A Legacy in Formation

Shortly before Cora Cohen's death in June 2023, the Cora Cohen 2023 Selected Works Trust was established under trustees Jeffrey M. Jones and Samuel Jablon to preserve and manage her body of work. In the years since, the Trust has organized a tribute in The Brooklyn Rail; the Greene Naftali gallery assumed representation of the estate and mounted her first posthumous exhibition A Decade: 2012–22 at Greene Naftali; and a definitive 320-page monograph was published in May 2026, marking the start of a sustained critical reappraisal of her career. The work enters a changing account of abstract painting. The archive of Cora Cohen’s artwork does not simply preserve the existing account—it becomes one of the conditions through which Cohen's position can be reconsidered.

The February 2024 tribute to Cora Cohen by the Brooklyn Rail included contributions from Sam Jablon; gallery owners Morgan Aguiar-Lucander and Mary Boone; writer/critics Barbara MacAdam, Saul Ostrow, Barry Schwabsky, and Jason Stopa; the collector Dirk Schroeder, and artists Marina Adams & Stanley Whitney, Sharon Butler, Nora Griffin, Heidi Howard, Mary Jones, Benjamin Langford, Rebecca Ness, Liz Phillips, Archie Rand, David Rhodes, and Carol Szymanski. In it, one of her last studio assistants, the artist Benjamin Langford, wrote:

“Helping her work on her silkscreen paintings in 2021, there was a funny tension between Cora’s approach and the printmaker’s attempt to conduct a technically correct printmaking process (one which would ensure an exact reproduction every time the screen is printed). Cora pushed for a silkscreen that eschewed traditional printing technique—a screen with dots so fine that some clog, where the image becomes effaced and altered with each print. The printmaker was reluctant; they were probably used to clients who say they want one thing, but are quick to complain when the unexpected occurs. There was a process of negotiation that had to take place to convince the printer that Cora really did want a kind of broken image; one that fades and shifts each time, never exactly the same. Those silkscreen paintings were the last large works that Cora was physically fit enough to work on.”

To quote from Greene Naftali’s catalog for A Decade: 2012 – 2022, held from September to November, 2025:

“This focused survey—Cohen’s first at Greene Naftali—centers on the final decade of her career, juxtaposing the chance operations unleashed in her late paintings with the layered deliberations of her works on paper. “The beautiful and the sublime are not uninteresting,” she once remarked, “but my urgency is for a different experience,” and her calibrated play of control and abandon allows for such complexities. Opposition becomes a mobilizing force in her barely corralled tensions between figure and ground: the near-transparent washes offset by thickets of rough impasto, the licks of a loaded brush against the skittering drag of a dry one. Rejecting the histrionics of the expressive mark—its penchant for angst and personal disclosure—Cohen opted for a loose, pulsing visual rhythm that implies a tacit structure: what one critic likened to “an alien calligraphy dilated in water.” The resulting works have a tactile grit and exert their own kind of emotional weather, cued to natural cycles but with a city-dweller’s respect for the built and made over the purely found.”

“Highly attuned to the gravitational pull of pigment as it absorbs into or sits atop the canvas, Cohen relished the action of the broadest range of materials put to experimental use. Atmospheric scrims seep into the weave of raw linen; scraps of wood veneer cling to the surface; paint vies with colored pencil, ink, pastel, and graphite in a push-pull of productive conflict. The variety of Cohen’s touch affirms that, as her friend Joan Mitchell liked to say, “abstraction is not a style,” but rather a fierce commitment to capturing the material world as seen from a particular point of view.”

In “Cora Cohen: Refusing Closure,” an appreciation in Two Coats of Paint in October 2025, Saul Ostrow wrote:

“Cohen’s approach was material and provisional, in perpetual negotiation between the properties of her painting materials and the temporal contingencies of working with them. … Each work functions as a site of ongoing inquiry, where attention negotiates with material resistance. Paint spreads, pours, lifts, scrapes, and leaves a stain; it asserts itself as much as it obeys. What emerges is not the triumph of the artist’s mastery but the stubborn record of Cohen’s persistence in the face of a medium that resists subordination. Her paintings grow as much through erasure as accumulation, as much through doubt as assertion; they thrive on hesitation, revision, rupture, and even abandonment.”

In May 2026, the Trust released Cora Cohen, a 320-page monograph, published in association with the Trust and Gregory R. Miller & Co., with texts by Raphael Rubinstein, Barry Schwabsky, Anne Thompson, Marina Adams, Jason Stopa, Ivy Shapiro, Linda Nochlin, Carlo McCormick, Odili Donald Odita, and Cora Cohen. A launch celebration, including a panel with Sharon Butler, Rebecca Ness and Barbara MacAdam, moderated by Raphael Rubinstein, was held on June 2, 2026, at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York.

RELATED DOCUMENTS

“A Tribute to Cora Cohen,” The Brooklyn Rail, February 2024

“CORA COHEN, A Decade: 2012–22,” Greene Naftali, September 2025

Will Heinrich, “The gauzy texture of this #CoraCohen (1943–2023) painting… ,” Instagram post, September 19, 2025

Maggie Turner, “Cora Cohen: A Decade: 2012–22,” Air Mail, September 22, 2025

Rebecca Schiffman, “Cora Cohen: A Decade: 2012–22,“ The Brooklyn Rail, October 2025

“Cora Cohen - A Decade: 2012-22 - Greene Naftali,” Manhattan Art Review, October 3, 2025

Saul Ostrow, “Cora Cohen: Refusing Closure,” Two Coats of Paint, October 8, 2025

David Ebony, “David Ebony’s Top 10: Autumn, 2025,” Snapshot, October 21, 2025

Colleen Dalusong, “Exhibition Review: Cora Cohen’s Poetics of Sensation,” Whitehot Magazine, November 4, 2025

Cora Cohen, et al., Cora Cohen (Gregory R. Miller & Co., 2026) (Note: Many essays are also available on this website)

Sharon Butler, “Sharon’s Substack / June 1, 2026,” Two Coats of Paint, May, 2026