Floch studied at the Academy of Fine Art in Vienna, where he worked particularly with Franz Rumpler. From 1921 into 1923 he was living and working in Holland, where he was much drawn to the work of Vermeer and others of the Dutch school of interior paintings. In 1925 he settled in Paris, and his works were accepted in the Salon d'Automne and Salan des Tuileries the following year. One-man exhibitions of Floch's work had been mounted in Vienna, possibly as early as 1917, but the exhibition that marked his first significant recognition was that presented by Berthe Weill in her Paris gallery in 1927.
At the outset of his career Floch had been much influenced by the Expressionists' arbitrary use of color although the form and content of his paintings retained connection with the classical, humanist tradition, often expressed in landscape subjects. In Paris he continued to paint in terms of subtle, artificial color; light; and perspective, favoring figures in interiors as his superficial subject matter.
Floch emigrated to the United States in 1941, settling in New York. The city's massive urban architecture had a marked effect on his choice of subject matter, and on his expression of space. Raphael Soyer became Floch's close friend when they both had studios in the Lincoln Arcade Building. In 1973, Soyer wrote of him:
Since the 1940s Joseph Floch has been producing many paintings of New York City--its skyscrapers, its roof terraces, its bridges, and many still-lifes and interiors with figures. On cannot over-emphasize the importance of color in his work. . . . A restlessness has entered into Joseph Floch's work of the last half-decade. His landscapes, interiors and still-lifes are almost explosive. One doesn't know where reality begins and abstraction ends. Color, light, space are unreal, not of this world, celestial.
Among Floch's major awards was a gold medal in the Paris International Exhibition of 1937. In America his first major award was the Lippincott Prize, conveyed by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, in 1945. In 1955 the Academy nominated Floch to receive the Brevoort-Eickemeyer Prize, which is awarded once every five years by Columbia University for the life-time achievment of an artist selected by the Academy. In Academy annual exhibitions, in which Floch began regularly to participate in 1954, his work was awarded the Isidor Medal, 1963; an Obrig Prize, 1964; Salmagundi Prize, 1965; the Saltus Gold Medal, 1967; Carnegie Prize, 1970; Palmer Prize, 1960, 1963, and 1973. Floch served on the Academy Council, 1967-70.
In 1972 the Belvedere Gallery in Vienna organized a retrospective exhibition of Floch's work, including a large selection from the Albertina Museum's collection of his drawings and prints. The artist was represented in New York by the Forum Gallery from 1961.
