LISTED Frank Koci (1904-1983) Portrait of a General Expressionist Oil Painting ECCENTRIC American Artist ONLY .77 Opening Bid!!! - NO RESERVE -
Currently, I am having my "MIDWINTER NO RESERVE FINE ART SALE"! This sale features an eclectic collection of 14 vintage, old and antique American, Latin American & European paintings, in separate auctions. ALL of these paintings were done by famous listed artists. ALL of this artwork is also being offered with only .77 opening bids, no reserves, no buyer's premiums and will be shipped within 1 business day. Buyer’s will also only pay the actual shipping cost, with no charge for materials, handling or transportation costs to the shipper. So, it may be cold outside, but it is going to be hot right here! Description
This
painting's provenance includes a major auction house. This is the first
of two paintings that I am currently offering by the eccentric
listed American artist- Frank Koci. Once these paintings sell, I will have no
other paintings to offer by this artist who has been the subject of a
book, a movie... and refused to have an art dealer or gallery represent his work! "God was or is the greatest creative artist of us all and he hasn't made a nickel out of it yet..." Frank Koci "
I saw my first Koci painting hanging in a friends living room back in
1960. We talked about the artist and agreed that he was great painter.
There was a raw emotion about them, all I know was I had to see more. "
Lyle Tuttle Frank Koci is an artist that is rapidly gaining
posthumous fame! "Koci" by Audrey Darby was written in 2011. Kociart.com
is a website in progress and a motion picture of Koci at work is in the
film library of the New York Museum of Modern Art! From an Etsy ad: "He (Koci) was a 20th century outsider
artist, working in the Abstract Expressionist style. He painted in the
San Francisco Bay area. He was a naive painter, untrained. His works are
in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and
a motion picture of Koci at work is in the film library of the New York
Museum of Modern Art. Koci, an active painter in San Francisco
from the 1950s until his death in 1983, is known for his
painterly-synthesis of Expressionist influences from artists such as
Beckmann, Nolde, Kirchner, Soutine and Grosz. He was a close observer of
the North Beach Beat scene and his paintings were sold by Henri Lenoir
from within his now-famous bar Vesuvio. Thomas Albright, in Art in the
San Francisco Bay Area 1945-1980, has written that Koci’s “strongest
work represented a remarkable union of naïveté and canny
sophistication.” There are plenty of other websites that discuss
Koci's "impact" on American art and I encourage you to read them. In
this powerful composition, Koci painted what appears to be a general, which actually may be a self portrait. His bold lines and masterfully juxtaposed colors adds a powerful energy to the painting! If you are unfamiliar with Frank Koci, I
would like to share his biography from with you below. Please note that
it is quite lengthy and if you don't care to read it, please scroll down
to the "Item Description" part of the auction:
BIOGRAPHY:
A Painter Who Goes From Humor to Intensity By Thomas Albright San Francisco Examiner - June 9, 1976 Frank
Koči observed his 72nd birthday last weekend, and a group of his
collectors helped celebrate the occasion with a massive retrospective
exhibition of his work, which runs through this Sunday at 63 Bluxome
Street. But chances are you
don't know who Frank Koči is. A native Czech, one-time cowhand,
merchant seaman, movie extra, etc., Koči taught himself to paint 25
years ago, and has since turned out more than 5000 works. He has been
heard to proclaim himself the next Picasso, and his partisans have
sometimes called him today's Van Gogh; on the other hand, similar things
have been said about Bufano and Pat Cucaro. The
current show provides some confirmation for almost any judgement, for
beyond all else, Koci has been uneven as well as prolific, and no effort
seems to have been made to separate the cream from the milk among the
150 or so works on display. They
separate themselves easily under observation, but there are enough
outstanding remaining to establish Koci as a painter of uniquely
personal vision, capable of combining robust humor with bold,
expressionistic directness and intensity. His
best paintings and drawings are the work of a canny "naïve," filled
with allusions to Nolde, Ensor, Picasso, Kokoshka, Rouault, Cuevas and
others, yet all recycled through his own blunt sensibility. Frequently,
he masses stylized, mask-like faces or anonymous crowds of full figures,
bounded by bold black outlines, into shallow, compacted spaces, their
claustrophobia heightened by darkly harmonized colors and richly worked
surfaces that assume the glowing intensity of stained glass. In
other paintings, Koči will line hooded silhouettes across a horizon
line like figures in an Egyptian frieze, as in "Death of the Church"
(the traditional expressionist triumvirate of Church-Business-Military
are frequent targets) or splay the profile of a single head boldly
against a flat color ground, as in his "Nun With a Five O'clock Shadow." Koči's
penchant for caricature sometimes carries him into broad farce, as in
many of his nude paintings; some of his more portrait-like heads --
indeed, some examples across the boards of his varied repertoire -- seem
to have been casually dashed off. But in other paintings, his visual
satire is trenchant, his insight is penetrating and his fantasy is fresh
and durable, as in his nostalgic views of Old Prague and whimsical
landscapes. At any rate,
his work is all of a piece, the product of a personality that seems
willing to risk obviousness for the sake of the raw vitality which, at
his best, he is able to achieve.
Understanding Suffering Essential, Says Funny Artist By John Dell, News Press Staff Writer, Santa Barbara "I
really hate San Francisco, and that's why I stay there. People that
live there go because it's a retreat and a punishment. I think they're
all masochistic." These are
the words of Frank Koči, artist, philosopher and writer in describing
his home town. Mr. Koči is in Santa Barbara during a show of his
paintings at the Museum of Art. His works have been on exhibition since
Oct. 23 and will continue showing until Sunday. It is his first museum
showing. "I'm a senior
citizen," continues Mr. Koči. "I've reached the golden age. Life begins
at 50. Therefore, that disposes of everyday cliches. Now, let's get down
to the nitty and gritty. You see, I'm more of a philosopher than an
artist." CHAMPION Frank
Koči was born in Pilsen, Czechoslovakia, and emigrated at the age of 16
to Texas. "I was the champion cow milker of Austin in 1922. In 1923, I
excaped from Texas and went to Los Angeles." Frank Koči's past includes working as a cowhand, as a movie extra and as a merchant seaman. A
self-taught artist, his paintings and drawings have become known during
the last two years in the San Francisco area, and have been selling. He
started painting in 1951 as the result of being inspired by a
television artist's canvases which he viewed while working as a janitor
in a Hollywood studio. HOME PORT I've
lived in San Francisco for 40 years," Koči says. "During that time I've
been in other places for months at a time, but I consider San Francisco
as home port. The town's been good to me, and I'm one of the luckiest
people there. Mr. Koči is
enthusiastic about his paintings. "I don't like to sell my paintings to
accommodate people's neuroses. They tell me they want a painting of a
certain color, and I say, 'To match what? Your nose?'" "I
like to get money for my paintings. People say to me, 'How can you bear
to part with that lovely picture?' Well, no matter how infatuated an
artist is with his own work, he has to remember that he can't eat beauty
and spirituality. "Understanding
the real meaning of suffering is essential to an artist," says Mr.
Koči, "and so is humor. I've sold a lot of paintings for the funny
titles alone. My method has proved successful: The best way to get
something done is to convince people that your humor is genuine." One
painting on exhibit at the art museum depicts a group of reveling
merrymakers whooping it up and thoroughly enjoying themselves. The title
is, "Not in Santa Barbara You Don't." Another is a surrealistic group of gray looking people titled, "Dialogue -- Senior Citizens." Other
Koči paintings are called "Madonna and Boris Nixon," "Madonna and the
Salami," "Madonna on the Way to the Supermarket" and "Madonna and
Pre-Soak Enzyme Detergent." "I painted 32 madonnas," says Mr. Koči. TOPLESS When
he sin't painting madonnas, Frank Koči paints topless and bottomless
waitresses he's seen in North Beach and other parts of San Francisco.
Also on display at the art museum is a topless nun. The
humor of Frank Koči is evident in his manner as well as in his
pictures. His comments are many and varied. He describes a lavish party
attended by some 60 people on his arrival in Santa Barbara, and
concludes with "That's an awful lot of honor for a guy who used to come
through this town in a boxcar." Explaining
that his paintings were on exhibit may be sold, he says, "I hope they
have some surprises for me. I'd hate like hell to pack all that stuff
back." On Santa Barbara in
general he says, "Santa Barbara better tremble and be on its good
behavior, because I'm taking notes. I can always tell everything about a
town from its newstands," he says, "and Santa Barbara is really a
straight town." He doesn't
like the sewage smell on East Cabrillo Boulevard. "These people are
polluting their own water. It stinks like dead fish from Japan or
Kamchatka, dead fish with a Spanish flavor. Is it from the Japanese
current?" He describes the story of his life as "The story of a man who is unsung and as yet unhung." He
describes women coming up to him and admiring his accent and wishing
that they had one, too. "Just don't put any adhesive on your dentures."
he tells them. "and you'll really have an accent." When people ask him if he is Russian, he says "No, I'm working out of East Germany." Asked
if it is true that he hadn't left the San Francisco city limits for 15
years, Frank Koci was quick to admit it. "I did go to Roseville,
though," he says, "but that didn't count." ECSTASY "A
lot of people think that I am an old hippie," he says, "but I'm not. I
don't have to take drugs to trip out." One of his favorite quotes on the
subject is from Nietzsche: "The ecstasy of Plato was not the same as
the ecstasy of a camel driver who smokes hashish." "I
can visualize things without drugs," he says, "Sometimes I even sing in
the morning. But if I sing in the morning, I'm done. I have to be
vicious, grouchy and quarrelsome in the morning. I become reborn in the
evening. "When I say an
artist should experience suffering, I know what I'm talking about. I
myself had a tragedy not long ago. My television set blew up. I can't
watch 'I Love Lucy' anymore." On
discussing the pop artist, Andy Warhol, Koči says, "He goes in for that
pop goes the weasel art, or whatever it's called. The difference
between Warhol and myself is that he paints the soup cans, and I eat the
soup." Asked why he paints
such out of the ordinary pictures, Koči says, "The only way you can get
back at the snobs of the world is with a dose of vitriol. I really
can't help it; it's my nature. I like to think that the chaos and
confusion of the cosmic is in my paintings. But I make fun of myself
most of all." KOČI --- MINISTER WITHOUT PORTFOLIO By B. Eremia, June 6, 1969 At
last the head of a clergyman; glares of malice emitting from that
paranoid lascivious shift. Yet in that same face, three others are
sleeping. First, inferior maxillary, second, in the zygomatic arch,
finally, occipital --- compassion has not escaped. But this anti-Christ
has been tricked. Hooray for mother! A
minister without portfolio is a historian of injustices. Frank Koči's
purpose consists of a bitter revelation of dehumanization, perpetrated
by institutions designed to protect and elevate the human spirit. The
military, the church, and the use of sex have failed to deliver any
promise. Any existential joy would do. Koči's
work maintains that one's individual psychological being is never of
another category but commands and is commanded by these forces. Thus,
while one is a perpetrator, he may also be its victim. In making
manifest Demonic forces (such natural urges as power, sex, anger) that
have overtaken the person, Koči will use imperative line to develop
heteromorphic sequences, whereby many faces may be seen in one face, or
some animal form develops into a facial characteristic. But
wait, which Frank Koči are we discussing? It must be obvious that there
are too many Kočis and we must suffice it to say that he is a painter.
The reader, therefore, is advised that he may disregard the above and
further description in this matter is forthwith terminated."
ITEM DESCRIPTION:
This
oil on wood panel measures 19.2" by 22.75", with its' frame and the actual painting
measures 14" by 17.8". The painting is indistinctly signed by Koci, on the lower
right. It should be noted that Koci used at least 15 different signature styles during his career. Some of his signatures are easy to read, while others are next to impossible to read. If you don't see his signature in the digital image, you won't see it in person. The painting has stable crazing. Otherwise, the painting is in good, overall condition. There are a couple of stable, vertical cracks in the back of the wood that do not affect the painting or the front of the wood. The 3" wide and 2" deep wood frame was probably made by Koci and it has some scratches/nicks. Overall, I believe the frame is presentable, but it is far from perfect. When
examining the painting under an ultraviolet light, I did not find
evidence of inpainting. Koci's signature is original to the painting and it
does not fluoresce under an ultraviolet light. Frank Koci is an
artist that has had a motion picture, a book and is now is having a
website done about him. Koci's paintings are in museums and he is an
artist that is gaining posthumous fame. Possessing a powerful composition, this painting should prove to be a
fine acquisition for any discerning art collection! Good luck on
becoming the winning bidder of this period American expressionist oil
painting by Frank Koci!
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