One could say that John Koch (1909–1978) painted as if modernism—Manet included —simply never occurred, but such a statement fails to account for the vehemence of his rejection of most twentieth-century art and the pointedness of his rebellion against it. Neither naïve nor provincial, but rather an urbane New Yorker who was part of a sophisticated Upper West Side cultural milieu, Koch worked during the ascendancy of the New York avant garde. He was entirely aware of the art he rejected and knew exactly how he didn’t want to paint. Indeed, in 1960, he, along with such artists as Edward Hopper and Raphael Soyer, took part in protests against the Whitney Museum’s exclusion of figurative art from its shows. The extent to which they failed to influence curatorial thinking forty years ago can be measured by the fact that Koch’s current retrospective, “Painting a New York Life,” appears at The New-York Historical So ...

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