Emergence: The Turbulence of Paint
Room, 1983, is an early example of what Cora Cohen called “expressing force and aggression by foregrounding the material qualities of paint.”
Room, 1983
Oil on linen
48 x 52 in.
In his New York Times review, Michael Brenson describes Sacagawea as “… dense, brooding and yet elated … There is a sense of something surging up within the canvas, about to break the surface … a recognizable female form [that] seems to be dancing through an opaque, untamed world, which has become the figure’s element.”
Sacagawea, 1983
Oil on linen
77 x 77 in.
The public revelation of the Baal Shem Tov (Rabbi Yisrael ben Elieze) took place in 1734, when he stepped out from his life as a hidden Ukrainian mystic to launch the Hasidic movement.
The Baal Shem Reveals Himself, 1986
Flashe, oil on linen
66 x 70 in.
John Chamberlain (1927 – 2011) was an abstract expressionist American sculptor.
Deaf Music (For John Chamberlain), 1986
Flashe, oil on linen
78 x 78 in.
Emergence: The Turbulence of Paint
Emergence: The Turbulence of Paint
Back to Index1976–1990
Back to Index1976–1990
Cohen's emergence as a painter occurred at a moment when painting was under critical attack but also returning to market prominence. She refused both the Neo-Expressionist revival and the postmodern critique of painting, pursuing instead a dense, gestural abstraction that neither restores the New York School nor participates in image-driven painting. Through the late 1970s and 1980s, Cohen worked toward larger, more heavily worked canvases. Paintings like Sacagawea (1983) and The Baal Shem Reveals Himself (1986), register her sustained commitment to abstraction, at a moment when the tradition faced mounting criticism from both postmodern and feminist quarters. The tension between material density and atmospheric ground becomes a defining condition of her work
From “A Personal History”
by Cora Cohen
”By the early 1980s, I had become interested in expressing force and aggression by foregrounding the material qualities of paint. I started to work larger, and the paint became heavier and thicker. In hindsight, I can see I was teaching myself how to make the paintings I wanted to make, in a way I never had: dense paintings with a worked quality, the stroke small in relation to the whole.”
“Technical aspects of Willem de Kooning’s work from the 1950’s served as a model, and I became increasingly involved in the phenomenology of figuration. My canvases captured the drama of nascent, almost-recognizable forms struggling to come into being, only to recede back into abstraction. Philip Guston’s work from the late 1950s to early 1960s was a source of inspiration, as was Alberto Giacometti’s painting and sculpture.”
“During the 1980s, painting came under attack from postmodern critics for being conservative and outmoded. By the 1990s, feminist circles had further discredited abstract painting as a bastion of male privilege. Yet I reaffirmed my commitment to this powerful tradition as a viable form of expression for myself and others. I believe the act of painting grows out of older forms of visual expression connected to the realm of the spirit. It connotes a belief in the value of individual, personal, subjective experience that honors and perpetuates the most basic of humanist values. Any assertion of a transcendent sublime by American modernist painters has long been in retreat, yet painting still redeems the possibilities of the human imagination.”
RELATED DOCUMENTS
Michael Brenson, “Cora Cohen at Max Hutchinson,” The New York Times, March 1984
“A Conversation with Barry Schwabsky & Cora Cohen,” catalog essay for Paintings and Altered X rays (1983-1996) (the Sarah Moody Gallery, 1986)
Stephen Westfall, “Cora Cohen at Jamie Wolff,” Art in America, June 1989