John Koch at Kraushaar - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Art in America, Oct, 1996 by Robert Kushner

I don't think I have seen a picture as profoundly sexy as The Bath in a long time. It is as if two Lands' End models, healthy and robust, slipped out of their polo shirts and had a go at it, the bed still rumpled in the distance. She is portrayed in a half-filled tub, her red pubic hair just catching the light. (What a coloristic touch, completing the arching curve of the chartreuse window, blue soap and yellow powder!) He is perched on the edge of the tub, gazing at her. The air is charged and redolent. Bonnard's wife soaked, observed, in her tub, but Koch brings the lovers together for a moment as intimate as their previous union, and more arresting for its unexpectedness. John Koch (1909-1978) is usually viewed as a specialist taste, but I think not. The pleasures of his paintings are so complex, subtle and urbanely off-beat that in comparison much "advanced" painting pales.

Koch is most easily dismissed for his subject matter-well-to-do members of the American upper class, contentedly following their daily rituals: playing music, drinking tea, painting, yearning, loving, always amid well-appointed New York interiors of an age that by now has almost completely vanished. The message is "the well-lived life is its own reward." If there is sadness, fatigue, regret, it can be read only through the clues of body language and gesture. Koch never questions the givens of his craft. There is no disjuncture in these pictorial spaces. This self satisfied world goes directly against today's grain, and I like it all the more for that.

Why devote a review to an artist so far out of the contemporary canon? Dead nearly 20 years, dealing with such gloriously politically irrelevant if not suspect material? If I am riveted by these paintings that seem so wildly out of step today, it is because they are damn good. The combination of consummate painterly skill, daringly exact composition and an eye for the decorative details that obliquely unfold the stories, make Koch one of the most consistently satisfying and germane artists I know of. The compositions that appeared in this exhibition are individually so strong, lucid and surprising that I can mentally reconstruct and savor most of them. That's a pretty fine batting average.