John Koch
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 work is 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. Life and career. He 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. 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 Koches' 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. 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. 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 an adjacent apartment for Dora's piano studio. After the death of Koch's mother, his father came to live with them, and appeared in individual portraits and some of the group portraits. Koch suffered a stroke in 1975, that paralyzed his right hand and forced him into a wheelchair. He recovered some use of his hand, but died following another stroke  in 1978. 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." Much of his mature work is made up 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. 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 a friend; 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) and "The Forbes Family at Dinner" (1966, private  collection). The Forbes Magazine Collection also purchased numerous paintings by Koch. 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). The painting at first appears to be a casual genre scene, with a handsome young man, 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 Ulman (and at the viewer via his reflection). Koch seems to have given the painting to Ulmer, "which hung in his own living room for many years," and who donated it 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 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 Dora, who appeared in dozens of his paintings, including tender double portraits painted for their wedding anniversaries. 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. 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. Two of his works were chosen for the Whitney Museum of Art's 1941 annual exhibition, "Paintings by Artists Under Forty". 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, and was awarded the Altman Prize in 1959 and 1964, the Saltus Medal in 1962, the Morse Medal in 1968, and the Engle Prize in 1972. He was elected an Associate of the National Academy of Design in 1953, and an Academician in 1954. 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 	John Koch
14744004	the Hall of Education at the 1964 New York World's Fair. The Museum of the City of New York hosted a 1963 exhibition: John Koch in New York, 1950-1963". The New York Cultural Center hosted a 1973 retrospective exhibition of his work. Kraushaar Galleries hosted a 1980 memorial exhibition of his work. 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." Sexuality. Sexual undercurrents are notable in Koch's personal works. "TIME Magazine" featured his painting "Siesta" on the cover of its January 24, 1964 special issue: "Sex in the U.S." One of the guests in "Cocktail Party", and the subject of a 1953 portrait by Koch, was Leo Lerman (1914-1994), an openly gay writer and magazine editor. Lerman's journals were posthumously published in 2007, in which he outed Koch as gay: I think, reading the beginning of "Swann in Love" (how witty is the fine blade  of caricature), of John and Dora Koch and their "circle"—Virgil, Ania, the Reginald Marshes, us, some worn music critics, eager young piano students who were then in the "slave" state (larvae—the parallel should be bees). ... Dora, with beautiful skin and an echo of Judy Garland in her face, ... [was not] the great concert artist which was her father's dream, but ... one of the world's great teachers. Their feasts were at first in a brownstone walk-up, one-plate gumbo dinners on laps, and later elaborate "banquets" in a huge, Central Park West double co-op, very Art  Deco, where Dora would scream: "This is just like old St. Petersburg!" She shouted affluence—at her sit-down dinners for seventy-five, at her collection of Guardis and Bouchers and El Grecos ("Aren't they a dream!" ... "All real!") ... as John's pink tongue darted avidly between his full lips, and his hands surreptitiously felt the limbs of any young male deliberately [seated] nearby at table. At the heart of this circle was John's homosexuality. He told all by his body and his facial movements (remnants of his former flirtatious girlishness), and, of course, I was astonished to  find he was a "practicing" homosexual. I think Dora knew. ... She determined to marry John, and after he was beaten up in a doorway, where he had been "doing one of his pickups" (the latter almost killed [him]), Dora was able to catch him. She made him the extraordinary success he became in their life with very rich out-of-New-York (Detroit, etc.) "society"—also Roosevelt ladies. John became the master of flashy, obviously sensual, rich portraiture. His portrait of me—black and pink—hangs in Kansas City. This world had its "little nucleus," as all such worlds must have  to exist—a core of devotees—the charities and benevolences done so quietly that you cannot fail to hear them. They had a box at the Metropolitan Opera. They went everywhere except to the higher reaches of New York "society." They were the Verdurins or the Veneerings of the moment, starting to climb in the forties, reaching their apogee in the late fifties and sixties, declining in the seventies with John's drawn-out death. Legacy. Among Koch's private students were Charles Pfahl and Nelson Shanks. Koch was one of six American Realist painters depicted in Raphael Soyer 's 1962 group portrait, "Homage to Thomas Eakins". Soyer painted a larger version, 1964-1965, with eleven American Realist painters. That painting and Soyer's 1965 study of Koch are at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Author Dorothy Parker's last published article was a 1964 appreciation of Koch's paintings and the nostalgic New York that they evoked: "I know Mr. Koch only through his paintings, and through the almost lyrical tributes to his works. I do not know what school of painting he belongs to; he is not, I believe, avant-garde, and he is, I gather , though I have to strain to take it in, a realist—but not of the ashcan school of the Glackens, Luks, Sloan group. He takes his realism out on the rich. His lovely ladies step out of Edith Wharton, and his graceful gentlemen come from Henry James." Joseph B. Treaster wrote Koch's "New York Times" obituary: "For much of his career, Mr. Koch was regarded by the art world's avant‐garde and the powerful family of museum directors as a rather accomplished, but, perhaps, superficial society painter whose aim was nothing more serious than to please. But with the  revival of Realism in the last decade, critics and many younger artists began to take a more serious view of his work." Koch's papers are at the Smithsonian Institution's Archives of American Art, for which he recorded a 1968 oral history. The John Koch Award in Art is presented annually by the American Academy of Arts and Letters "to a young painter of figurative work," and is accompanied by a $10,000 prize. "Studio - End of Day" (1961) set the auction record for a painting by Koch. On December 1, 2005, it realized $604,000 at Christie's  New York, and is now in the collection of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.