Swope Art Museum Permanent Collection Part II

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Here are a few more pieces from Swope Art Museum's impressive Permanent Collection. My wife Alice's favorite sculptor is Paul Manship (Am. 1885-1966). Commanding your attention in Swope's lobby is a terrific painted plaster cast of his Diana. Swiftly moving, a dead shot with a bow and arrow, and always accompanied by her faithful hounds she's an impressive figure. No wonder Alice liked her. I'm a big fan too.



The Swope's first Director was John Rogers Cox (1915 - 1990) who when he took the job was the youngest museum director in the country. That he had a good eye is attested to by his purchases of widely acclaimed paintings by Edward Hopper, Thomas Hart Benton and Charles Burchfield. Cox was an accomplished painter himself, best known for his visionary landscapes. These two are in Swope's Collection: above Scales Mound from 1974, below White Cloud from 1943 & 1946.



Artist Sketching, Milton on the Hudson by George Inness (1825-1894) below is an extremely subtle painting. I fear my photograph doesn't do justice to the picture's wonderfully palpable sense of atmosphere.



Bruce Crane (Am. 1857- 1937) painted Grey Dawn with a similar devotion as George Inness to capturing the overall effect of a silvery atmosphere wrapped over the emerging landscape.



I get such a kick out of exhibiting my paintings in a museum's galleries alongside artists like the ones I've shown. I am a former abstract painter and to this day I have a contemporary eye. But  in the work of these artists who went before me are the echoes of so many of the themes I explore in my own work. 


Philip Koch, Edward Hopper's Kitchen: Open Door
oil on canvas, 40 x 60 inches, 2016 hanging in one of  
Swope's galleries.

Every generation naturally sees and feels a little differently. The way we see light for example has shifted slightly from how our forebears experienced it. As one walks into my show at the Swope from the galleries hung with the work of the earlier painters there is an inescapable change in color and mood. 



 Exhibition catalogue for Swope Museum's Light and Shadow: 
Paintings and Drawings by Philip Koch from Edward
 Hopper's Studio

The show of my work at the Swope Museum runs through March 25, 2017. Terre Haute Living magazine's March issue is just out with an interview with Susan Baley, the Museum's Director, and a good number of photographs of my current exhibition. Here's the link.



Philip Koch outside Swope Art Museum with
the banner for the exhibition.



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