JOHN KOCHPAINTINGS THAT PUZZLE

To use a baseball analogy, the paintings of John Koch (pronounced “Coke,” 1909–1978) have come down to us with two strikes against them.

First, Koch was a successful portraitist, catering to a wealthy clientele whose commissions helped support his career in fine art. (The publishers Henry Luce and Malcolm Forbes, as well as the composer Richard Rodgers, were among his many sitters.) That shouldn’t be a strike against anyone, but, like it or not, many observers have considered commissioned portraiture an obstacle to “serious” artmaking for more than a century. Why? Because it usually requires artists to please the sitter, while “fine art” obliges them to please only themselves.

Second, we have come to believe that great artists challenge accepted norms. (“Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,” as one wit put it.) Monet made the seemingly permanent look transitory; Picasso fractured the spatial plane and disoriented viewers, while Warhol proposed that markers of consumer capitalism had become America’s defining feature. John Koch, on the other hand, depicted his comfortable middle class life in New York City, sometimes while painting a nude professional model, sometimes during a cocktail party that revealed the wondrous view from his upper-floor apartment on Central Park West. The main artistic currents during his heyday were various forms of abstraction, most reflecting the uneasiness of modern life. Western culture was transformed by the 20th century: underlying anxiety is what we came to look for in an artist, not self-satisfaction.

“I think some of the problem with Koch’s works is that they strike people as totally academic, totally well-done but just so old-fashioned,” says Barbara Haskell, curator at New York City’s Whitney Museum of American Art, which owns several paintings by this artist that haven’t seen the light of day in decades, and won’t anytime soon. Ultimately, she concludes, “he doesn’t have any relevance to the contemporary art world.” Robert Fishko, who owns Manhattan’s Forum Gallery and has sold Koch’s work on the secondary market from time to time, offers his verdict: “Koch was a very interesting artist, but he made no single unique contribution to American art to arouse a great deal of interest.” One might say that artists can defy societal conventions, but not the drift of the art world. “He was just the wrong guy at the wrong place at the wrong time,” adds painter Jacob Collins (b. 1964), who also refers to himself as a “perennial outsider.” Strike two.

Initially I didn’t want to launch this exploration of Koch’s life and art in such negative terms because, in large measure, that is what almost every other writer on him has done (and there aren’t that many to begin with). The last notable exhibition of his art, John Koch: Painting a New York Life, occurred in 2001–02 at the New-York Historical Society, which owns works of art but isn’t really an art museum. Almost all of its catalogue essays begin with descriptions of postwar intellectual ferment and the artists — particularly Pollock and De Kooning — who captured the era’s rebelliousness that Koch seemingly did not share.

Let’s not feel pity for John Koch, however. His paintings of that Manhattan apartment are in the collections of major museums including the Metropolitan, Whitney, Brooklyn, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Kansas City’s Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, and Museum of Fine Arts Boston. At some point, curators at all of these institutions liked his works, even if they almost never get displayed now. One exception: Caroline Gillaspie, assistant curator of American art at the Brooklyn Museum, notes that Koch’s The Sculptor was frequently on view in its American galleries between 2001 and 2016.

Lack of visibility in museums has not eliminated all interest in Koch, however. “We handle works by Koch, perhaps not every season but certainly every other season,” says Caroline Seabolt, head of sales in Christie’s American Art department. “He has a dedicated collector base.” Koch’s drawings, studies, and finished paintings command prices at auction that can be quite high, such as Studio—End of Day (1961, oil, 5 x 5 ft.), which fetched $604,000 at Christie’s in 2005, or Siesta (1962, oil, 30 x 25 in.), which brought $596,075 at Bonhams in 2020. Galleries that sell Koch works on the secondary market find no lack of buyers. “Anything we get of his, we sell very quickly,” says

Katherine Degn, director and partner of New York City’s Kraushaar Galleries, which represented both the artist and his estate from the 1940s through the ’90s.

IS KOCH PULLING OUR LEG?

So, let’s focus on the 1969 oil John Koch Painting Alice Neel in the permanent collection of the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. Feted last year with a well-attended retrospective at the Metropolitan, Neel (1900–1984) was a barrier-breaking New York painter, influenced by the German Expressionists and strongly leftist. She made many portraits, but they were never commissioned. They depicted her family members and friends — including artists Robert Smithson and Andy Warhol, Metropolitan curator Henry Geldzahler, and art historian Linda Nochlin — as well as figures less familiar to the art elite, like labor organizers and black and brown people.

Perhaps her most famous painting is the nude self-portrait (1980) that shows Neel staring at us, her pale, sagging body perched on an upholstered chair. “This is me, now,” she seems to declare. Without explicit references to sex, she also painted out-of-the-closet gay men and lesbians who stare right back at us. Such images were not sales gold through most of her career, which suddenly took an upward trajectory from the late 1960s as feminists began to celebrate her frank subject matter, expressive handling, and the very fact that a woman artist was challenging viewers in this way.

Koch’s painting of his session with Neel is totally different. We see a large room with stained wood floors; at its far end is Neel, sitting in an armchair, wearing a long, modest dress one might associate with the Victorian era. Her face is largely obscured by shadows. There is no artificial lighting, and, if there is a window, it is out of view somewhere at left. In the foreground is Koch himself, mostly seen from the back, seated before his easel and reaching for a rag — presumably to wipe his hands or something else — next to a table holding his paints. The room itself is quite bare. A large painting of what looks like a darkened European church interior hangs beyond Neel, and behind the artist is an antique writing desk.

There is an oddness about this painting. The fact that Neel, an artist who exposed things, is dolled up so primly, and that her face is not recognizable in the shadows, suggests that the scene is neither about her nor her relationship with Koch. (In some ways, it is almost a parody of her work.) Koch himself is not much of a presence, other than the fact that he clearly orchestrated the moment we are viewing. There actually is more clarity devoted to the wall’s wainscoting and the inlaid desk than to the two people here. Perhaps the furnishings that might otherwise belong in what seems to be a living room have been pushed aside so that no paint will drip on them? One might say Koch likes Neel but loves the room, which seems to be the star here.

If this room is relatively bare, other rooms in Koch’s apartment — the staging site of so many pictures — are filled with furniture, most antiques or just old-fashioned. Portrait of Dora in Interior (1957) does include a profile of his wife, Dora, but her face is largely in shadow because the lamplight is behind her; better illuminated are the vases of fresh flowers, and the room is full of interesting elements — a tabletop sculpture, a seascape on the wall, and a shelf holding various objets d’art. Dora herself appears to be just one more object in the room.

The oil Morning, 1971 shows Koch on a stepladder polishing a chandelier’s crystals while his wife, Dora, cleans out the hearth. The room is crammed with loveseats, cane-back chairs, carved desks, framed pictures, and inlaid bookcases holding not books but curios. Mina Weiner, who organized that 2001 exhibition at the New-York Historical Society, says this painting is actually funny because “the people who knew John and Dora knew that they never cleaned.”

In yet another oil portrait of Koch’s apartment, The Movers (1954), two workmen in undershirts strain to lift a large painting; its richly carved wood frame is likely what makes it so heavy. The workmen need to be careful, not only with the painting but with the many antiques all around them. From the side, Dora’s shaded face watches the pair like a hawk, presumably to ensure they don’t scratch anything; perhaps her surveillance is part of the strain they feel. The workmen twist their bodies to support the framed painting; perhaps Koch was channeling the contorted figures in Rodin’s sculptures, in which twists and turns reveal their musculature. Assuming that’s true, this is a painting about the physical weight of art that also references historical art. Like Morning, 1971, it’s funny, but in a different way.

Koch certainly had time to study Rodin sculptures, among the works of many modern and pre-modern masters, during the five years he spent in Paris in the early 1930s, and again after World War II. He had little formal training in art: nine months drawing plaster casts with a private teacher at age 10 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he was raised, then a couple of summers taking classes at the Provincetown Art Association on Cape Cod in 1926–27. Fortunately, his parents (his father worked in a furniture store) were generally supportive of their son pursuing his bliss.

Paris was a hotbed of experimentation, but Koch was less interested in visiting artists’ studios and contemporary galleries than in spending time in museums, particularly the Louvre, where the Old Masters were parked. Gregarious by nature, he made friends easily with both French and American people, some of whom commissioned him to paint portraits or other images, which helped him pay his way in what was then a relatively inexpensive place to live.

Koch did try his hand at modernism (“Kandinsky had an effect on me … quite a strong one”), and he once visited Picasso, whom he described as “an enormously charming man, very friendly … [although] I had a very hard time making out exactly what he was saying,” which he attributed to his own “embryonic French.” He also met some Dada and Surrealist painters who tried to pull him into their spheres, but it didn’t really take. Former Manhattan gallerist Gertrude Stein, now 95, knew John and Dora Koch. She recalls that, several years before his death, he suffered a stroke that affected his dominant right side. “Dora tried to get him to paint with his left hand, and he did something that was abstract, but he didn’t like it.”

Koch’s time studying the Old Masters in Europe clearly made him partial to a pre-modern sensibility. In the backgrounds of many paintings, particularly those set in his apartment, are copies he made of museum masterworks; perhaps that blurred seascape in Portrait of Dora in Interior was one such copy, though he did occasionally purchase an actual Old Master painting or sculpture when it fit his budget. In The Cocktail Party (1956), we see two paintings in the background, one by Tiepolo and the other by Vuillard, that Koch described to an interviewer (for the 1963 exhibition John Koch in New York at the Museum of the City of New York) as “my complete fantasy” — the fantasy being that he could actually afford to own such masterpieces.

Koch’s own paintings may remind viewers of figures found in Baroque art, dramatically contorted to reveal musculature and an emotional state. His undated Telephone Call suggests the influence of Georges de la Tour (1593–1652), with its dramatic lighting provided by an electric lamp rather than a candle. The unexpected ring of a telephone awakening a naked woman might bring to mind Rembrandt’s Danaë (1636, Hermitage). The twisting bodies in Baroque art were intended to heighten the emotional effect of the story being told, usually based on the Bible or classical mythology. In Koch’s scenes, however, the narrative is generally mundane or non-existent because his focus is instead the look of a body in a position that highlights its musculature. Here the modern world is a form of life drawing class. When he returned to the U.S., settling in New York City on the recommendation of an English friend he met in Paris, social realism was all the rage, but “I knew that was not for me,” Koch recalled later. What was for him was a woman he had met and fallen in love with before going to Europe, the pianist and piano teacher Dora Zaslavsky (1904–1987). She was married at that time, but that union was ending when Koch came to New York in 1934, and the pair wed the following year. All reports indicate it was quite a happy marriage. (“Her first husband was a very close friend of mine, and I met her through him,” Koch said. “It worked out very well.”)

Love doesn’t pay the rent, and neither did Koch’s paintings in the depths of the Depression, but Dora earned some money from concert performances and, later, as an instructor. For a couple of years during World War II, Koch taught at the Art Students League, but “portraiture always came to my rescue,” he said: “Certainly of that period, some of the most committed and telling pictures, I think, were portraits.” The parents of some of Dora’s students commissioned him to paint their children’s portraits, paying him $100 or $150, not bad money in the 1930s and ’40s. (An example of Koch’s family portraiture from 1951 is illustrated here.)

In 1939, Kraushaar Galleries began to show and sell Koch’s work, beginning what he called a period of “enormous growth and great happiness.” Many of those paintings were Manhattan cityscapes made as new buildings and bridges were being erected, or they depicted the workmen undertaking these projects. These were not stylized social realist images of the working class whose victory will come. Radical politics was not Koch’s thing; he noted later that “both Dora and I were pretty much fighting the official leftism of the time.” His East River (c. 1930) offers an aestheticized vision of industry in which factory and tugboat smoke blend in a cloudy sky that mirrors the water itself. The workingman “does represent mankind to me in a certain way,” Koch explained in 1968. “I do think that people are beautiful, and I think the image of what they’ve built is beautiful.”

Koch enjoyed getting out of the city from time to time, painting quieter rural life, as seen in Vermont Barns — Neutral Monochromatic Study in Grays (c. 1940); here we view a small town from the other side of a waterway. Nature is great, but this artist’s heart was really with the interactions of city people.

A circle of artist friends began to develop for John and Dora, including Milton Avery, Paul Cadmus, Reginald Marsh, Isabel Bishop, Marsden Hartley, and Raphael and Moses Soyer. Marsh and his wife, Felicia, were particular favorites, and Koch’s 1953 portrait of them is now in the Whitney’s collection. It is not just painters who appear in Koch’s work, but also writers, collectors, and members of genteel society in general. As noted above, Koch would occasionally make paintings of cocktail parties held in his apartment, combining his portraiture skills with his love of this home and the satisfaction he had with life. He also portrayed the piano lessons his wife gave, views of his studio (with and without models), the daily interactions of a husband and wife, and views over the city from the windows.

There is, as commentators have often noted, something odd about many of Koch’s images. They can seem a sort of puzzle in which viewers try to put the pieces together to uncover the story, somewhat like an amusing Hogarth scene of 18th-century British life. Yet there is nothing particularly funny or moralistic here. Koch frequently shows people not looking at, or speaking to, each other, disconnected or lonely in the midst of others. Or they may be absorbed by the newspaper, or just thinking. The look of the apartment, its tastefulness and air of refinement, steals the show every time. In this way, the paintings are deeply personal, reflecting Koch’s sense of himself as portrayed through the placement of every piece of furniture. The artist willingly makes himself a bit ridiculous through his roles as director, prop master, and choreographer. Even in his own day, this stageset was becoming dated, and it takes a brave person to do that.

Something Odd

In his numerous artist-in-the-studio paintings, Koch’s models — both male and female — are depicted as points of fascination, sometimes posing but frequently taking a break, returning to who they are. In After the Sitting (1968, private collection), a male model starts putting his clothes back on while the painter continues developing what looks like a theatrical Tiepolo scene of Olympian gods. Presumably, the John Koch in this painting is por- traying a nude, while the actual John Koch is more interested in the naked model at what is normally an unseen moment.

Koch’s penchant for showing people not interacting can even appear when they are in the same bed: Telephone Call suggests that the woman rising to answer the phone is quite through with the man still asleep beside her. Night (1964) is a post-coital scene of a naked woman on her side seemingly asleep, or aiming to sleep, while the naked man beside her reads a newspaper. Siesta (1962) shows a naked woman fixing her hair while her female partner still sleeps, wrapped in a bed sheet. The tenderest moments appear to reveal how alone and apart people feel: Discussion (1974) features a fully clad man and woman holding drinks and sitting silently across from, but not looking at, one another.

Was-he-or-wasn’t-he speculation about Koch’s sexual preferences has long factored in the interpretation of his paintings of models and of men generally. The Sculptor (1964) is interesting not only for the image itself — a standing nude model, seen from behind, lights the cigarette of the seated male artist, whose face is perilously near the model’s genitals — but also for what appears on the museum’s webpage devoted to the painting. There members of the public can ask questions; two make reference to the model’s buttocks, and one asks if the artist was gay.

Kraushaar’s Katherine Degn takes umbrage at the very question, calling his sexuality “irrelevant,” yet it remains an open question. “He had a longtime marriage to Dora,” curator Mina Weiner says, “although certainly there were rumors about his homosexual longings. He may have been very closeted, not acting out his homosexuality.” Ninety-four-year-old Burton Silverman, a portraitist who was taken under Koch’s wing early in his career and had several of his paintings purchased by the older artist, recalls him as “fey,” noting that Koch “did not talk about his sexuality, keeping it quiet. Maybe he was a 19th-century gay. I never saw anything one way or the other.” Jacob Collins, who didn’t know the artist but likely was influenced by him, says, “I don’t know for a fact that he was gay, but that was my impression.” He adds that the suggestion that Koch was homosexual perhaps is made by “gay activists throwing a lifeline to his reputation,” in effect making him more relevant to our times.

There is a sense of stagecraft in Koch’s art. A question that arises after seeing many of his paintings, particularly those of his Manhattan apartment, is whether he is playing the debonair master of home and studio, wearing tailored suits and showing off his antiques, or if he really is that comical-yet-not-funny person. Burt Silverman claims that Koch really was the former. Perhaps his greatest creation was his lifestyle, depicted so often in his paintings. (When she was organizing the 2001 exhibition, Weiner visited the apartment and found it smaller than it appears in his scenes, as though Koch sought to aggrandize his life.)

The longer we look, the more we wonder, “What is the subject of this painting? What was on the artist’s mind?” Great art may overcome the oddness of an artist’s personality (think Van Gogh), but the fact that Koch’s paintings remain in seemingly permanent storage nationwide reflects their puzzle-like nature, that they do not fit into a category and thus don’t help curators wanting to tell a clear story of American art. Don’t hold your breath that this puzzle will be figured out anytime soon.