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 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.

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. 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. 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.

Koch was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1943, but wound up doing alternative service in New York veterans hospitals. 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. 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. His Portraits Inc. commissions included Family Group (1951, Smithsonian American Art Museum), John and Barbara Wood and their two sons; 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 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. Ulmer donated Interior of Studio to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2007. 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". 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. Studio – End of Day (1961), Interlude (1963), Two Artists and a Model (1965); and Ernest Ulmer. who appeared in dozens of his paintings,

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. Kraushaar represented him for the next thirty-four years, and presented more than a dozen one-man shows. 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 its Altman Prize in 1959 and 1964, its Saltus Medal in 1962, 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 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.

Sexuality There are notable sexual undercurrents in Koch's paintings. TIME Magazine featured his painting Siesta on the cover of its January 24, 1964 special issue: Sex in the U.S. And there has always been speculation about Koch's sexuality. Editor and critic Leo Lerman (1914–1994), an "out" gay man, a long-time friend of the Koches and a subject in several of the paintings, wrote of Koch in his posthumously published journals: "I was astonished to find he was a practicing homosexual. I think Dora knew." But there is no other literature or stories from Koch's many friends and students that corroborate this, and he was happily married, for almost 50 years, to Dora Zaslavsky.

Legacy Among Koch's private students were Charles Pfahl, Nelson Shanks , and Teodorico Quirós.

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."

Pulitzer-Prize-winning reporter 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." 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. Portrait of My Wife (1942), New Britain Museum of American Art, Connecticut Self-Portrait (1950-1953), National Academy of Design, New York City Portrait of the Artist's Father (1951). Auctioned at Christie's NYC, 26 February 2013, Realized $62,500 Family Group (1951), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. Roosevelt Ladies at Oyster Bay (1953), Roosevelt family Interior: Leo Lerman (1953), National Academy of Design, New York City The Antiquarian (1953), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City Portrait of Princess Margaret (1955), National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C. Portrait of Dora in Interior (1957), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City The Forbes Family (1956), private collection The Painter and His Wife (1967), Gibbes Museum of Art, South Carolina Painting Alice Neel (1969), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. Portrait of Janet D. Schenck (1970), Manhattan School of Music, New York City Portrait of Henry Luce III (1973), private collection Portrait of Mrs. Joel Lang with "The Cocktail Party" (n.d., after 1956), Farnsworth Art Museum, Maine

Genre scenes Rehearsal (1938-1940), Columbus Museum, Georgia Supper Table (1939), Newark Museum, New Jersey The Supper Table (1940), University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor Flower Shop (1940), Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Missouri. Exhibited at PAFA, 1940 At the Museum (1941), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts Vermont Marble Quarry (1941), Museum of Fine Arts, Springfield, Massachusetts. Exhibited at Whitney Museum, 1941 The Florist (1943), New Britain Museum of American Art, Connecticut Garden at Wilmington (1946), Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington The Window (1947), Brooklyn Museum, New York City From My Window (1947), New Britain Museum of American Art, Connecticut The Monument (1950), unlocated. Exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's American Painting Today, A National Competitive Exhibition, 1950. Hanging Clothes (1950), Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio The Bridge (1950), Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, California The Bed (1950), Detroit Institute of Arts, Michigan My Studio (1952), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. Studio in Night Light (1952–1953), Des Moines Art Center, Iowa Interior of Studio (1956), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City Friends (1956), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City Music (1956–1957), Butler Institute of American Art, Ohio Three Musicians (1958). Auctioned at Sotheby's NYC, 20 May 2015, Realized $274,000 Polishing the Chandelier (1958), Parrish Art Museum, New York Studio – End of Day (1961), Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Arkansas. Auctioned at Christie's NYC, 1 December 2005, Realized $604,000 Siesta (1962). Auctioned at Bonhams NYC, 29 July 2020, Realized $596,075 Interlude (1963), Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester, New York 10 A.M. (1963), Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond The Sculptor (1964), Brooklyn Museum, New York City, gift of the artist The Painter (1964). Sold at Christie's NYC, 19 May 2010, Realized $122,500 The Toast (1964), Addison Gallery of American Art, Massachusetts The Plasterers (1967). Sold at Brunk Auctions, 9 May 2005, Realized $210,000 The Rehearsal (1968), Princeton University Art Museum, New Jersey End of Day (1970), Rockford Art Museum, Illinois Morning (1971), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. Two Models and the Artist (1972), Westmoreland Museum of American Art, Pennsylvania Painter and Models (1972), Columbia Museum of Art, South Carolina The Telephone (1972), Lauren Rogers Museum of Art, Mississippi Writing Letters (1973), Canton Museum of Art, Ohio Sunday Morning (1974), Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond Studio – End of Day II (1974), Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minnesota The Window Washers (1975), Wichita Museum of Art, Kansas Telephone Call (n.d.), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City Female Nude (n.d.), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City

Landscapes and still lifes East River (1934), Brooklyn Museum, New York City Still Life with Angels (1953). Auctioned at Christie's NYC, 20 May 2008, Realized $29,800 Dining Room Still Life (1972), Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Missouri