It's called "Interior with a Lady." You could call it a portrait. For whatever reason the painter, John Koch, did not. Whistler called his famed painting of his mother "Arrangement in Grey and Black." You could also refer to this as an arrangement of colors, red near the top of the list. The lady takes center stage no matter how you slice it.
You can find evidence that Koch was painting in the mid twentieth century if you look closely. The compact electric lamp, for one thing. But he always has the feel of the late nineteenth, when Impressionism is just starting to have a broader influence. There's something to be said for holding onto the old ways, if in using them you're better able to create. That certainly looks to have been the case for him.
2 comments:
Of all his works, and there were many, you've chosen a real beauty. You can almost smell the Sunday roast cooking in the oven on an autumn afternoon.
According to wikipedia John Koch was a self taught, albeit very talented, artist whose only training was the five years he spent copying Old Masters in Paris. (I could have spent ten years doing so with little result.) It also said he developed a soft and luminous style of underpainting in egg tempera and glazing with misty oils to create a cool and ingratiating effect vaguely reminiscent of the seventeenth-century Dutch master Vermeer. It was very effective.
There's definitely major benefits to holding with old ways of image making. What I especially appreciate about this one, and his work in general, is that it displays what we normally see in a different light, allowing us to appreciate the image from a familiar but refreshing point of view.
Sunday roast? Yes, I can see it, or see smelling it. :) It's an understated scene taken from the understated side of life, which Koch excelled at.
Paris was the destination for would-be artists and especially for Americans up until World War II. Most of the art students enrolled at one of the Ecoles des Beaux Arts, But Koch seemed to do pretty well skipping that step and doing his own thing. Tempera and oil are two very different mediums and he gets an intriguing effect from mixing them.
There's nothing inherently wrong with avant-garde methods but they don't work for everyone. This is a strikingly different picture. The narrow hint of an opening in the curtains, for example.
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