Robert (Bob) Steven Koffler, born November 8, 1938, was an artist, teacher, wrestling coach, husband, and father, who passed away in his Cheltenham, Pennsylvania, home on March 15, 2022, after a prolonged battle with Parkinson’s disease.
Bob’s life as a painter was greatly influenced by intellectual pursuits, the talent and guidance of many people he met and befriended, his natural surroundings, his family, and the “interesting times” in which he lived. His works are in the permanent collection at La Salle University Art Museum, DuPont Pavillion at Villanova, and private collections.
Bob graduated with honors from Cheltenham High School in 1956 and received the Holden Award in wrestling (having won District Championships that year). A broken wrist ended his collegiate wrestling. His plan to then study painting and sculpture with Ivan Mestrovic of Rodin’s Studio changed when Mestrovic left for Notre Dame. Bob instead earned a BFA at Syracuse University on a painting scholarship, minoring in printmaking and sculpture. In 1959, Bob attended Skowhegan’s summer school program on a scholarship to study traditional underpainting with Reed Kay from Boston University, giving him the opportunity to interact with artists Kenneth Callahan and Ben Shahn. From 1960 through 1963, Bob rented a studio and began teaching in the Philadelphia Public Schools. He spent a few months in Taxco, Mexico, sharing a printmaking studio with his landlord and friend, Carl Peppe. His small group of etchings and paintings, “The Mexican Series,” came from that period.
Bob earned his MFA in painting from the University of Pennsylvania in 1961, having worked during those “golden years” with Angelo Savelli in his studio and attending the seminars of Louis Kahn, Robert Venturi, Dore Ashton, Katharine Kuh, David Smith, and Barnett Newman. Dominant themes in Bob’s work from that period include seated and special figures such as; “The Flight of Icarus (a five-panel mural, paintings, and studies), and the 5×8 foot “St. Paul with a Vision of St. Peter.” While living in an unheated barn in the Olney section of Philadelphia, Bob painted the last of this series, “The Death of Manolete,” before spending the summer touring Southern Europe with Rich Liberthson. While in Pamploma, Spain, they attended the Festival of San Fermin where they partook in “running with the bulls.”
In Montpellier, France, Bob met the love of his life, Anny Peiffer, and they became pen pals, exchanging letters of affection for two years. They were married on November 14, 1963, at the city hall within the Rialto Bridge in Venice, where he was on a Ford Grant, teaching American art students at the Cini Foundation.
Living in Rome, the newly married Kofflers made enduring friendships with young expats such as the writer, William Melvin Kelley and wife, painter Karen Aiki Kelley; artist Wolf Kahn and Emily Mason, sculptor Charles Kaprelian, and Pulitzer prize winning poet, Charles Wright (who mentioned Bob in his seminal poem Homage to Morandi ). The strongest of his work from 1963–1964 in Venice and Rome are drawings, “Venetian Angels,” and a group of works on paper interpreting Andrea Mantegna’s “Corpo Cristo.”
In 1964 the Kofflers moved back to Bob’s hometown, Philadelphia, with their new son Nathaniel, named after Bob’s mentor, Nathan Margolis. Bob began working long hours flipping houses and teaching to support his new family. A group of archetypes and semi-abstract figures within the confines of the space became prevalent in his work. Some of this imagery transitioned into pastels and small deep-wall relief bronzes. “White Paintings” emerged as well as Bob moved from Japanese print-influenced abstract figures to figures intertwined with American flags in protest of those being sent to die in the Vietnam War. Daughter Miriam was born in 1967.
Avid patrons of the arts and devotees of jazz and blues music, Bob and Anny volunteered at the Empty Fox Hole jazz club collective on the Penn campus. Through discourse with musician friends J.R. Mitchell, Byard Lancaster, Jerome Hunter, Alice Coltrane, and Herbie Hancock, Bob’s interest in the effects of interrelationships between different art forms inspired his own art. One of his art openings years later featured J.R. Mitchell playing drums along with avant-garde dancers.
From 1965 to 1978, Bob taught at Moore College of Art, continuing his work with pastels on such themes as the Vietnam war, images from the Civil War, and a series on Vermeer. He began painting architectonic abstractions: first creating a photo-montage, painting these into geometric studies and, when satisfied, painting much-larger versions. First formatted on a horizontal-vertical form, these images were later turned on its axis 45 degrees into a triangular design within a rectangle. Eventually, collages implying doors and windows became triangles in space. By the late 1970s, the triangle was blurring into the “Thales Series,” which broke down the form of Greek philosophers categories: earth, air, fire & water.
In 1978, moved to East Grand Rapids, Michigan, ahead of his family, after accepting a position as the dean of the Kendall School of Art & Design. In 1979, he took a position with Herman Miller as the head of their national showroom design team. Fellow artist Bob Wepman became his art advocate and running partner around scenic Reeds Lake. Triangles became prevalent in his work during this time.
In 1981, the family returned to their home in Cheltenham, Pennsylvania, and Bob began teaching at The Art Institute of Philadelphia. His paintings became more ethereal and abstract as the triangles became fully diffused by the mid-1980s.
In 1986, Bob’s nephew Alexander came to live with the family, followed by Jonas in 1989. Bob wrote articles on wrestlers and helped coach both nephews in wrestling at Cheltenham High School. “Uncle Bob” continued to help coach wresting at Cheltenham long after his nephews graduated. His passion for coaching wrestling led to his being inducted into the South Eastern Pennsylvania Wresting Hall of Fame in 2021. He would be proud to know that his high school now has a wrestling scholarship in his name.
In 1988, Bob went to Nepal with high school wrestling buddy, David Wechsler. On the 26th day hiking up the Annapurna Mountains, they cleared 16,000 feet (proudly without the use of oxygen). From these travels, an abstraction of the spinning cylindrical Nepalese Prayer Wheel, manifested throughout many of his next works.
In 1989, Alexander and Nathaniel helped Bob lay the foundation of his gallery to display and store many of his paintings. This connected the house to the studio. In 1996 Bob purchased a cabin in the Berkshire Mountains that was built from the ruins of an ancient mill beside a brook that cascaded down through a billion-year-old granite rock formation. There, nature enthusiasts and friends, Ed and Ellen Bond, took Bob to natural scenic attractions via mountain bikes and kayaks, and Bob photographed, drew, and painted the pristine areas. Bob transformed an old shed overlooking the brook into the art studio where he worked weekends from spring till fall. The theme of his abstractions began resembling shapes of the surrounding landscape. These abstract oils, hundreds of them painted on linen canvas, evolved into landscapes.
Bob, who used to refer to himself as an abstract expressionist was still interested in how to best introduce an explosion of color within his multilayered oil paintings, said in 2009, “Reflecting upon five decades of work, today I call myself a landscape painter. Yet this label affords more questions than answers. Twenty years ago, I was moving from pure abstraction to memory-landscapes. Today these landscapes have specificity of location in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts. For the most part, the landscape omits man-made elements such as roads and farmhouses, but I consider each of the paintings as places to enter and experience. Specificity has replaced generalities; light, color, and time of day each play their roles. Over forty years of abstraction plays against the realism of place and the long shadows of time passing.”
Even on the days when he was no longer able to wield a brush or pencil, when asked what he was looking at
while sitting in his wheelchair on the deck of the cabin, he would reply that he was figuring out how to layer paints to create the clouds that were drifting over the brook.
Bob is survived by his loving wife, Anny, son Nathaniel Koffler (wife Amy); daughter Miriam Hardin (husband
David), grandchildren Hannah and Samuel Koffler and Mike Hardin; nephews; Alexander, Jonas, and Daniel
Koffler; and his massive body of artwork.