Arts and Letters

Any of the painters who were colleagues of John Koch would unhesitatingly write a tribute in his memory. All of us recognize him as the last creature in an otherwise extinct species, a technical craftsman of exquisite refinement, alone in his field. The illusionist magic where the bird will peck at the painted grapes requires a finesse of eye and hand that today has virtually ceased to exist.

What is more remarkable in the case of John Koch is that such consummate mastery was self-taught. His learning came from our artist-ancestors whose work he worshipped, as a superb copyist, in the great museums.

But this meticulous discipline was never more than vocabulary for John, a by-product of his expressive effort. What he was after was the pulse and interplay of people and their context, the sensual harmony of texture and shadow and light seen always in gracious terms. The rude shock, the dissonance, the big disturbance—so common in contemporary art—play no part in John Koch's canvases.

They were exhibited, and still are, in the galleries of Antoinette Kraushaar whose steadfast support meant so much to this painter. Long years with his beloved Dora, who inspired great piano performers, imbued his work with the kind of felicity inherent in the musical phrase.

Personally he was one of the most responsive men I ever knew. Impassivity was just not in him. I remember the rapture with which he spoke of Watteau's "Embarkation for Cythera" as the greatest picture in the Louvre. His adoration of painting made him a collector of choice works by Ingres, Tintoretto, Rubens, Boucher, El Greco, Bellotto, Guardi as well as by his contemporaries. We honor him as an artist whose labor at his easel was one of uncommon devotion, evident in his every brush stroke.