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

I don't think I have seen a picture as profoundly sexy as The Bath in a drawn out time. It is as if sum of two units Lands' End models, healthy and robust, slipped without of their polo shirts and had a move at it, the bed still rumpl in the distance. She is portrayed in a half-filled tub her r pubic hair just catching the light. (What a coloristic touch, completing the arching bend of the chartreuse window, amethystine soap and yellow powder!) He is perched upon the edge of the tub gazing at her. The air is charged and redolent. Bonnard's wife soaked, observ in her tub on the contrary Koch brings the lovers together for a second as intimate as their previous union, and more arresting for its unexpectednes John Koch (1909-1978) is usually viewed as a specialist taste, on the other hand I think not. The pleasures of his paintings are for a like reason complex, subtle and urbanely off-beat that in comparison a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of "advanced" painting pales.

Koch is greatest in quantity easily dismissed for his subdue 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 of recent origin York interiors of an age that through now has almost completely vanished. The message is "the well-lived life is its hold reward." If there is sadness, fatigue, grief it can be read solitary through the clues of material substance language and gesture. Koch not at any time questions the givens of his craft. There is no disjuncture in these pictorial spaces. This self satisfied world goe directly against today's grain, and I like it all the more for that.

on what account devote a review to an artist in like manner far out of the contemporary canon? Dead nearly 20 years, dealing with of that kind gloriously politically irrelevant if not suspect material? If I am riveted through these paintings that seem with equal reason wildly out of step today, it is because they are damn useful The combination of consummate painterly skill, daringly exact composition and an organ of sight for the decorative details that obliquely expand the stories, make Koch individual of the most consistently satisfying and germane artists I know of The compositions that appeared in this exhibition are individually with equal reason strong, lucid and surprising that I can mentally rebuild and savor most of them. That's a beautiful fine batting average.

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