Harry Cohen, The Banquet Table, 1965 oil on canvas 48” x 85”

Harry Cohen Biography: Painting from the Outside In 

By Patricia Watts

Always fascinated with the surface of paintings, Harry Cohen applies his paint with a visceral sensuality. As he builds shapes and forms with color, unscripted and improvisational, he merges the abstract with the representational. Cohen’s joie de vivre makes for expressive paintings that are full of energy and life, and his choices of colors are always instinctive. With childlike joy, he has painted for over fifty years, producing hundreds of paintings full of affirmation, like the artist himself.

Having grown up in Boston’s South End in the 1930s, Cohen found his way into the art world from the outside in. He was one of five kids, the son of first-generation Romanian and Russian Jews. His father worked in the garment trade, and his mother, who became very sick while Cohen was in high school, died in her mid-forties during the Great Depression. The artist finished high school—the only child in his family to graduate—as the Second World War was starting. He worked for a year in the shipyards, then served in the army.

Cohen’s maternal grandfather, David Gott, was an immigrant Austrian designer of men’s suits. The artist was influenced as a child by watching Gott make his pencil drawings. And as adults, Cohen and his brothers, four of them, could all draw. However, Harry Cohen was the only one of his siblings who would go on to become a lifelong artist. After the war, between 1945 and 1950, Cohen attended the Boston School of Fine Art on the GI Bill. There, his primary teacher was painter Karl Zerbe, a German-born American refugee who arrived in Boston in 1937. Until 1955, Zerbe headed the Department of Painting, and his form and technique became the foundation of Boston Expressionism. Other teachers included Jack Levine and Hyman Bloom, later known as the Bad Boys from Boston,1 and fellow students were David Aronson, Bernard Chaet, Jack Kramer, and Lois Tarlow, among others.

The Boston Expressionist movement embraced a distinctive blend of visionary painting, dark humor, religious mysticism, and social commentary. Its historical roots can be traced to European Symbolism and German Expressionism. “Largely through Zerbe’s example, the towering modernist figures to be reckoned with in Boston were Max Beckmann and Bauhaus artist Oskar Kokoschka.”2 European artists Chaim Soutine and Beckmann greatly inspired this group of painters, and Beckmann often critiqued students at the school when giving lectures, even though he did not speak much English. Cohen, who was able to interact one-on-one with Beckmann, loved his philosophical bent and was greatly disappointed when he left to teach at Washington University in Saint Louis in 1948.

Zerbe continuously urged Cohen to “tighten up” his paintings. He criticized his painting style for being “too loose,” and also said, “You have to learn to compromise.” These were harsh words for the young artist. What Cohen really wanted to hear was “Paint what you want to paint,” “Stick to your guns,” and “Be a big artist!” One of the highlights for Cohen was the summer of 1949, when he went to Pittsfield, in the Berkshires, where Kokoschka held a summer painting session sponsored by the Berkshire Museum.

Cohen reported, “Oscar would come by every third or fourth day to peek, asking innocent questions. . . . He also told me to find a rich girl who would allow me to paint every day.”3 Though Cohen never succeeded in finding that girl, Kokoschka has remained an important influence. Cohen felt that his style of painting was more like Kokoschka’s, and he also taught Cohen that art wasn’t just the application of the medium itself, it comprised the entire context of life.

There were prestigious teachers and gifted students at the school, and he was grateful to learn from and be associated with them. Yet he lived in “the coldwater flats in the cheap Roxbury and South End neighborhoods, where the chill was unbearable, with no heat, seeking out warmth at the Waldorf cafeteria, drinking coffee for a dime.”4 Unlike Levine and Bloom, who were wealthy and whose parents could afford private painting lessons at a young age, Cohen had not enjoyed such advantages, and he felt the distance between them. Yet Cohen said that Bloom would greet him on the streets with a nod, which he felt was Bloom’s way of acknowledging his work. And, what a nod it was—it rendered all of Cohen’s obstacles and poverty unimportant.

Cohen is a master at constructing and organizing space using color. He also excels at arranging forms to create surface excitement. Cohen says, “I don’t think too much about color relationships. They just happen. There is no particular reason why white is white and red is red. I let it happen.”7 In his 2006 painted collage Keeper of the Black Flag, an acrylic on canvas applied with painted and cut paper, he combines fragmented elements of brightly colored patterns and shapes aligned with cut black paper in lines that hold the pieces together formally. This work is unique in Cohen’s oeuvre in terms of its structural perfection. It might well have made his Boston mentor, Karl Zerbe, proud. It appears as if Cohen knew exactly where all the pieces would go before he approached the canvas.

Cohen views the artist’s life to be a noble calling. In over fifty years, he has painted more than two thousand? paintings and has sold hundreds of works, as well as given them away to friends. He feels he is privileged to make art, and that visiting an art museum is akin to going to church; it is a spiritual experience. When he speaks, he comes across as wise and thoughtful, as well as highly articulate in discussing the great painters of the past. Another of his preferred forms of communication is his animated style of typing letters to form words. At first glance, the sentences appear to be a poem. They consist of fragmented thoughts and reflections ornamented with capital letters arranged in patterns.

Cohen and his wife, Marge, made several extended trips to Italy, France, and Spain, to see works by El Greco, Cézanne, Michelangelo, Titian, Tintoretto, and Correggio. They also traveled to Boston and New York to visit the art museums there. Though the artist has always yearned for a cultured and urbane life, he has remained in the Northwoods of the San Francisco Bay Area, quietly sustaining a distant yet heartfelt relationship with the important art of the past. Cohen doesn’t pretend to be an intellectual, but it is evident that he is a genius in painterly expression.

It is rare when an artist allows himself to outwardly enjoy his own work, as Cohen does. Such artists are more likely to paint for themselves than artists who make work for the art market or others. Cohen admits that he could paint eleven paintings and not hit the mark, and that the next painting will simply fall into place. When asked when is a painting finished, Cohen exclaims, “Never! I think what you do is you abandon them.” Addressing a painting, he says, “I’ve taken you as far as I can.”8

End Notes

1.  Katherine French, Director, Danforth Museum of Art, Framingham, MA, 2009; in trailer for the Hyman Bloom exhibition video, The Beauty of All Things (online). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJZ9NtMFaLs

2.  Painting in Boston, 1950–2000, by Rachel Rosenfield Lafo, exh. cat., DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002). p. 131.

3.  Cohen, interview by Patricia Watts, Woodacre, CA, May 14, 2015

4.  Cohen, interview by Watts.

7.  Cohen, interview by Kimberly Fabrizi, 2013 (online video) https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=_h7nyssGkgk

8.  Cohen, interview by Watts.

Collaborations with Friends

For Cohen, his life and his art have always been deeply connected, and his friendships have played an important role in his art making. In the late 1960s, Cohen met Leonard Breger, four years his senior, a painter from New York who studied painting at City College and who moved to the Bay Area around the same time. Cohen built a studio behind Breger’s home in 1980, and a few years later Breger connected him with a gallery on Hayes Street which prompted his paintings of the 49ers. In the late 1980s, for a three-year period, the two artists collaborated on an installation of freestanding painted sculpture made of interlocking Masonite panels; it was installed on Bernal Hill in San Francisco in 1990.

Cohen also formed a friendship with Ron Coulter, who has collected many of his works over the years. Coulter first encountered Cohen’s paintings at the Pacific School of Religion, above Berkeley, in the late 1960s. Later, when Coulter founded the Myth and Magic Factory in Oakland in the 1970s, the artist made promotional posters for his plays and collaborated on creating puppets for a marionette show.

Another collaborator and supporter of Cohen’s is Michael Killen, who was formerly a tech entrepreneur and is now an artist and filmmaker in Palo Alto. Also from Massachusetts, he moved to the Bay Area in the late 1960s. Killen met Cohen in 1996 through Breger, and since 2010, they have collaborated on at least fifteen large-scale paintings addressing environmental issues, such as energy, sustainability, and economics. Titles of their collaborative paintings include Sustainability of America, Resilience of America, Don Quixote fights the Great Giant of Our Time, Don Quixote Fights Sea Level Rise, Gone with the Wind Is the Electric Grid, and Methane Joins Carbon Emissions to Boil the Planet. This animated series of colorful paintings portrays our impending ecological crisis using Don Quixote as the environmental hero. These works have been shown at the U.S. Department of Commerce, the U.S. Department of the Interior, and Stanford University, at various sustainability events. Cohen and Killen also painted Knock Knock Knocking on Heaven’s Door and Don Quixote Fights the Greatest Giant Ever, which were displayed at an annual energy summit at Stanford University and at NASA, during national discussions on climate change strategies.

In 2014 Cohen collaborated with childhood friend Paula Kirkeby, founder of Smith Andersen Editions in Palo Alto, to create a single monotype, an abstraction. Kirkeby has worked with many important artists, including Enrique Chagoya, Bruce Conner, Claire Falkenstein, George Herms, Frank Lobdell, Michael Mazur, Ed Moses, Nathan Oliveira, and many more. She says that “Cohen is really one of the important artists who the world has not discovered yet,” during an interview with their mutual friend Killen in 2013.

Biography

Born September 29, 1924, in Boston, Massachusetts. Died September 17, 2019, in Woodacre, CA. Attended Boston School of Fine Arts, 1945–50

Cohen’s paintings were included in Prime Time, curated by Patricia Watts, at the Marin Community Foundation in 2014. This large group exhibition presented the work of five under-recognized mature artists who live in the Bay Area. From 2009 to 2014, Cohen was represented by Skip Henderson of Gallery Mona Lease, San Rafael, California. Henderson represented other artists of the same generation in the region, including Jenny Hunter Groat and Leonard Breger. Cohen has also exhibited at venues in California—including a solo show at the La Jolla Art Center (1957); the annual group exhibition of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (1956); a solo show at the Pacific School of Religion, Berkeley (1967); a group show at the Berkeley Art Center (1998); and a group exhibition at Smith Andersen Editions in Palo Alto (2014)—as well as in Texas, in a group show at Rare Discoveries Gallery (1982), and Nevada, where he was given a solo show at the Reno Arts Commission (1998). His paintings have been exhibited most extensively in San Francisco, in a solo show at Quay Gallery (1964), a solo and a group show at SOMA Gallery (1980, 1981), a group show at Bolles Gallery (1965), a solo show at Celini Gallery (1966), a solo show at Nathan Gallery (1976), and a solo show at Art House (1993). Cohen also participated in a group exhibition at the California School of Fine Arts (now San Francisco Art Institute) in 1958.

Cohen’s work has been collected by admirers and friends throughout his career, and many works were offered by the artist as gifts. His hallmark, generosity, is evidenced in his personality as well as in his painting style: he paints without restraint, pouring his love of color and form into his work.