John Franklin Koenig "Waiting for OTA 1, 1961" oli on canvas 80x90cm.

John-Franklin Koenig was an international artist, better known in Europe and Japan than in his native country. Born in Seattle in 1924, he grew up in the Wallingford neighborhood and became interested in art at a young age — particularly the Asian art he found at the Seattle Art Museum. Koenig was drafted into the army in 1943 and fought in Europe until the end of the war. Waiting to return to the U.S., he took a course at the university for American soldiers in Biarritz and fell in love with France and French.

In 1986, John Koenig received the Gold Medal of the City of Paris and was later made a Commander of the French Order of Arts and Letters. In 1989, the Paris Arts Center held a retrospective of his work. His paintings and collages have been shown in nearly 150 solo exhibitions around the world and are part of collections in a number of international museums: e.g., the Musè d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and the Musè National d’Art Modern (Paris); the National Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Western Art (Tokyo); the Musè des Beaux-Arts and Musè d’Art Contemporain (Montreal); the Musè de L’état (Luxembourg); and the Seattle Art Museum.