Word: koch
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...Michael Thomas observes in his catalog essay, Koch's world is one of grownups. They congregate in those elegant friendly rooms like the inhabitants of an ideal but real fete champetre within four walls: New York's high bohemia, in mutual recognition. In it, children are rarely seen and subliterates are never heard. The fear, disgust and boredom that are the axial coordinates of American urban life in the 2000s do not appear. People are not afraid of growing older. Ripeness is all. They have not become depressed helots to the culture of ignorant mall rats with Dolby stereos. Nobody...
Three: he loved to paint nudes, of a low sexual intensity, and to record the interaction among guests at the parties the Koches liked to give, at which all the male guests, incredibly, wore ties, and the female ones favored pearl necklaces--natural, one suspects, not cultured. But the pearl necklaces were about the only noncultured things in Koch's painted world (as, come to think of it, they were in the world of one of his chief idols, Vermeer). His pictures celebrate refinement--of material, of craftsmanship, of manners and, so far as a silent...
...Koch had a wonderful eye for nuance. It lifts images that might otherwise seem beautifully rendered but fringed with banality into real, unforced poetry. Take, for instance, Central Park Looking North, 1967. A chilly, wet day in New York, seen through a metal casement window. An antique statue of a faun on the sill, far in space and temperature from his native Mediterranean. And high on the brick wall of the apartment building to the left, a pink patch: a ray of sun breaking through winter's grisaille. Surely Koch had been thinking of the "little patch of yellow wall...
...Koch understood material substance, and he matched it with an unfailing sense of the beauty of paint as an autonomous surface, something to be enjoyed in its own right. His still lifes are exquisite. He was not attracted to raw landscape--liking neither vast American space nor the feeling of bugs in his trousers--but rather to the panoply of stuffs and textures with which he and Dora lived surrounded, the Great Indoors, and the light that bathed them. Everything gets equal attention from this light, and the structure of shadows and highlights Koch could raise from...
Maybe these are small virtues. Or maybe not. Certainly they are a lot more intriguing than the Failed Sublime that made up so much American art in Koch's time. And they suggest how much is still to be said about that time, so much more alluring than our own. How can you not love such a show...