Pyke Koch at the Musee Cantonal des Beaux-Arts - Lausanne, Switzerland - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Art in America, Dec, 1995 by Janet Koplos

Several Dutch painters of the '30s were tagged magic realists, among them Carel Willink, Dick Ket and Pyke Koch (1901-1991). Although Koch accepted the label, and this retrospective was so billed, a catalogue essay rightly suggests that "enigmatic realism" might be more apt. Koch's images are precisely defined and his surfaces smoothly glazed and impersonal. His subjects, after a few early works packed with headless figures, falling leaves, phonographs and other symbols, consist primarily of strange, frozen portraits of circus performers, prostitutes and laborers, as well as friends in his artist/poet circle (a Dutch Bloomsbury).

Koch was obsessive in the planning and execution of his works, and in an artistic life of almost 60 years made fewer than 100 paintings. About two thirds of his output was included in this show, organized by Rotterdam's Museum Boymansvan Beuningen. When Koch is discussed today, his controversial sympathies toward Mussolini and Franco are inevitably mentioned, but aside from the possibility of reading something into his 1937 Self-portrait with Black Headband, politics does not show up in the art. What does, and what keeps it interesting, is psychological tension, especially a sexual charge. Subject and tone hardly varied over the years. This absence of development was demonstrated by a juxtaposition of early and late works at the start of the exhibition. The Signal (1975) is a closeup of a redhead whose tight mouth suggests vulnerability behind the mask of her drawn-out eyebrows and heavily powdered skin. She holds up two gloved fingers in a gesture so clipped that one might miss it without the clue of the title. Next was a much earlier painting, Bertha of Antwerp (1931), another centered, static image of a woman remarkably similar in stance and appearance, although less concerned with hiding her age. Her wrinkled flesh has an almost natural tone; she looks benign. She perhaps reappears, close-mouthed, with two cat-calling friends in evening dress in Women in the Street (1962-64).

Obsessive repetition suggests that Koch's subjects are far from random, and indeed, the catalogue explanations are as steamy as soap operas. Various authors recount Koch's attachment to his mother (his family saw her likeness in Bertha), his involvement at 28 with a woman of 48, his troubled marriage to the titled daughter of a prime minister, his familiarity with Freudian theories, the erotic subtext in his depictions of men. The Large Contortionist (ca. 1957) is sometimes regarded as a key to his oeuvre. A wooden caryatid at left represents the unattainable woman, while the pose of a fierce female contortionist at center draws attention to her crotch. Koch's life seems to have had its share of twists and turns. These perfected paintings--born over decades, reworked, discarded, begun again--are the autobiography of a complex character.