O ne mark of a good artist is the ability to reinvigorate the content of our cultural narratives. When Caravaggio paint🃏ed the Virgin Mary with dirty bare feet that seemingly simple gesture came to be seen as the gateway to Humanism and a dramatic and irreversible shift away from orthodox interpreta꧋tions of Christian narratives.
I am not elevating John Koch to the genius of Caravaggio, but I use the reference to illustrate how a seemingly small shift i🉐n convention results in a big impact.
Koch worked within a genre of American realism that includes Eakins, Homer and Hopper as its luminaries. This particular kind of realism sought to find the epic and the archetype among the plain spoken and quotidian. In his painting, 168开奖官方开奖网站查询:The Accident #2 – one of 𝐆Koch’s most surprising works – he takes on the genre of the arti꧙st and his model and manages to subvert it for unanticipated effect.
Here is the picture: We are looking into the artist’s studio, an intimate space the size of a bedroom. He establishes a sullen interiority by bathing the room in an almost crepuscular light, contrasting it with the midday sun-filled light glinting through the windows. The props in the room are a bed with tousled sheets🐽, a rumpled, thrown off red silk robe, a pair of boudoir mules casually kicked off, a hand-mirror propped on the rim of a waste basket (both shoes and mirror a nod to Balthus), a curtain pulled back and the p🔯ainter’s station: easel, canvas, palette.
The artist and the model is a well-defined genre. It explores intimacy, beauty, desire, mystery, otherness and love. It is also an act of possession. Historically it depicts a moment of deep concentration and privilege on the𒀰🍷 part of the artist and of detachment on the part of the model, who is often pictured sleeping or daydreaming. It is a space in which only the two exist. They are in their own world. Nothing else matters or is of interest.
This is where John Koch’s painting disrupts the genre. In his room are two figures, artist and model. She is naked, he is clothed. However, rather than being in the traditional artist/model rel🍸ationship where he observes her, they are both standing at the window. She is pointing to something that he is straining to see. Whatever is the nature of the accident we will never know, but it has trespassed their intimacy, pulling them into the outside world, and broken the spell of their erotic engagement.
