Oil on canvas, 48 X 60" (121.92 x 152.40 cm.)

Museum purchase, 962-0- 112

John Koch, born in Toledo, Ohio, is best known as a painter of fashionable Manhattan and New England mansion dwellers. As Koch himself stated, "I am quite visibly a realist, occupied essentially with human beings, the environments they create, and their relationships." He remained aloof from the cross-currents of abstract and experimental fashions of the day, continuing his own steady path toward success as a figurative painter, using as his setting his own elegant fourteen-room apartment facing Central Park West. The figures who people his canvases are those whose presence permeated the everyday life of the Kochs: Mrs. Koch, an eminent pianist and instructor, her students, Koch's models, artists, and other friends. In defense of this seemingly "upper-crust" subject matter, Koch once stated, "I have great affection for ... dishonored subject matter ... [because of] the arbitrary ... way in which it has been dismissed. Have (sic) the sensuous, the lyrical elements really been expelled from modern life? Of course not. Is modern man exclusively occupied with his own tragic plight, his neuroses, his destruction? This ... is as much the sentimentality of our day as was the sweetness and light for which we so tirelessly berate the Victorians."
Koch's early training was minimal. He attended two summers at the artists' colony at Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he was influenced by the work and theory of Charles Hawthorne. After graduating from high school, he went to Paris, where he stayed for four years painting on his own, never under a teacher. As he later recalled, "the Louvre taught me my major lessons." He won his first award in the 1929 Salon de Printemps; more awards and representation in major museums began arriving in the 1930s.
Music was awarded the Benjamin Altman Figure Prize at the 1959 National Academy of Design Exhibition, and both the First Award in Oils and the John J. McDonough Award at the Butler Institute's 1962 National Midyear Exhibition, where it was subsequently purchased. Music, one of Koch's finer interior scenes, pictures Koch's wife, Dora Zaslovsky, teaching her student, the well-known musician Abbey Simon. A combination of outdoor and artificial light, used by Koch since 1950, imbues the scene with a clear light. The diagonal line created by the direction of Simon's gaze and Mrs. Koch's gesture connects the two sides of the scene, which is divided by the glass shelves in the middle. The positions of the two people are echoed by the terra cotta figurines on each side of the bottom shelf. This symbolic and compositional relationship between objects and people is characteristic of Koch, and is used by him often.
Though Koch is generally viewed as a painter of the rich and famous, he was not a superficial "society painter." His work evokes the quiet, intimate interiors of Jan Vermeer, whose seventeenth- century upper-class Dutch activities he transcribed with clarity and feeling into the world of twentieth-century Manhattan.

CLYDE SINGER