Cora Cohen: Embracing the Mess

“Logic doesn’t get in the way exactly. I try not to let it.”¹
—Cora Cohen

“It will be a little messy, but embrace the mess. It will be complicated, but rejoice in the complications.”²
—Nora Ephron

The artist Cora Cohen could bear the deep darkness of the unknown. She didn’t let logic get in her way. She embraced the mess. Within the context of her art-making, she accepted and mastered the complexity and complications of living in the present. The artist faced and immersed herself in unfinished beginnings, refusing to commit to one medium or a specific movement. She moved tirelessly to her own beat.

Working in her studio on multiple pieces at once, Cohen danced between surfaces. She also went out into the city and took photographs. Even the underground pipes in a seemingly benign snapshot of a gritty Chambers Street subway station were a means for her to see and draw—to express her roving, frenetic sense of line. Cohen made photocopies (which she recycled in her paintings); she drew incessantly on every working surface; she painted on X-rays of her own body and her friends’ bodies; she tirelessly mixed media—defying perceived and imagined rules about what a painting is and what a painting should be. Along the way, she turned viewers into amateur detectives, seeking clues in her ongoing artistic investigation.

Cohen operated as an artist in an intuitive present tense, creating a lyrical, intertwined vocabulary. She possessed the lightest touch and used it to speak with emotive depth and solemnity. Although Cohen often said, “I don’t know what I’m doing,” I’d argue that she was entirely self-aware and held her ground in a uniquely illusory/non-illusory practice.

Her formal legacy is one steeped in Abstract Expressionism. Cohen was a native New Yorker who attended Vermont’s Bennington College, as did the painter Helen Frankenthaler, who appears in Cohen’s stains and who shared her tendency to work on a large scale on the studio floor. Like many of her Ab-Ex predecessors, Cohen shifted back and forth between the application of thin and thick paint, exploring the edge between transparency and opacity. She leaned into the lessons of her teachers and mentors, equally at ease agreeing with and arguing against them. After graduating and returning to New York City, Cohen befriended the painter Joan Mitchell, and continued wrestling against Greenbergian formalism, eventually rejecting many of its reductive theoretical assertions.

Cohen was anti-heroic. Like the artist Sigmar Polke, she played the role of the alchemist magician, erasing her own identity, rejecting the ubiquitous Ab-Ex romanticization and primacy of gesture. In her wrestling match with the history of art she was catapulted into a new moment in contemporary painting—placing her among such artists as Amy Sillman, Charline von Heyl, Jacqueline Humphries, and Wade Guyton. Cohen would discuss her relationship to Art Informel (or Tachisme)—and specifically to the French painter Jean Fautrier. Her materiality took over completely, engulfing whatever thesis had prompted or catalyzed her works at the outset. See a painting titled Rough Brush from 2009, in which the bristly texture of a wide brush is inseparable from the artist’s body and style of mark making. Paint and brush become one.

Cohen had the rare ability to revel in and mock the mark until it all vanished in the field. She had a need for her paintings to occupy a particular kind of egoless space: “I want to make a painting that is non-finite, ambiguous but at the same time rather serious and non-ironic, a painting one might not notice as a painting.” With even more conviction, she adds: “One might walk by it as one does a wall or an unremarkable tree.” This was her “method of turning failure into a compelling act.”³

Cora Cohen was indeed compelling. She knew exactly what she was doing. She embraced the moment, moving slyly between media, humbly accepting both the past and the future. She had the strength to bear witness to reality and to accept the chaos of unfinished beginnings. She was willing to embrace and even rejoice in the mess.

For Craig Markus (1965–2023): Thank you.

Notes

^1. Samuel Jablon, “The Formative Formlessness of Cora Cohen, Hyperallergic, August 22, 2013, https://hyperallergic.com/80124/the-formative-formlessness-of-cora-cohen/.

^2. Nora Ephron, commencement address delivered at Wellesley College, Massachusetts, 1996. See “Nora Ephron ’62 addressed the graduates in 1996,” Commencement Archives, Wellesley College, https://www1.wellesley.edu/events/commencement/archives/1996COMMENCEMENT.

^3. Cora Cohen, “Now,” 2022.On the artist’s website, http://www.coracohen.com/now.html (Note: Statements from that webpage have been incorporated in The Final Years)

Images included in this essay

Chambers Street Subway 3 (Vertical from Moving Train), 2007
Digital chromogenic-print, 11 x 14 in.

01-16, 2016
Graphite and colored pencil on paper, 22 x 30 in.

Rough Brush, 2009
Oil on canvas, 14 x 14 in.