Alfred Cohen was born in Chicago of Latvian-Jewish immigrant parents. Following wartime service with the US army air force, he resumed his studies at the Chicago Insittue of Art. After graduating in 1949 he settled in Europe, initially Paris, then London, making England his home. His subjects included the <em>commedia dell' arte</em> and riverscapes of the Seine, the Thames and the Channel ports.
Painter and printmaker Alfred Cohen was born to Latvian-Jewish immigrant parents in Chicago, USA on 9 May 1920. He showed a talent for drawing as a child and later attended evening classes at the Art Institute of Chicago. During the Second World War he served with the US army air force as an aerial navigator (1942–45) and was posted to Guadalcanal on the Solomon Islands in the Pacific from 1943–44, an experience that later profoundly informed his art. After the war, Cohen enrolled full-time at the Art Institute, where the teaching was dominated by the European French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist traditions, and together with two fellow students, he set up his own portrait studio, painting celebrities including actors Basil Rathbone and Anthony Quinn. On the proceeds of a travelling fellowship, Cohen set out for Europe in 1949, studying in Paris for a year, where he shared a studio with the Californian artist Sam Francis, then associated with French abstraction (Tachisme). Together with his first wife, Virginia (née Adler), Cohen divided his time between Paris, Heidelberg and Rome, mixing with movie stars including Ingrid Bergman, Sophia Loren and Kirk Douglas, and gaining patrons including James Mason, Sam Wanamaker and Stanley Baker.
In 1958 Cohen was offered his first solo UK exhibition at Ben Uri Gallery in London and showcased his riverscapes of the Seine in Paris, and seascapes of the Channel ports. The success of this exhibition led to a further solo show at the Obelisk Gallery in 1960 and prompted his move to London the same year. He found a studio close to World’s End in Chelsea and embarked upon the most innovative decade of his artistic career. He recalled, ‘one morning I walked out and saw the light on the river and the houseboats and I knew that’s what I had to paint’ (cited MacDougall 2020, p. 7). He later described his series of large Thames canvases as ‘impressionistic – watery, Turneresque, suffused with light’ (Saunders, ‘Illustrated Biographical Sketch’) and reviewers were struck by their combination of historical and more contemporaneous influences: The Tatler observed, ‘It is not the new angles so much as the rich sense of colour that makes his work immediately striking and lastingly memorable. Faced with a sunset he becomes imbued with the Spirit of Turner. Look […] at almost any few square inches of a Cohen canvas and you have a little gem of abstract painting’ (Wraight 1961, p. 207), while Anita Brookner described in the Burlington Magazine the atmospheric paintings as ‘abstract impressionist’ (Cornwell, Art UK). He chose high vantage points for many of his Thames paintings, earning him the nickname ‘The Spiderman Painter’ from the Evening News: ‘The roof of London was a natural place for me after four years as an aerial navigator’, he explained: ‘I felt like a bird, soaring over the surface of the river, dipping down when I wanted to’ (Saunders, op. cit). His exhibition, Aspects of the Thames , at the Kaplan Gallery, St James, in October 1961, sold out, to be followed by another sell-out solo exhibition at London’s Brook Street Gallery in 1963 on the theme of the commedia dell'arte showcasing robust, vigorously painted figures in a predominantly bold red palette, which became a consistent motif.
In 1969 (and again in 1974 and 1976), Cohen exhibited with the émigré dealers Roland, Browse and Delbanco in Cork Street, but in the meantime, moved out of London to rural Kent with his second wife, Diana Saunders, once again changing his subject matter and his technique as he responded to the local landscape. In 1978, the Cohens moved to north Norfolk, converting the old schoolhouse at Wighton, near Wells-next-the-sea, establishing a studio, print workshop and art gallery in 1983. In his late Norfolk phase Cohen focused on interiors and shopfronts, swapping the impasto of the Kent paintings for a flatter, highly patterned surface, often using translucent washes – as in his London pictures – but now applied to bolder, more stylized compositions, as well as a series of cogent, witty drawings. In June 1991, having just turned 71, Cohen had a large exhibition at the Fermoy Gallery in the King’s Lynn Arts Centre.
Alfred Cohen died on 25 January 2001 in King’s Lynn, Norfolk, England. A recent reassessment of his career and reputation includes two major study days at the Courtauld Institute of Art (2018) and the Paul Mellon Center (2019), respectively, and a major centenary exhibition, Alfred Cohen: An American Artist in Europe - Between Figuration and Abstraction , co-curated by Max Saunders (Alfred Cohen Art Foundation) and Sarah MacDougall (Ben Uri Gallery and Museum) at The Arcade, Bush House, King's College London (scheduled for 16 March – 22 May 2020, but only open for one day owing to the pandemic lockdown), co-editors of the accompanying publication. Alfred Cohen is represented in UK public collections including the Arts Council, the Ben Uri Collection, Great Yarmouth and King’s Lynn Museums, Rye Art Gallery and the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts at the University of East Anglia.
Alfred Cohen in the Ben Uri collection
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Alfred Cohen]
Publications related to [Alfred Cohen] in the Ben Uri Library