Cora

I recently heard about a study where women were asked what was most important to them in life. Listeners were then asked what they thought was the most common answer. Many responded, “Love.”

No.

It was “Freedom.”

This brings me to Cora. The strongest part of Cora, to me, was her desire—no, her insistence—on maintaining her freedom, in her life and in her work. She wanted room to move and make moves based on necessity. And she made her moves, both in her paintings and in her life, based on this insistence for freedom. She maintained a kind of agility to do this, an agile mind and an agile body. Her life was her work and, in both, you sensed a fierce independence. As with many other painters, it’s impossible to separate the art from the life.

One’s contribution to the world is made up of giving and giving up so much, to connect to larger energies, higher frequencies. It is made with the possibility of being ignored, disregarded, as if your contribution to the world has no effect. But time does tell. The art inside, the interior, must become exterior.

Cora simultaneously maintained an intellectual curiosity, a verbal ability to see and question the visual, with a wide-eyed sense of wonder and a big smile. She had a seductiveness to her and a kind of slyness, that was part of her protection. Protecting the work meant protecting her freedom.

To tell your story in a visual language, one must be prepared for the time it takes—which is slow—for it to be found and clarified as well as deciphered. But it is a life story, and the clues are all there, and it is intrinsically the complicated mix of your whole self. This includes what was happening when you came into the world, the accumulated knowledge born of your personal experiences, and your lifelong research—both historical and inclusive of other forms of creative production.

Painters work in isolation.

Cora grew up as an artist in the time of American improvisation; the forms of painting, poetry, and music all reflected this, and the artists, poets, and musicians were all aware of each other. It was both a difficult and richly adventurous journey: the desire to create something “new,” something no one had seen or heard before, yet simultaneously acknowledging and working in the very long creative traditions of the past. And despite the hardships of living, the work itself afforded a kind of freedom.

But what can I tell you about her paintings?

Cora’s work tells us of a dialogue with the material itself, an acknowledgement of its substance and the hand and the mind that guides it. It speaks to us in the decisions she made of what it is, but also in what it is not.

“I approach each day with an anything can happen mentality.”¹

This insistence on such an open approach is political. It is an affirmation of the poetic spirit and a rejection of false rhetoric. And it has a tradition. Remember Sun Ra Arkestra leader Marshall Allen’s response when asked how he kept improvisation fresh . . . “I play the vibrations of the day.”

To quote Laurie Lisle's biography of Georgia O'Keefe—talking about the language of paint as opposed to its description —“she said that words were often false, meaningless and limited. Pigment, on the other hand, was trustworthy yet unexplored terrain.”² Cora’s belief system is revealed in pigment. Her wisdom is given in her titles and marks, movement, color, viscosity of paint—and mostly energy. Her courage is revealed not only in her steadfast commitment to a difficult and demanding practice, but also in her ability to give up total control, instead staying attuned to what comes her way.

Making moves, risking, negating, covering, specifying, trying to expose the magic, trying to recognize it when it appears or when enough is enough, when “it is what it is.” Paintings both tied to the past and opening to the future.

Cora was some years older than I, but this kind of reckoning with time neither of us found interesting. We both did our best to ignore it. I met her in the 1980s. I think it was through the painter Dona Nelson, whom I had met through Stanley Whitney, who in turn knew both Cora and Dona since the ’70s. I remember dinners at Cora’s, in her Manhattan studio downtown in the cast-iron building at the corner of Reade and Broadway when artists were still numerous in that neighborhood, using the large lofts as work spaces, studios in which they also lived. A big table would be pulled out and set up in the middle of the loft, with ad hoc studio chairs around it. I remember the food being delicious in a sensuous way and, combined with a lot of wine, the conversation flowed all night.

Cora seemed to do everything with ease. She had a natural offhanded sophistication and flair . . . like the crisp white, slightly oversized men’s shirt that she would wear over jeans with so much style. She had a theatricality about her that I loved.

The paintings would be there, naturally, as we were in her space, her studio. And they were just like her . . . beautiful in a delicate but fierce, strong, tough way . . . very ambitious, mysterious, almost secretive, hard to pin down. They were part of a language that I was familiar with from looking at the work of previous generations of New York painting, an abstract language, gestural, full yet spare, ambitious in her scope of what paint can do, reminding me a bit of the work of her friend Joan Mitchell that I was seeing at the Xavier Fourcade Gallery uptown on East Seventy-Fifth Street.

Cora was generous and interesting as well as interested. We saw each other occasionally, visiting each other’s studios and exchanging thoughts on painting and on the work we were doing.

As to details of Cora’s intimate life relationships, I knew only two of her partners. One she married and later separated from. That was later in her life. But to quote the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva, “The poet is in the poem.” And the painter is in her paintings.

Beauty is its own excuse for being.

Notes

^1. Cora Cohen, “Now,” 2022.On the artist’s website, http://www.coracohen.com/now.html. (This comment has been incorporated into The Final Years on this website).

^2. Laurie Lisle, Portrait of An Artist: A Biography of Georgia O’Keeffe (New York: Atria Books, 1997), 279.