Metropolitan master: John Koch: a self-taught painter with a penchant for the European grand tradition, Koch chronicled an exceptionally graceful form of New York life. In the subtle studio interiors and domestic scenes assembled for a recent 40-year retrospective, his knack for intimate disclosure is counterbalanced by an unbreachable code of restraint

Art in America, July, 2002 by Kenneth E. Silver

The painter John Koch was one of those precious New York resources that, like Mary Elizabeth's restaurant on 37th street, the Parke-Bernet sales rooms on Madison Avenue and the swimming pool of the St. George Hotel in Brooklyn Heights, mostly disappeared by the 1980s (Koch himself died in 1978). Fixtures of a genteel way of life that preceded the era of supermerchandising and mergers-and-acquisitions, each of these low-key local phenomena had a loyal following that, at least within the limits of Gotham parochialism, was highly discerning. Koch's first solo exhibition at the Kraushaar gallery in 1939 was a sell-out, and he proceeded to exhibit there about every three years for the rest of his life.

I became aware of Koch (pronounced "coke") about 25 years ago, first from the occasional reproduction in art magazines and auction catalogues, and then, firsthand, from pictures I kept noticing in the storerooms of museums. Over time my curiosity grew into a full-blown passion, although I don't remember ever having discussed his art with anyone. Judging from the crowds I saw last fall at the New-York Historical Society's retrospective, "John Koch: Painting a New York Life," the artist has many other secret admirers like me. (1) Despite the satisfaction I took in seeing this remarkable talent given his due, I cannot deny feeling at least a little bit cranky about having my private taste for the art of John Koch merchandised, merged with and acquired by the world at large.

But this is how Koch wanted me to feel, I have no doubt. He made private pictures for the public, almost as if he sensed that we would increasingly come to need lessons in how to finesse the transition between the personally felt and the collectively held. His career, as well as his life (as I have learned from the small but excellent catalogue edited by Mina Rieur Weiner, with essays by her and Phillip Lopate, Elisabeth Sussman, Michael M. Thomas and Grady T. Turner) were precisely calibrated to make a place for himself just outside the glare of the spotlight, but within the glow of what Dorothy Parker, describing the illumination in Koch's paintings in 1964, called "the autumn of the day--the late afternoon." (2)

Koch was nothing if not autumnal and belated, a representational painter in the heroic days of New York abstraction. Like other realists of the period, he was thus relegated to the dustbin of art history. A close friend, former New York Times music critic Howard Klein, said that Koch was "hostile to art critic Clement Greenberg and the Abstract Expressionists," and insisted that he would continue to paint as he saw fit. (3) To a much greater extent than his realist contemporaries like the Soyer brothers or Alice Neel, Koch eschewed any sign whatever of current New York abstraction and embraced tradition with the conviction of a zealot. His meticulous paint handling (which captures light, shadows and the subtlest variation in tonality and hue) and his knowing compositions (with their often complex arrangements of mirrors, windows and subsidiary spaces, and dramatic use of repoussoir) recapitulate the endlessly refined mimetic techniques and self-conscious pictorial gamesmanship of the three centuries of European painting encompassed by the Baroque, the Rococo and Impressionism, up to and including the art of the Nabis (from whom he cribbed salient organizational ideas, if none of their loose technique). It is significant that Koch was entirely self-taught, his art education accomplished by copying works in the Louvre during a five-year period in Paris, ca. 1928-33. No art school of the time would have been capable of equipping him with the astonishing technical prowess, nor, even less, the conviction of its efficacy, which he learned directly from the works of French, Italian, Flemish, Dutch and Spanish old masters.

Old masters! The very term conjures a closed chapter--if a heroic one--in the history of art. Yet if Koch's art drew essential nourishment from the great European tradition, it did so while becoming willfully local (like his rejection of abstract art, this must have made Koch still less appealing to the expansionist New York art world of the postwar years, so determined to throw off the shackles of provincialism). Most of the paintings in the Historical Society's retrospective were not just pictures of New York, but of one apartment: his vast, 14-room spread on Central Park West, a place viewers came to know intimately by the conclusion of the show. Within this high-ceilinged, elegantly appointed stage set, the cacophony of the metropolis is kept at bay. Koch's self-contained world--an arcadia high above the busy streets--is one of artists and models, musicians and music lovers, friends in quiet conversation or at cocktail parties, and couples in the bath or in bed, usually in what appears to be postcoital relaxation or retreat. In case we hadn't noticed it elsewhere, the artist insists on his arcadian theme in Central Park Looking North (1967): at the bottom of a tall, double-paned casement window is a bronze statuette of a satyr, mounted on a Plexiglas stand, who prances over a view of the rainy street below--cars, taxis and a city bus pulling away from the curb--that is flanked on the left by the neighboring red-brick apartment house (the one in which, coincidentally, I spent years on my psychotherapist's couch) and on the right by the expanses of a grayish-green Central Park and a stormy sky.