Alfred Cohen

Alfred Cohen (1920-2001) was an American artist whose art was firmly rooted in the European tradition; he was inspired in particular by the commedia dell'arte; and by the colour and handling of the Post-Impressionists and Expressionists.

Cohen was born on May 9, 1920, in Chicago.

His father, a furniture dealer, had emigrated from Latvia to America, where he married the daughter of another Latvian emigre.

Cohen attended the Art Institute of Chicago, but left to enlist in the US Army Air Forces.

He served from 1942 to 1945 as a navigator in Flying Fortresses and Liberators based in the Pacific Theater.

After the war Cohen returned to the Art Institute, where he studied under Louis Ritman, Boris Anisfeld (who collaborated with Léon Bakst) and Egon Weiner.

In 1949 he was awarded a fellowship to study in Europe, where he was to spend the rest of his life.

He lived in France and Germany, and travelled widely throughout the Continent.

Cohen and his first wife, Virginia Adler, lived in Sam Francis' old studio on the Boulevard Arago in Paris, where he studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière.

Cohen's work was representational and figurative, owing most to Raoul Dufy, Bonnard, Marc Chagall, Oskar Kokoschka, Georges Rouault and Chaïm Soutine.

His favourite subjects were ports and river banks, vibrant flower compositions and searching portraits.

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In the 1950s Cohen staged one-man exhibitions in Germany and Paris.

French critics described him as an 'intimist', 'ranking among our best painters', and hailing his paintings as 'good, direct and natural'.

In 1958 he had his first one-man exhibition at The Ben Uri in London, where two years later he decided to settle.

His exhibition at the Obelisk Gallery in 1960 was the first of several sell-out shows in Britain.

Cohen had already met with considerable success in Germany and France.

But with the large canvases of his Aspects of the Thames exhibition in 1961 Cohen really began to win critical acclaim in Britain too.

Anita Brookner wrote in the Burlington Magazine that Cohen was 'a fresh and accessible artist of considerable accomplishment, whose abstract impressionist compositions were enlivened by an acute charm of colour'.

The Tatler admired 'the rich sense of colour that makes his work immediately striking and lastingly memorable' and again noted the combination of abstract design and representation which remained important throughout his career: 'Look (...) at almost any few square inches of a Cohen canvas and you have a little gem of abstract painting'.

Edward Lucie-Smith, in Arts Review, found the paintings 'strikingly well constructed', adding: 'the architecture is nearly always firm and logical.

. . . I admire these pictures most as virtuoso demonstrations of technical skill.

They have immense panache and glitter, and yet they are self-consistent'.

The New Daily appreciated the 'visionary quality' of their effects of light.

Cohen followed this with an exhibition at the Brook Street Gallery in 1963, on the theme of the commedia dell'arte. The Daily Telegraph described the technical achievement of his images as 'formidable', and declared him 'one of the best draughtsmen at work today', adding that 'Only Picasso in one or two early works has in our time touched such depths through the characters of the Commedia dell'Arte'. Conroy Maddox, wrote in Arts Review that 'The paintings are a show of force and theatricality (...) Cohen has certainly gained a sensuous richness and a robust and vigorous way of handling his material'.

The inspiration of the commedia dell'arte was to recur throughout Cohen's work.

But once again he resisted the temptation to repeat a successful formula, and completely reinvented his painting yet again.

Now he turned his attention to the landscape of Kent, where he settled with his second wife, Diana Saunders, in 1963.

His exhibition of 'Recent Paintings' at the Brook Street Gallery in 1965 sounded a note that was to remain important in Cohen's work, focusing on the English countryside and country people.

His attraction to Britain never waned.

'I don't want to leave it.

America is no longer my home.

I feel more of a foreigner there than I do anywhere in Europe.' But he was also attempting to capture the features of the land that most perplexed him.

First, its postwar air of decline: 'It is crumbling from the inside, and crumbling in style.

It's elegant, but there's danger in the elegance.' But also the challenge represented by its crowded seclusion.

As the writer Philip Oakes explains: 'He evolved a new style, using paint like a sculptor, laying down slabs of colour, carving it with his brush so that the fields and hedges and houses seemed to be hewn from the canvas'.

Cohen's British landscapes were well-received too, with critics continuing to praise his compositional intelligence.

Pictures on Exhibit said:

"There are very few artists of today's generation with the ability to synthesise the quality of 20th Century Ecole de l'Europe in the sense that the late impressionists and the post-impressionists did it for their epoch. Alfred Cohen is one of them, and maybe this explains his success with a wide category of collectors. Their enthusiasm is unstinting (...) There are few enough painters like [Cohen] nowadays; hardly one capable of capturing the British scene in such an attractive and authoritative way."

Cohen had nine one-man exhibitions in London, and others in Heidelberg, Hannover, Paris, Toronto, Montreal, Tokyo, Cape Town, Belfast, and many other cities and towns in England, including Cambridge, York, Harrogate, Leeds, Rye, and King's Lynn.