their wedding anniversaries.Still Life with Angels from Christie's NYC.
Exhibitions, awards and honors While living in Paris, Koch exhibited at the 1929 Salon de Printemps of the Société des Artists Français, and received an honorable mention.
His first one-man show was in 1939 at Kraushaar Galleries in New York City, from which East River (1934) was purchased for the Brooklyn Museum.East River from Brooklyn Museum. Kraushaar represented him for the next thirty-four years, and presented more than a dozen one-man shows.
He exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts from 1939 to 1945, and in 1952 and 1962.Peter Hastings Falk, ed., The Annual Exhibition Record of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Volume 3, 1914–1968 (Madison, CT: Sound View Press, 1989), pp. 272-273. Two of his works were chosen for the Whitney Museum of Art's 1941 annual exhibition, Paintings by Artists Under Forty.Paintings by Artists Under Forty from Internet Archive. The Metropolitan Museum of Art hosted American Painting Today, A National Competitive Exhibition in 1950, at which The Monument was shown. He first exhibited at the National Academy of Design in 1948,Peter Hastings Falk, ed., The Annual Exhibition Record of the National Academy of Design, 1901–1950 (Madison, CT: Sound View Press, 1990), p. 308. and was awarded its Altman Prize in 1959 and 1964,John Koch from NAD. its Saltus Medal in 1962, its Morse Medal in 1968, and its Engle Prize in 1972.
Koch was elected an Associate member of the National Academy of Design in 1953, and an Academician in 1954.National Academicians from NAD. He was awarded the National Arts Club's 1963 gold medal, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1970.
The U.S. Senate authorized Leon Kroll, Julian E. Levi, and Koch to select American art to be exhibited in the Hall of Education at the 1964 New York World's Fair."American Art at the World's Fair", Congressional Record: Proceedings and Debates of the 88th Congress, Volume 110—Part 8, May 14, 1964, pp. 10893-10894.
The Museum of the City of New York hosted a 1963 exhibition: John Koch in New York, 1950–1963.John Koch in New York (1950–1963) (New York: Museum of the City of New York, 1963) from ABE Books. The New York Cultural Center hosted a 1973 retrospective exhibition of his work.John Koch, exhibition catalogue, February 21 – April 1, 1973, (New York: NY Cultural Center, 1973) from ABE Books. Kraushaar Galleries hosted a 1980 memorial exhibition of his work.John Koch (1909–1978) (New York: Kraushaar Galleries, 1980) from ABE Books.
The New York Historical Society organized a 2001–2002 posthumous exhibition, John Koch: Painting a New York Life. In a Time Magazine review, critic Robert Hughes compared Koch's highly cultured "painted world" to that of Vermeer, and the artist's consummate skill in painting surfaces to John Singleton Copley. "Memory and desire: Koch's great understated themes."
In 2022, the Hammer Museum at University of California, Los Angeles, organized the exhibition Joan Didion: What She Means, curated by The New Yorker theater critic Hilton Als. The exhibition paid homage to writer Joan Didion, and works by John Koch and 50 other modern and contemporary international artists were included to give a flavor of the New York City art scene of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.
Sexuality