Cora Cohen Trust

Cora Cohen: The Presences of Absence

Monograph cover

May 19, 2026

Cora Cohen: The Presences of Absence

Raphael Rubinstein

This essay was published in Cora Cohen (Gregory R. Miller & Co., 2026)

In late 2007, the elegant nineteenth-century cast-iron building on Lower Broadway where Cora Cohen had been living and working for thirty-five years began to subside and tilt to such a dangerous extent that the New York City Department of Buildings ordered an evacuation of all the tenants. For Cohen, who occupied the top floor of the six-story structure, this was an incredibly disruptive event. Apart from some extended stays in Germany and France, it had been her home since 1972, and its large windows and three exposures (north, east, and west) provided ample and often glorious light. She eventually relocated to Long Island City, where she would remain for the rest of her life, but not without a years-long legal battle as she tried to force the landlord to repair the building and remove the code violations so that she and other tenants could return. In 2009, while this unpleasant process was still going on, Cohen was interviewed by a reporter from the Tribeca Trib, who accompanied her on one of her return visits to the empty building to retrieve items from her studio. “It’s my home and I want to come back here and I want to be left alone and make the paintings I want to make. That’s what I do,”1 she told the paper. While, sadly, Cohen was never able to return to 287 Broadway, for the fourteen years remaining before her death in 2023 she continued to make the paintings she wanted to make, thus completing a body of work that spans six decades, encompassing hundreds of paintings, even more works on paper, and additional series of works in more unconventional formats. Despite her expressed desire “to be left alone” in the studio, throughout her career Cohen consistently engaged with other artists, contributing to the discourse around painting, and abstract painting in particular. As often happens when an artist dies, the immediate sense of loss is gradually replaced by a growing appreciation for their achievements as the scope of their life’s work comes slowly into focus.

One noteworthy aspect of Cohen’s trajectory is how she connected with multiple generations of artists, both on a personal level through friendships and dialogues and via her work. While this generational promiscuity may have sometimes been detrimental to Cohen’s career—some observers weren’t sure where to “place” her—it fed her painting and kept her in constant creative evolution. The first cohort of artists that Cohen encountered were associated with Color Field painting, a mode that was particularly influential at Bennington College in Vermont, where Cohen earned a BA degree in 1964. (In the early 1970s, Cohen would return to Bennington on a fellowship for graduate study, receiving an MA from the college in 1972.) If nothing else, her encounter with this work and its adherents helped her understand what she didn’t want to do as a painter. Many years later she recalled, “When I was a student at Bennington College in the ’60s and early ’70s, Clement Greenberg asserted the primacy of a particular aesthetic. In addition, he advanced a formalist analysis that was based on Wöfflin. Greenberg’s formalism became linked with the style of the work he supported—color field painting.”2

Cohen could see the attraction of formalism, but for her it held very little interest: “I do know that it [formalism] has been utilized to remove a sense of the world from the practice of painting, and has enabled the consideration of a painting as an autonomous object, often outside of any social system. I refute this obliquely and explicitly.”3 Throughout her life as an artist, Cohen did indeed resist the notion of art as an autonomous object, whether by taking cues from random street detritus (as evidenced in the photographs of urban environments she often took in New York and Berlin and Cologne) or in the Altered X-rays that she created in response to the AIDS crisis, or in some of her later work that, as she readily acknowledged, was shaped by events such as the COVID pandemic or the Black Lives Matter movement. Yet it was not only by connecting her work to places and events outside the studio that Cohen dissented from certain modes of painting. She also came to reject the definition of the painting as a direct product of the artist’s will, as the culmination of a series of decisive and intentional actions.

Judging by some of Cohen’s earliest surviving work—in particular the Orange Series of paintings on paper that feature flat color and neat, sinuous contours—she seems to have been influenced by her Bennington teacher Paul Feeley, whose work she characterized as “soft hard-edge.” Once out of school, however, she embraced what she later recalled as “freer and more expressive brushwork.”4 She also distanced herself from anything connected to the Greenberg doctrine. In the mid-1960s, Cohen spent several years in New York City, where she had been born in 1943, struggling to find her way as a painter. Conditions improved when she was awarded two fellowships, first at the University of Pennsylvania, in 1969, and then back at Bennington, from 1970 to 1972, thanks to which she was able, at nearly thirty years old, to fully emerge as an artist. Her work began to draw attention, and in 1974 she enjoyed the double honor of having her first solo show and her museum debut at the same time in the form of an exhibition at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, New York. Unfortunately, almost none of her work from the early 1970s survives, but we can get an idea of how she thought about painting, both then and later, from her 2022 comments:

I am interested in paintings easily overlooked, paintings that one might walk by without knowing they were paintings. Something almost like air, kind of like the paintings I made in the early seventies right after graduate school. . . . They are very much related to my recent work, particularly in how they resemble the cosmos.5

Throughout her career Cohen sought to anchor her art in realities, whether cosmic or quotidian, that obliterated the well-policed borders of formalist abstraction. In the late 1970s this took the form of Portraits of Women, a series of paintings each titled with a woman’s name, among them Sacagawea (for the Native American figure) and Ruby (inspired by Ray Charles’s version of the song by composer Heinz Roemheld). When some of this work was shown at the SoHo gallery Max Hutchinson in 1984, New York Times art critic Michael Brenson noted how among the “thickly painted oils” was an untitled painting that reflected “the mood of the show as a whole.” In this painting, Brenson perceived how “a recognizable female form seems to be dancing through an opaque, untamed world, which has become the figure’s element.”6

Looking back on Portraits of Women years later, Cohen acknowledged the fluidity of her practice: “There was a seemingly free paint handling. They were not about women or paint or form, yet they reinforced all of that. My works don’t cohere, at least not in a formal way. They are about the same things but they don’t look alike, they’re not organized, their morphology is not consistent.”7 Among the “not consistent” forms that Cohen recruited into her early paintings (such as the wonderfully titled Massacre of the Icons were scatters of broken-up lines suggestive of tally marks or some kind of primitive mapping. In fact, they were influenced by the artist’s fascination with Linear B, the early Greek syllabic script famously deciphered in the mid-twentieth century. Many years later, around 2015, she would return more directly to this source.8

In the works that followed Portraits of Women, she favored dispersed areas of muted color, close to monochrome but so anti-pristine, so subtly variegated, that “monochrome” seems a serious misnomer. In this work, and in everything that would follow, Cohen pursued a surface grittiness and a porousness of shape that alienated her work from the cool, clean look of post-painterly abstraction. But this didn’t mean she reverted to the direct painterliness of gestural abstraction: Like many other New York painters of her generation who were confronting the widespread notion that painting, and especially abstract painting, was a “dead” medium, Cohen needed to fashion her own definition of painting, and her own artistic genealogy.

It was in 1984, the year she showed Portraits of Women, that Cohen was introduced to Joan Mitchell, an older painter who would provide Cohen much invaluable support and offer a model of artistic independence. As the decade progressed, Cohen stayed several times at Mitchell’s home in Vétheuil outside of Paris, joining a circle of young French and American artists who had gravitated around the older painter. This was also the moment when Cohen became closely involved with Bomb magazine, an influential arts journal that published interviews with artists and texts by many of the most adventurous young New York writers. In the fall of 1986, BOMB published an interview that Cohen and Bomb editor Betsy Sussler had conducted with Mitchell. As well as being valuable to anyone interested in Mitchell, this text, which at points is more of a conversation than a simple series of questions and answers, also provides a glimpse into Cohen’s working process:

JM: I can manufacture a painting. Can’t you? But I’d get bored. Can you work long? I can’t work long.
CC: That’s basically how I like to work. I get into it and work for 12 hours.
JM: What do you take—vitamins?
CC: Well, it’s not all of the same intensity.
JM: That’s what I mean. Some of it’s squeezing paint, or hammering stretchers.
CC: No, not hammering. I can push the paint around 10 hours.
JM: It must look awful after pushing it around. Do you get a kind of non-color, New York quality? I mean by 12 hours of pushing paint around you’ll have smog over Los Angeles.
CC: You do not.
JM: How do you do it? This is oil paint. Right?
CC: That’s what I do.
JM: That’s what I thought. How do you do it?
CC: I work a lot wet into wet. What’s the matter?
JM: I’m having a good time.
CC: Because you’re baiting me.
JM: C’mon, how do you work wet into wet for 12 hours and keep a fresh look. You don’t. You can’t. What do you get, that weathered look?
CC: Joan, you’re not supposed to censure in advance.9

The image of Cohen “pushing paint around” continuously for ten hours reminds us that she was an artist who discovered her work via process, an artist who didn’t feel she had to rush to resolve a painting. While Cohen’s paintings sometimes possess the “weathered look” that Mitchell noticed, they never feel overworked or weighed down by their own materiality. Rather, they seem to be paused in the act of becoming. Her work requires a similar openness from the viewer. Cohen never panders to us, never offers any easy paths to reaching the content of her painting. More so than any of her contemporaries, from the mid-1980s on Cohen not only refuses to adopt a signature style but also forgoes any easy compositional methods, any obvious visual hooks.

By 1984, painting was no longer under critical interdiction. On the contrary, thanks to the much-publicized advent of Neo-Expressionism, it had again become ubiquitous. What hadn’t changed, however, and what in some ways had gotten even worse than in the 1970s, was the gross underrepresentation of women painters in nearly every important exhibition and, as a result, from the higher echelons of the art market. This was the year that the Museum of Modern Art, New York, mounted An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture, an exhibition in which only nineteen of the 169 artists included were women. But away from the spotlight, in galleries that were mostly downtown, a different vision of painting was emerging, one that was not only far better balanced in terms of gender but that also approached the medium of painting, and abstraction in particular, with a newly critical attitude. Klaus Kertess, who had introduced Cohen to Mitchell, included her in Figures of Paint, a 1984 exhibition at the adventurous Cable Gallery that also featured Dona Nelson, Louise Fishman, and Carroll Dunham, among others. Over the next several years, Cohen participated in group exhibitions in various New York galleries, including Aspects of Abstraction at Holly Solomon Gallery. Reviewing this 1988 exhibition of seven abstract painters (including Mitchell) in the New York Times, Brenson noted, “For someone who has not seen Ms. Cohen’s work in a while, her Molloy at Tournus may come as a surprise. It is large (8 feet tall by 8½ feet wide) and confident. Irregular black stripes are stained into the canvas. Gestures influenced by Ms. Mitchell mill about at the left and begin to disperse across the surface. Not every gesture has the necessary conviction, but a dialogue between inside and outside, speed and measure, is in place.”10 Brenson also noted the influence of France on Cohen, perhaps because of the title Molloy at Tournus—the town of Tournus in Eastern France is the site of an important eleventh-century Romanesque church—and in the mid-1980s Cohen had traveled around France in search of Romanesque architecture. Solomon would give Cohen a solo show in 1990.

One feature of Cohen’s work during the second half of the 1980s was the eruption of passages of thick impasto against thinly painted or stained atmospheric grounds. An example is the 70 by 66 inch (Untitled 1987) (Can-Can Dancer), where a giant, gnarly knot of oil paint floats against the ground like a painterly asteroid. There’s an obvious affinity between these works and the paintings that Cohen’s friend Stephen Mueller was making at the time. (The two had met at Bennington in the early 1970s and remained close after relocating to New York.) Neither artist, it seems, could resist the frisson of introducing Neo-Expressionist impasto into the legacy of Color Field painting. When some of these 1980s paintings, which hadn’t been seen in decades, were shown at the New York gallery Morgan Presents in the fall of 2022, they received an enthusiastic reception.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Cohen felt compelled to make paintings that embodied the speed and disjunctions of the environment around her. “So much struck me in New York at the end of the ’80s and the beginning of the ’90s as plastic, technological, distanced and cold,” she said. “My paintings then were a reflection of that.”11 Accordingly, she moved quickly from one painting to another, doing lots of pouring paint and sprinkling pigments (often powdered earth pigments) and various industrial materials onto the paintings. For her, pouring and sprinkling were “distanced procedures,”12 fruitful alternatives to the brush. She also would sometimes recycle studio drop cloths for paintings, another way of injecting distance from the hand into the work.

With her typical restlessness and love of experimenting with new materials, Cohen kept pushing the boundaries of abstract painting. In 1992 she initiated a group exhibition titled An Esemplastic Shift at the innovative AC Project Room. Based on a concept she found in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria—Cohen was a passionate student of literature and philosophy—the show, as she later described it, was about “painting aware of its limitations but behaving as if it’s not; painting as a protean form, condensing, expanding, shifting energy to the dimensional.”13 Reviewing An Esemplastic Shift for the New York Times, Roberta Smith identified a prevailing “sense of physical experimentation” and approvingly noted how Cohen enlisted unconventional items (“plastic mesh and polyurethane as well as oil and pigment”) while remaining in the realm of gestural abstraction.14 Less than two months later, another New York Times critic, Holland Cotter, in reviewing Contemporary Surfaces at Pamela Auchincloss Gallery, detected convincing “emotional energy” in Cohen’s “delicate but rambunctious Tropological Painting, a mélange of bright fruit-colored pigment and scraps of odd applied materials (a toothpick, some masking tape) on a sheet of unmounted Mylar.”15

Cohen’s radical openness toward her medium is evident in this account of how she would begin a new painting:

Sometimes a subject—sometimes a work of art, sometimes a physical object charged with personal or historical significance—provides a source. And sometimes it’s odd things I get connected with, that are debased. Recently I saw an air freshener hanging in a subway car. I thought it was odd and took a picture of it and then found it very beautiful. Its sweet colors combined with its mundane aspect intrigued me. Then a painting I’m working on at the moment had a shape reminiscent of that air freshener and I decided the painting ought to be in those colors.16

Before going off in search of the Cohen painting that was inspired by an air freshener, it’s important to take into account what she said next: “Usually my source material ceases to be my reference point and the process of adding and subtracting paint takes over and becomes the subject as well as the content of a work.”17

With the death of Joan Mitchell in October 1992, Cohen lost a crucial mentor. But thanks to her increasing visibility in group exhibitions, by the early ’90s Cohen’s work began to find a context in New York, especially among painters of a new generation. In an influential 1991 article titled “Painting and Its Others: In the Realm of the Feminine,” painter Shirley Kaneda addressed the masculine/feminine question in Cohen’s work. While noting some “masculine” traits, Kaneda argued that “the underlying structure is feminine in its atomization. In her work, processes are articulated, making them explicit as a subject. Events take place simultaneously, without hierarchy or synthesis, unlike the masculine, which establishes an echelon of forms, or reduces everything to the commonality of a field, an unbroken surface or continuity. Cohen’s work is fragmented into short-term events replicating the temporal, rather than the endlessly meditative or iconic.”18 Three years later, in an essay for the catalogue of Cohen’s 1994 solo exhibition at Jason McCoy, the great feminist art historian Linda Nochlin took a different position, rejecting altogether the notion of there being any kind of “feminine” quality shared by Cohen and other women painters:

Must gender play a role in the work of all women artists, even the most abstract ones? Think of the work of three women abstract artists who have had shows recently: Joan Mitchell, Joan Snyder, and Cora Cohen. Their work is more different than it is alike it would seem, except in the negative sense: they all seem more part of their respective generations—male and female—than to share in some sort of essentialist feminine sensibility.19

An important turning point for Cohen came in 1996 when she rented a studio in Cologne and, with that as a base, undertook extensive art-viewing trips around Europe. The experience of her German year—a period in which she devoted herself to creating works on paper and vellum rather than painting on linen (a shift that initially came about because for a time she was without a studio)—had the effect of returning a gestural component to her painting. As Cohen saw it, “by reintroducing brushwork as surrogate for my touch, my work had become more reliant on emotive and psychological force and connected to personal contingency.”20 When the paintings she made after returning from Europe, as well as some begun long before, were shown in New York at Jason McCoy, the exhibition attracted substantial critical attention. Among what he termed “a particularly intense group of works,” David Ebony, writing for artnet.com, singled out one canvas in particular: “the largest painting on view, the approximately 9-by-7-foot Terrains Vagues, which the artist worked on for six years, presents gray ground covered with countless incidents of contention, all of which are somehow defused.”21 As with so many of Cohen’s paintings, the making of Terrains Vagues involved the artist dousing her linen support with an unconventional mix of materials, including copper powder, enamel, Flashe, marble dust, oil, oil medium, plastic mesh, and polyurethane. Writing about the same show in Time Out, Yvette Brackman was struck by The Abject-As-Intermediary,22 in which “a viscous, impenetrable fluid pools at the bottom of the canvas, directly above, the paint is as wet and matted as damp animal fur.”23

Another important frame of reference that emerged for Cohen in the 1990s, one that is perhaps closer to the heart of her project than the feminist insights of Kaneda and Nochlin, is the concept of “the formless” as articulated by Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss in their 1996 exhibition at the Centre Pompidou and in the subsequent book Formless: A User’s Guide. Building on Georges Bataille’s concept of the informe, Bois and Krauss sought to articulate a new and subversive approach to the form/content binary that, in their view, had distorted interpretations of modern art. As Bois puts it in his introduction, when art achieves the condition of formlessness “matter cannot be reabsorbed by the image (the concept of image presupposes a possible distinction between form and matter, and it is this distinction, insofar as it is an abstraction, that the operation of the formless tries to collapse.)”24 While admitting in a 2013 interview that the “exclusionary, esoteric nature” of Bois and Krauss’s book “feels even more exclusionary and esoteric now,” Cohen recalled how “at the time, their terminology (‘base materialism,’ ‘horizontality,’ ‘entropy’) was a relief.”25

The concept of a collapse of form and matter is deeply relevant to Cohen’s work in which entropically dispersed paint rarely coalesces into any kind of “image.” Two of the artists central to Bois and Krauss, Jean Fautrier and Wols, were also important to Cohen, who was drawn to their work by what she called its “odd materiality.”26 (It’s worth noting that Cohen’s discovery of Fautrier and Wols, as well as other informel painters, came at a time when, Formless: A User’s Guide notwithstanding, few American painters were interested in or even aware of postwar European abstraction.) In both artists she found an unusual disconnect between line and form:

Wols’s line is so abstract—as it is with Agnes Martin—it has nothing to do with describing the forms on which they are drawn. . . . Taking one’s time looking at his paintings and drawings, one becomes aware of a renunciation of form as an organizing element, and a rejection of quotidian psychological space. The abstraction of Fautrier and Wols counters the striving toward logic that is inherent in people—all people, those who make art objects and those who view them.27

The liberation of line from shape first becomes visible in many works on paper from the early 1970s, long before her discovery of Wols and Fautrier. Only later would it become a frequent fixture in her paintings. In the painting Reflection of Space, for instance, jagged lines overlay broad areas of blue and white paint while seeming to deliberately miss opportunities to coordinate with them. Similar effects are visible in several 2016 paintings that include the word “meander” in their titles, and in the provocatively titled Reject. In a very late painting, Point Counter Point, a variety of ghostly lines form biomorphic shapes whose contours seem to blithely ignore the underlying areas of pastel color. Another enthralling late painting, Portrait of an Artist, takes the dissociation of line and shape even further; it looks as if the painting has been begun and abandoned several times, with no effort made to erase the false starts. Given the work’s title, Cohen seems to be telling—no—showing us something fundamental about her process. Such disjunctions should not be seen as examples of Surrealist-inspired automatism—as always, chezCohen, there is clearly a series of deliberate choices being made: when to change mediums, tools, colors, thickness of line, density of color. Yet she shares with automatist painters (and others) a determination to avoid “good” composition and all comfortable protocols of abstract painting in order to access other ways of seeing. In many ways the artist Cohen most resembles in her renegade spirit is Sigmar Polke, not only for the German’s painter’s attraction to the irrational and his penchant for frustrating lazy viewers, but also because of their mutual fascination with conducting pseudo-alchemical experiments on the surfaces of their paintings.28 But Cohen arguably took matters further than Polke in her quest for paintings that were “unstable” or “fluid,” where, as she put it in some 2012 lecture notes, “figure and ground shift and reform continually, and absence and presence change places.”29 If the power of Cohen’s work depends heavily on a deep understanding of her materials and processes acquired over decades of studio practice, she also knew when to trust intuition and illogic, when to let the painting make itself. Underlying this quest for fluidity and openness was a set of ethical beliefs about aesthetic experience. As she declared in her 2012 lecture notes, “I am against art that tries to control how the viewer sees the work, where the artist lays down laws about what art should be, thereby limiting the participation and the autonomy of the viewer.”30

One of Cohen’s last assistants, Benjamin Langford, who was able to watch the artist at work, has eloquently described how she balanced the deliberate and the accidental:

In looking at one of her works, you can see her decisions show profound daring—marks and layers that threaten to muddy, unbalance, or destroy a work—yet she embraced these elements and maintained a precarious balance and beauty. Her confidence did not come from a foolhardy place, but a place of accepting and moving with the ebbs and flows of life. Her work seems so at home alongside the accidental abstractions of the world: spills, damage, or dust—but also primordial growth, like nature has begun to reclaim her canvases. Cora could appreciate and accept the world in its ambiguity and struggles—and her work acts to inspire such an understanding.31

Of all Cohen’s departures from conventional materials, the Altered X-Rays paintings of the 1990s are arguably the most extreme. Emerging early in the decade out of Cohen’s persistent anger at the US government’s initial failure to take the AIDS epidemic seriously because so many of the victims were gay or trans or intravenous drug users, this series consists of paintings made on exposed roentgenographs (mostly the standard size, 17 by 14 inches).32 As Sidra Stich explained in a 1996 essay, Cohen “effaced sections of the film—and the body imagery—by dissolving, shriveling, or burning the surface with chemicals [and in other cases] enhanced the film’s black-and-white appearance and homogeneously smooth, slick surface by applying globs, rivulets, and sprays of pigment and textural substances like metallic powders (copper, silver, aluminum), mica, enamel, paper, wax, and polyurethane.”33 In effect, Cohen treated these products of the medical industry the way she treated the linen supports of her paintings (apart from actually destroying the surfaces). While the first Altered X-Rays focused only on roentgenographs from AIDS patients, by the end of the decade Cohen had expanded her sources to include medical image records of, as she put it, “strangers, friends, and colleagues with a wider variety of disorders.”34 She also drew on products of newer imaging techniques such as sonograms and neuromagnetic resonance. When exhibited, the Altered X-Rays are hung slightly off the wall, creating shadows as the light filters through the transparent film. For Cohen, these works were not only a form of protest and mourning but also a metaphor for one of her abiding concerns: the play of the material and the immaterial.

The Altered X-Rays can also be seen as a version of Cohen’s passion for photography—an interest, it’s worth noting, that she shared with Wols. For much of her life, she loved to wander the streets of whatever city she happened to be in, taking photos of random, odd details of the urban landscape. In 1999, Abaton Press published a small pamphlet of photographs she had taken in Berlin and New York. Titled The Record, the Death, the Surprise, it represented, in Cohen’s own words from the brief preface, her “efforts to record and in some sense assimilate the unfathomable.”35 This psychogeographical dimension of her work was explored more fully in a 2007 exhibition titled Oblique Forms: Spray Paint Paintings, Photographs, The Hybrid Indexical Adventure Series, at Abaton Garage, a small artist-run gallery in Jersey City. In a text about the show, artist-critic Stephen Maine described how the various components of Cohen’s practice cohered:

Cohen’s photographs of the streets of Manhattan and Berlin engage the textures and tonalities of neglected spaces within the metropolis. They provide the evidence that, though the paintings suggest spaces of oceanic vastness, they are anchored to the world of appearances. The photos—snapshots by an artist who seeks out the unfiltered—are field notes, specimens, raw data. They often show features of the public domain refit to private ends, which is precisely analogous to Cohen’s studio procedure. The Spray Paint Paintings (acrylic, oil, spray paint on linen), in particular, are tethered to the quotidian by the use of spray enamel in colors such as fluorescent orange and aluminum, evoking not graffiti so much as the utilitarian marking of construction workers and maintenance crews.36

Cohen always seemed to have paid attention to her surroundings and drawn inspiration from them, whether walking the streets or looking out from her studio window. (An episode about Cohen on the cable television series 13 Artists in the Studio37 opens with a fascinating montage of what Cohen could see from her Lower Broadway studio in the mid-1990s.) Her sensitivity to the world outside her studio subtly changed whenever she moved. In a late interview she recalls her thoughts after moving to her second studio in Long Island City at the end of 2019:

And I soon realized that here in my new place, the relationship of the inside space to the outside world is different. At the start of being here, in addition to seeing water and barges and trains, I could also see debilitated military veterans from the shelter for homeless veterans across the way. The inside space and the outside world are more continuous and, as such, that called to mind my thoughts about New York City in 2007, when my studio was in Chelsea [this was during her nomad years, between leaving 287 Broadway and moving to Long Island City] and Chelsea was changing to a place for luxury and I was becoming acutely aware of the neighborhood’s income disparities.38

As much as Cohen drew energy from the unpredictable juxtapositions offered by city life, it was hardly her only source of inspiration. While her titles could be blatantly matter-of-fact (for instance, Brown with Drips or Blue Horizontal, they are far more often allusive. Some reference modern poets such as Wallace Stevens and Delmore Schwartz, while others evoke Jewish history and culture, such as The Baalshem Reveals Himself, which points to the eighteenth-century Jewish mystic known as the Baal Shem Tov, who had been considered an unremarkable person before he famously revealed himself as a powerful spiritual healer. The 1998 painting Nebel is titled with the German word for “fog,” and the painting does indeed feature a turbulent mass of foggy gray paint, but Cohen would surely have known from Alain Resnais’s groundbreaking Holocaust documentary Night and Fog of the Nazi use of the phrase “nacht und nebel” to describe their policy of “disappearing” political prisoners. The titles of many other works hint at her debt to French theorists such as Maurice Blanchot and Roland Barthes.

Cohen seems to have shared Barthes’ skepticism toward approaching creative works in quest of singular meanings, and definitely adopted the French writer’s idea of “dodging or baffling the paradigmatic, oppositional structure of meaning . . . [and] the suspension of the conflictual basis of discourse.”39 There is a persistent concern in her art to baffle the conventional expectations of her viewers in order to keep painting, and abstract painting in particular, radically open. Interestingly, her campaign against simplistic varieties of meaning, against easy resolution, has perhaps more affinities with some distinctly non-abstract artists (one thinks of early David Salle or Mel Bochner’s conceptual work of the 1960s) than it does with Cohen’s Abstract Expressionist and Color Field influences.

A solo exhibition provocatively titled Come in a Little Closer at Michael Steinberg Fine Arts in Chelsea in 2007 gave Cohen an opportunity to expose her thoughts about painting without, as she put it, “relying on a stylistic or formal organization.”40 In the critical responses to the show it’s evident that viewers were beginning to better grasp her painting, to see it as a distinctive project. Writing in the Brooklyn Rail, artist-critic Joan Waltemath observed that “Cohen defies the classical organization of foreground and background,” and how, when abstract “images” do appear in the work, they are usually “transitory and dissolve again after a moment, not allowing the painting to coalesce into a specific ‘thing’, but rather keeping the perceptual experience open to exchange.”41 Picking up on the deliberately disparate choice of work, another reviewer, Jennifer Riley, appreciated how “rather than following a single stylistic thread, the ten paintings on view tend to follow thematic paths; each distinguished by its own surprising internal logic.”42 Riley also eloquently described the constant metamorphoses experienced by viewers of Cohen’s work: “Forms become clouds, then spills, then bones, then traces of footprints in mud, then strokes, then spills, then clouds again! What may initially recall the dirty clay and rubble floor exposed during infrastructure upgrades can just as eloquently evoke oxidized, faded frescoes of a Cimabue at Assisi. Just as the systematic opening and then closing of a street’s surface seems to have a physical counterpart in the activity of Cohen’s studio, colors from both inside and outside the history of painting are fluently put into play.”43

In the works where she uses very liquid paint, broad gestures are subsumed into ever-broader veils of color, and when the paint is thicker she lets it accumulate into boulder-like shapes, often so dark that it’s hard at a glance to detect the countless marks employed. The predominance of dark and muted colors in Cohen’s work, especially in the paintings, can lead one to overlook her gifts as a colorist. Often the understated colors are the result of Cohen’s unusual technique of applying watercolor to linen, resulting in thin, barely-there tints of color. Her fondness for pale, watery brushstrokes can give her paintings, even the very large ones, the feel of spontaneous experiments in a sketchbook, a causal informality that allies her art to that of older painters such as Kimber Smith and Bram Van Velde. Something similar can happen with her use of screenprinting, though the areas printed with silkscreen ink tend toward gray and black. She also frequently obscured areas of bright color with expanses of dense black. But she was hardly chromophobic. Her oeuvre is full of bold colors, as in the slab of orange-red hiding at the bottom of the otherwise muted Little Nomad 8, or the smear of pink in Contingency, a small painting dominated by icy green and white and darker areas of raw linen. Nor was she afraid of pretty colors: The small painting Pink and Blue, for instance, features an entanglement of flowing blue and pink brushstrokes redolent of chiffon and cotton candy. Some of her late works on paper are similarly vibrant with joyful palettes. Reviewing her 2013 exhibition at Guided By Invoices, artist-critic David Rhodes observed how the thin layers of paint that Cohen so often favored “seem to both emit and trap light.”44

The variousness that pervades Cohen’s work, even among paintings made more or less simultaneously, is all the more surprising in that she tended to work on multiple paintings, of different sizes, all at once. “They sort of breed each other,” is how she once described what happened in her New York studio.45 One of her assistants, painter Samuel Jablon, recalls how Cohen “was always dragging the paintings around. She would stretch them and I [would] stretch them, cut them up, and glue them to each other. Sometimes they would just be used as tables and placed on saw horses. She liked the stains and the spills . . . one painting would start on the floor, and then be a table for a while, and then once it was kind of stained enough she took it to the wall or painted on blocks.”46

After being forced out of the Lower Manhattan studio that was also her home in late 2007, Cohen bounced around New York, living and working in various places. One positive thing that emerged from this serious disruption was Nomads, a series of small paintings featuring pieces of wood veneer. She got the idea of using wood veneer from her discovery of the twentieth-century French architect and furniture designer Jean Prouvé, known for his portable prefab structures such as the Maison Tropicale, an aluminum house he designed for use in equatorial Africa. Fascinated by his furniture designs, Cohen began cutting pieces of wood veneer to match Prouvé’s shapes with the idea of possibly using them in her paintings.

In an interview, she describes what happened next:

I found unexpected curves and moves that I had not seen or known of in advance—the forms seemed animated. Those discoveries caused me to discard my expectation of what the form first signaled. The resulting slippages and discrepancies prompted me to include disparate elements in the rest of the painting—like a seemingly random brush stroke. I guess I saw Prouvé’s forms eliciting in me an inclination to follow my own bent. The Nomads would best be seen in liminal and odd spaces, at irregular intervals, on a wall of a staircase, opposite an elevator, in an elevator, on the exterior wall of an exhibition space. These spaces would be provisional way stations for the works, and I hoped that the irregular intervals and placements would allow—even encourage—the viewer’s consideration of our uncertainty in the world.47

In most of her work, Cohen tends to elide the differences between gesture and shape to compelling effect, but inserting pieces of wood veneer into the paintings allowed her to play with more distinct shapes. In Nomad 2, for instance, the veneer is surrounded by equally solid painted shapes.

In 2011, a solo exhibition of Cohen’s work was held at the Raketenstation Museum Insel Hombroich, a museum set within a nature preserve in Neuss, Germany. In 2013, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. For the next nine years, apart from a small 2016 exhibition of the Meander drawings at the New York Studio School, Cohen would go without a solo show in any New York gallery, which made the recognition and financial support of a Guggenheim all the more important. Out of this near-decade would emerge an immense amount of work, paintings and works on paper as compelling and distinctive as anything that had come before. She continued to make small Nomad paintings with Prouvé-inspired veneers, larger more gestural works exploring her reawakened interest in Linear B, Meander paintings that foregrounded her love of drawing, and, in 2018 to 2019, a powerful group of paintings in which nuanced screenprinted fields and jagged splotches of dense, dark brushwork nearly obliterated the entire linen support. (These latter paintings had their start with a group of monochrome screenprints of paintings she had made more than fifteen years earlier.) Along with incorporating aspects of Linear B (graphic fragments of logograms and pictograms) into her work, Cohen also perceived in the lengthy and convoluted efforts to decipher the mysterious ancient script a reflection of her own artistic journeys. She especially relished the fact that the person who finally cracked the code, Michael Ventris, was an amateur archeologist.

In December 2019, Cohen moved to a new studio in Long Island City. As the COVID-19 pandemic hit the city just a few months later, she decided to take advantage of the imposed isolation.

I wanted to go back to my own beginnings as a painter—my love of making things with my hands. So I started making work in our living room, going back into small unfinished paintings and drawings from various periods of my life that I had left unfinished and then abandoned. My sense that life was not infinite and that what I had not finished might never be finished unless I did so right away took over. The works I made in the spring of 2020 had that sense of urgency. Because they had been begun at different periods, I saw them as bridges between past and present, between life and death, life and the possibility of an afterlife, and between the past and a radically uncertain future.48

Across every period of her career it’s impossible to predict from one painting (or work on paper) to the next what kind of compositional strategy Cohen would adopt. She was just as likely to push the dominant linear motifs off to the side, ceding the center of the composition to the washes and stains of muted color, as she was to fill near the entire support with a single rough block of dark color or a curtain of translucent brushstrokes. What she seemed to be looking for in this constant variation was a way to disrupt, just as her models Wols and Fautrier did, that “striving toward logic that is inherent in people.” Perhaps the body of work that best exemplifies this anti-strategic strategy are the watercolors she made in the last several years of her life. Generally created on 22-by-30-inch sheets of paper and sometimes including touches of the Flashe paint Cohen loved, these works often feature clumps of watery marks in colors that range from decaying leaves and pond algae to crushed berries and wine stains. Other smaller late drawings employ graphite and matte medium. To peruse these late works on paper is to accompany the artist’s restless imagination as she constantly shifts between casual-looking, wildly decentered compositions and allover veils of translucent color. In one 2022 watercolor there’s an unmistakable still-life image of a pink flower in a vase, an anomaly in Cohen’s overwhelmingly non-objective work.

To the end of her life Cohen delighted in creating paintings with unconventional combinations of materials, as if she could only realize her particular vision via working methods that resembled no one else’s. The 2022 painting Wind in Pines is a large horizontal composition of countless broken-up translucent planes achieved with a Cohenesque (that’s to say, unlike any other painter) set of ingredients: Flashe, pigment, silkscreen ink, and watercolor.49 The title suggests not only a possible inspiration in nature but also that the artist was contemplating the relationship between the visible and the invisible or, as she put it, between “life and the possibility of an afterlife.” As must happen to us all sooner or later, Cora Cohen the person, the painter, the thinker about painting, has herself become invisible, but the artworks that she has left behind remain magnificently visible. Indeed, their visibility is just beginning.

Notes

1. Cora Cohen, quoted in “Artist, in Court, Tells Owners to Reopen Landmark Building, Tribeca Trib, October 31, 2011, https://www.tribecatrib.com/content/artist-court-tells-owners-reopen-landmark-building%C2%A0-0.

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

3. Ibid.

4. Cora Cohen & Manfred Engeser, “220724 Engeser Interview,” 2022. On the artist’s website, http://www.coracohen.com/texts/archive-1.html.

5. Ibid.

6. Michael Brenson, “Cora Cohen at Max Hutchinson,” New York Times, March 16, 1984. On the artist’s website: http://www.coracohen.com/texts/about-21.html.

7. Cora Cohen & Manfred Engeser, “220724 Engeser Interview.”

8. Ibid.

9. Cora Cohen and Betsy Sussler, “Joan Mitchell” (interview), BOMB magazine 17, Fall 1986, https://bombmagazine.org/articles/1986/10/01/joan-mitchell/.

10. Michael Brenson, “Art: Works by 7 Women, ‘Aspects of Abstraction,’” New York Times, January 22, 1988. https://www.nytimes.com/1988/01/22/arts/art-works-by-7-women-aspects-of-abstraction.html

11. “Interview with Cora Cohen,” Bentley Gallery, Phoenix, November 1998. On artist’s website, http://www.coracohen.com/texts/about-15.html.

12. Ibid.

13. Cora Cohen, “Narrative_long,” 2011. On the artist’s website, http://www.coracohen.com/texts/archive-11.html.

14. Roberta Smith, “Art in Review,” New York Times, June 26, 1992.

15. Holland Cotter, “Art in Review,” New York Times, August 7, 1992.

16. Cora Cohen & Manfred Engeser, “220724 Engeser Interview.”

17. Ibid.

18. Shirley Kaneda, “Painting and Its Others: In the Realm of The Feminine,” Arts Magazine 65, Summer 1991, pp. 58-64. Reprinted in Terry R. Myers, ed., Painting: Documents of Contemporary Art, Whitechapel Gallery, London, and The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2011, pp. 72-80.

19. Linda Nochlin, “Cora Cohen: Recent Paintings,” in Cora Cohen: Recent Paintings (New York: Jason McCoy Inc., 1994). On the artist’s website, http://www.coracohen.com/texts/about-19.html, accessed May 25, 202, accessed May 25, 2025.

20. Cora Cohen, “Narrative_long.”

21. David Ebony, “New York’s Top 10: Cora Cohen,” artnet.com, September 1997, http://www.artnet.com/magazine_pre2000/reviews/ebony/ebony9-23-97(7).asp.

22. Artwork subsequently destroyed.[So many of the artworks mentioned appear in the Monograph that I thought it important to flag one we know was destroyed.

23. Yvette Brackman, “Cora Cohen at Jason McCoy,” Time Out New York, October 1997. On the artist’s website, http://coracohen.com/texts/about-17.html. This artwork was subsequently destroyed.

24. Yve-Alain Bois, introduction to Formless: A User’s Guide, ed. Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss (New York: Zone Books, 1996), 29.

25. Cora Cohen, quoted in Samuel Jablon, “The Formative Formlessness of Cora Cohen.”

26. Cora Cohen & Manfred Engeser, “220724 Engeser Interview.”

27. Ibid.

28. In her contribution to the Brooklyn Rail tribute to Cohen, Mary Jones, a friend of the artist’s, recalls how during a talk Barry Schwabsky gave about Cohen at Jason McCoy Gallery in 1984, he described her work as “alchemical” and Cohen “in her inimitable way. . . interrupted him and said, ‘No, it’s chemical.’” See “A Tribute to Cora Cohen,” The Brooklyn Rail, February 2024, https://brooklynrail.org/2024/02/in-memoriam/A-Tribute-to-Cora-Cohen/.

29. Cora Cohen, “2012 Lecture Notes,” 2012. On the artist’s website, http://www.coracohen.com/texts/archive-8.html

30. Ibid. Cohen also expressed this sentiment in other lectures, as well as her interview with Engeser.

31. Benjamin Langford, in “A Tribute to Cora Cohen.” The Brooklyn Rail, February, 2024. https://brooklynrail.org/2024/02/in-memoriam/A-Tribute-to-Cora-Cohen/

32. This was Cohen’s preferred term for roentgenograms (ed.).

33. See Sidra Stich, Cora Cohen: Paintings and Altered X-rays (1983–1996) (Tuscaloosa, AL: Sarah Moody Gallery of Art, , 1996).

34. Cora Cohen & Manfred Engeser, “220724 Engeser Interview.”

35. Cora Cohen, The record, the death, the surprise (Newton, NJ: Abaton Book Company, 1999), not paginated.

36. Stephen Maine, “Keeping It Real,” in Oblique Forms: Spray Paint Paintings, Photographs, The Hybrid Indexical Adventure Series (Jersey City: New Jersey, Abaton Garage, 2007), available online, http://www.coracohen.com/texts/about-9.html, accessed May 25, 2025.

37. 13 Artists in the Studio: Cora Cohen, Morgan Snyder St John, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juiT3HqZBT4, 2014

38. Cora Cohen & Manfred Engeser, “220724 Engeser Interview.”

39. Roland Barthes, The Neutral (Lecture Course at the College de France 1977-1978), translated by Rosalind E. Kraus and Denis Hollier (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). Cohen’s studio library included a copy of the paperback edition, and she referenced the influence of his ideas in a series of lectures she gave between 2011 and 2016.

40. Cohen, draft of biographical essay for Guggenheim Fellowship application, 2011.

41. Joan Waltemath, “Cora Cohen: Michael Steinberg Gallery,” The Brooklyn Rail, November 2008, available on Guided by Invoices website, https://guidedbyinvoices.us/artists/CoraCohen/Press/2008_11_Cora_Cohen_The_Brooklyn_Rail.pdf, accessed May 25, 2025.

42. Jennifer Riley, “Cora Cohen: Come in a Little Closer at Michael Steinberg,” artcritical.com, October 2008, available at. http://coracohen.com/texts/about-7.html

43. Ibid.

44. David Rhodes, “Dirty/Clean Painting: Cora Cohen at Guided by Invoices,” artcritical.com, March 6, 2013, https://artcritical.com/2013/03/06/cora-cohen/.

45. “Interview with Cora Cohen,” Bentley Gallery, Phoenix, November 1998, available online, http://www.coracohen.com/texts/about-15.html, accessed May 25, 2025.

46. Samuel Jablon, email to the author, January 22, 2025.

47. Cora Cohen & Manfred Engeser, “220724 Engeser Interview.”

48. Ibid.

49. The screenprinted image in Wind in Pines is derived from Cohen’s 2008 painting Curtain. According to Benjamin Langford, for Wind in Pines “the screen was rotated 180 degrees after printing and printed again to make a horizontal composition.” Langford, email to Jeffrey M. Jones, March 29, 2025.

Images included in the article

Orange Series 01, 1963
9 x 12 in.
Paint on paper

Sacagawea, 1983
Oil on linen
77 x 77 in.

Ruby, 1983
Oil on linen
78 x 78 in.

Massacre of the Icons, 1980
Oil on linen
77 x 104 in

Molloy at Tournus, 1987
Flashe and oil on linen
97 x 103 in.

Nebel, 1998
Acrylic medium, copper, latex, and pastel on muslin
47 x 43 in.

The Baal Shem Reveals Himself, 1986
Flashe and oil on linen
66 x 70 in.

Contingency, 2006
Acrylic medium, Flashe, and opaque watercolor on linen
17 x 19 in.

Monograph cover

May 19, 2026

Cora Cohen: The Presences of Absence

Raphael Rubinstein

This essay was published in Cora Cohen (Gregory R. Miller & Co., 2026)

In late 2007, the elegant nineteenth-century cast-iron building on Lower Broadway where Cora Cohen had been living and working for thirty-five years began to subside and tilt to such a dangerous extent that the New York City Department of Buildings ordered an evacuation of all the tenants. For Cohen, who occupied the top floor of the six-story structure, this was an incredibly disruptive event. Apart from some extended stays in Germany and France, it had been her home since 1972, and its large windows and three exposures (north, east, and west) provided ample and often glorious light. She eventually relocated to Long Island City, where she would remain for the rest of her life, but not without a years-long legal battle as she tried to force the landlord to repair the building and remove the code violations so that she and other tenants could return. In 2009, while this unpleasant process was still going on, Cohen was interviewed by a reporter from the Tribeca Trib, who accompanied her on one of her return visits to the empty building to retrieve items from her studio. “It’s my home and I want to come back here and I want to be left alone and make the paintings I want to make. That’s what I do,”1 she told the paper. While, sadly, Cohen was never able to return to 287 Broadway, for the fourteen years remaining before her death in 2023 she continued to make the paintings she wanted to make, thus completing a body of work that spans six decades, encompassing hundreds of paintings, even more works on paper, and additional series of works in more unconventional formats. Despite her expressed desire “to be left alone” in the studio, throughout her career Cohen consistently engaged with other artists, contributing to the discourse around painting, and abstract painting in particular. As often happens when an artist dies, the immediate sense of loss is gradually replaced by a growing appreciation for their achievements as the scope of their life’s work comes slowly into focus.

One noteworthy aspect of Cohen’s trajectory is how she connected with multiple generations of artists, both on a personal level through friendships and dialogues and via her work. While this generational promiscuity may have sometimes been detrimental to Cohen’s career—some observers weren’t sure where to “place” her—it fed her painting and kept her in constant creative evolution. The first cohort of artists that Cohen encountered were associated with Color Field painting, a mode that was particularly influential at Bennington College in Vermont, where Cohen earned a BA degree in 1964. (In the early 1970s, Cohen would return to Bennington on a fellowship for graduate study, receiving an MA from the college in 1972.) If nothing else, her encounter with this work and its adherents helped her understand what she didn’t want to do as a painter. Many years later she recalled, “When I was a student at Bennington College in the ’60s and early ’70s, Clement Greenberg asserted the primacy of a particular aesthetic. In addition, he advanced a formalist analysis that was based on Wöfflin. Greenberg’s formalism became linked with the style of the work he supported—color field painting.”2

Cohen could see the attraction of formalism, but for her it held very little interest: “I do know that it [formalism] has been utilized to remove a sense of the world from the practice of painting, and has enabled the consideration of a painting as an autonomous object, often outside of any social system. I refute this obliquely and explicitly.”3 Throughout her life as an artist, Cohen did indeed resist the notion of art as an autonomous object, whether by taking cues from random street detritus (as evidenced in the photographs of urban environments she often took in New York and Berlin and Cologne) or in the Altered X-rays that she created in response to the AIDS crisis, or in some of her later work that, as she readily acknowledged, was shaped by events such as the COVID pandemic or the Black Lives Matter movement. Yet it was not only by connecting her work to places and events outside the studio that Cohen dissented from certain modes of painting. She also came to reject the definition of the painting as a direct product of the artist’s will, as the culmination of a series of decisive and intentional actions.

Judging by some of Cohen’s earliest surviving work—in particular the Orange Series of paintings on paper that feature flat color and neat, sinuous contours—she seems to have been influenced by her Bennington teacher Paul Feeley, whose work she characterized as “soft hard-edge.” Once out of school, however, she embraced what she later recalled as “freer and more expressive brushwork.”4 She also distanced herself from anything connected to the Greenberg doctrine. In the mid-1960s, Cohen spent several years in New York City, where she had been born in 1943, struggling to find her way as a painter. Conditions improved when she was awarded two fellowships, first at the University of Pennsylvania, in 1969, and then back at Bennington, from 1970 to 1972, thanks to which she was able, at nearly thirty years old, to fully emerge as an artist. Her work began to draw attention, and in 1974 she enjoyed the double honor of having her first solo show and her museum debut at the same time in the form of an exhibition at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, New York. Unfortunately, almost none of her work from the early 1970s survives, but we can get an idea of how she thought about painting, both then and later, from her 2022 comments:

I am interested in paintings easily overlooked, paintings that one might walk by without knowing they were paintings. Something almost like air, kind of like the paintings I made in the early seventies right after graduate school. . . . They are very much related to my recent work, particularly in how they resemble the cosmos.5

Throughout her career Cohen sought to anchor her art in realities, whether cosmic or quotidian, that obliterated the well-policed borders of formalist abstraction. In the late 1970s this took the form of Portraits of Women, a series of paintings each titled with a woman’s name, among them Sacagawea (for the Native American figure) and Ruby (inspired by Ray Charles’s version of the song by composer Heinz Roemheld). When some of this work was shown at the SoHo gallery Max Hutchinson in 1984, New York Times art critic Michael Brenson noted how among the “thickly painted oils” was an untitled painting that reflected “the mood of the show as a whole.” In this painting, Brenson perceived how “a recognizable female form seems to be dancing through an opaque, untamed world, which has become the figure’s element.”6

Looking back on Portraits of Women years later, Cohen acknowledged the fluidity of her practice: “There was a seemingly free paint handling. They were not about women or paint or form, yet they reinforced all of that. My works don’t cohere, at least not in a formal way. They are about the same things but they don’t look alike, they’re not organized, their morphology is not consistent.”7 Among the “not consistent” forms that Cohen recruited into her early paintings (such as the wonderfully titled Massacre of the Icons were scatters of broken-up lines suggestive of tally marks or some kind of primitive mapping. In fact, they were influenced by the artist’s fascination with Linear B, the early Greek syllabic script famously deciphered in the mid-twentieth century. Many years later, around 2015, she would return more directly to this source.8

In the works that followed Portraits of Women, she favored dispersed areas of muted color, close to monochrome but so anti-pristine, so subtly variegated, that “monochrome” seems a serious misnomer. In this work, and in everything that would follow, Cohen pursued a surface grittiness and a porousness of shape that alienated her work from the cool, clean look of post-painterly abstraction. But this didn’t mean she reverted to the direct painterliness of gestural abstraction: Like many other New York painters of her generation who were confronting the widespread notion that painting, and especially abstract painting, was a “dead” medium, Cohen needed to fashion her own definition of painting, and her own artistic genealogy.

It was in 1984, the year she showed Portraits of Women, that Cohen was introduced to Joan Mitchell, an older painter who would provide Cohen much invaluable support and offer a model of artistic independence. As the decade progressed, Cohen stayed several times at Mitchell’s home in Vétheuil outside of Paris, joining a circle of young French and American artists who had gravitated around the older painter. This was also the moment when Cohen became closely involved with Bomb magazine, an influential arts journal that published interviews with artists and texts by many of the most adventurous young New York writers. In the fall of 1986, BOMB published an interview that Cohen and Bomb editor Betsy Sussler had conducted with Mitchell. As well as being valuable to anyone interested in Mitchell, this text, which at points is more of a conversation than a simple series of questions and answers, also provides a glimpse into Cohen’s working process:

JM: I can manufacture a painting. Can’t you? But I’d get bored. Can you work long? I can’t work long.
CC: That’s basically how I like to work. I get into it and work for 12 hours.
JM: What do you take—vitamins?
CC: Well, it’s not all of the same intensity.
JM: That’s what I mean. Some of it’s squeezing paint, or hammering stretchers.
CC: No, not hammering. I can push the paint around 10 hours.
JM: It must look awful after pushing it around. Do you get a kind of non-color, New York quality? I mean by 12 hours of pushing paint around you’ll have smog over Los Angeles.
CC: You do not.
JM: How do you do it? This is oil paint. Right?
CC: That’s what I do.
JM: That’s what I thought. How do you do it?
CC: I work a lot wet into wet. What’s the matter?
JM: I’m having a good time.
CC: Because you’re baiting me.
JM: C’mon, how do you work wet into wet for 12 hours and keep a fresh look. You don’t. You can’t. What do you get, that weathered look?
CC: Joan, you’re not supposed to censure in advance.9

The image of Cohen “pushing paint around” continuously for ten hours reminds us that she was an artist who discovered her work via process, an artist who didn’t feel she had to rush to resolve a painting. While Cohen’s paintings sometimes possess the “weathered look” that Mitchell noticed, they never feel overworked or weighed down by their own materiality. Rather, they seem to be paused in the act of becoming. Her work requires a similar openness from the viewer. Cohen never panders to us, never offers any easy paths to reaching the content of her painting. More so than any of her contemporaries, from the mid-1980s on Cohen not only refuses to adopt a signature style but also forgoes any easy compositional methods, any obvious visual hooks.

By 1984, painting was no longer under critical interdiction. On the contrary, thanks to the much-publicized advent of Neo-Expressionism, it had again become ubiquitous. What hadn’t changed, however, and what in some ways had gotten even worse than in the 1970s, was the gross underrepresentation of women painters in nearly every important exhibition and, as a result, from the higher echelons of the art market. This was the year that the Museum of Modern Art, New York, mounted An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture, an exhibition in which only nineteen of the 169 artists included were women. But away from the spotlight, in galleries that were mostly downtown, a different vision of painting was emerging, one that was not only far better balanced in terms of gender but that also approached the medium of painting, and abstraction in particular, with a newly critical attitude. Klaus Kertess, who had introduced Cohen to Mitchell, included her in Figures of Paint, a 1984 exhibition at the adventurous Cable Gallery that also featured Dona Nelson, Louise Fishman, and Carroll Dunham, among others. Over the next several years, Cohen participated in group exhibitions in various New York galleries, including Aspects of Abstraction at Holly Solomon Gallery. Reviewing this 1988 exhibition of seven abstract painters (including Mitchell) in the New York Times, Brenson noted, “For someone who has not seen Ms. Cohen’s work in a while, her Molloy at Tournus may come as a surprise. It is large (8 feet tall by 8½ feet wide) and confident. Irregular black stripes are stained into the canvas. Gestures influenced by Ms. Mitchell mill about at the left and begin to disperse across the surface. Not every gesture has the necessary conviction, but a dialogue between inside and outside, speed and measure, is in place.”10 Brenson also noted the influence of France on Cohen, perhaps because of the title Molloy at Tournus—the town of Tournus in Eastern France is the site of an important eleventh-century Romanesque church—and in the mid-1980s Cohen had traveled around France in search of Romanesque architecture. Solomon would give Cohen a solo show in 1990.

One feature of Cohen’s work during the second half of the 1980s was the eruption of passages of thick impasto against thinly painted or stained atmospheric grounds. An example is the 70 by 66 inch (Untitled 1987) (Can-Can Dancer), where a giant, gnarly knot of oil paint floats against the ground like a painterly asteroid. There’s an obvious affinity between these works and the paintings that Cohen’s friend Stephen Mueller was making at the time. (The two had met at Bennington in the early 1970s and remained close after relocating to New York.) Neither artist, it seems, could resist the frisson of introducing Neo-Expressionist impasto into the legacy of Color Field painting. When some of these 1980s paintings, which hadn’t been seen in decades, were shown at the New York gallery Morgan Presents in the fall of 2022, they received an enthusiastic reception.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Cohen felt compelled to make paintings that embodied the speed and disjunctions of the environment around her. “So much struck me in New York at the end of the ’80s and the beginning of the ’90s as plastic, technological, distanced and cold,” she said. “My paintings then were a reflection of that.”11 Accordingly, she moved quickly from one painting to another, doing lots of pouring paint and sprinkling pigments (often powdered earth pigments) and various industrial materials onto the paintings. For her, pouring and sprinkling were “distanced procedures,”12 fruitful alternatives to the brush. She also would sometimes recycle studio drop cloths for paintings, another way of injecting distance from the hand into the work.

With her typical restlessness and love of experimenting with new materials, Cohen kept pushing the boundaries of abstract painting. In 1992 she initiated a group exhibition titled An Esemplastic Shift at the innovative AC Project Room. Based on a concept she found in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria—Cohen was a passionate student of literature and philosophy—the show, as she later described it, was about “painting aware of its limitations but behaving as if it’s not; painting as a protean form, condensing, expanding, shifting energy to the dimensional.”13 Reviewing An Esemplastic Shift for the New York Times, Roberta Smith identified a prevailing “sense of physical experimentation” and approvingly noted how Cohen enlisted unconventional items (“plastic mesh and polyurethane as well as oil and pigment”) while remaining in the realm of gestural abstraction.14 Less than two months later, another New York Times critic, Holland Cotter, in reviewing Contemporary Surfaces at Pamela Auchincloss Gallery, detected convincing “emotional energy” in Cohen’s “delicate but rambunctious Tropological Painting, a mélange of bright fruit-colored pigment and scraps of odd applied materials (a toothpick, some masking tape) on a sheet of unmounted Mylar.”15

Cohen’s radical openness toward her medium is evident in this account of how she would begin a new painting:

Sometimes a subject—sometimes a work of art, sometimes a physical object charged with personal or historical significance—provides a source. And sometimes it’s odd things I get connected with, that are debased. Recently I saw an air freshener hanging in a subway car. I thought it was odd and took a picture of it and then found it very beautiful. Its sweet colors combined with its mundane aspect intrigued me. Then a painting I’m working on at the moment had a shape reminiscent of that air freshener and I decided the painting ought to be in those colors.16

Before going off in search of the Cohen painting that was inspired by an air freshener, it’s important to take into account what she said next: “Usually my source material ceases to be my reference point and the process of adding and subtracting paint takes over and becomes the subject as well as the content of a work.”17

With the death of Joan Mitchell in October 1992, Cohen lost a crucial mentor. But thanks to her increasing visibility in group exhibitions, by the early ’90s Cohen’s work began to find a context in New York, especially among painters of a new generation. In an influential 1991 article titled “Painting and Its Others: In the Realm of the Feminine,” painter Shirley Kaneda addressed the masculine/feminine question in Cohen’s work. While noting some “masculine” traits, Kaneda argued that “the underlying structure is feminine in its atomization. In her work, processes are articulated, making them explicit as a subject. Events take place simultaneously, without hierarchy or synthesis, unlike the masculine, which establishes an echelon of forms, or reduces everything to the commonality of a field, an unbroken surface or continuity. Cohen’s work is fragmented into short-term events replicating the temporal, rather than the endlessly meditative or iconic.”18 Three years later, in an essay for the catalogue of Cohen’s 1994 solo exhibition at Jason McCoy, the great feminist art historian Linda Nochlin took a different position, rejecting altogether the notion of there being any kind of “feminine” quality shared by Cohen and other women painters:

Must gender play a role in the work of all women artists, even the most abstract ones? Think of the work of three women abstract artists who have had shows recently: Joan Mitchell, Joan Snyder, and Cora Cohen. Their work is more different than it is alike it would seem, except in the negative sense: they all seem more part of their respective generations—male and female—than to share in some sort of essentialist feminine sensibility.19

An important turning point for Cohen came in 1996 when she rented a studio in Cologne and, with that as a base, undertook extensive art-viewing trips around Europe. The experience of her German year—a period in which she devoted herself to creating works on paper and vellum rather than painting on linen (a shift that initially came about because for a time she was without a studio)—had the effect of returning a gestural component to her painting. As Cohen saw it, “by reintroducing brushwork as surrogate for my touch, my work had become more reliant on emotive and psychological force and connected to personal contingency.”20 When the paintings she made after returning from Europe, as well as some begun long before, were shown in New York at Jason McCoy, the exhibition attracted substantial critical attention. Among what he termed “a particularly intense group of works,” David Ebony, writing for artnet.com, singled out one canvas in particular: “the largest painting on view, the approximately 9-by-7-foot Terrains Vagues, which the artist worked on for six years, presents gray ground covered with countless incidents of contention, all of which are somehow defused.”21 As with so many of Cohen’s paintings, the making of Terrains Vagues involved the artist dousing her linen support with an unconventional mix of materials, including copper powder, enamel, Flashe, marble dust, oil, oil medium, plastic mesh, and polyurethane. Writing about the same show in Time Out, Yvette Brackman was struck by The Abject-As-Intermediary,22 in which “a viscous, impenetrable fluid pools at the bottom of the canvas, directly above, the paint is as wet and matted as damp animal fur.”23

Another important frame of reference that emerged for Cohen in the 1990s, one that is perhaps closer to the heart of her project than the feminist insights of Kaneda and Nochlin, is the concept of “the formless” as articulated by Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss in their 1996 exhibition at the Centre Pompidou and in the subsequent book Formless: A User’s Guide. Building on Georges Bataille’s concept of the informe, Bois and Krauss sought to articulate a new and subversive approach to the form/content binary that, in their view, had distorted interpretations of modern art. As Bois puts it in his introduction, when art achieves the condition of formlessness “matter cannot be reabsorbed by the image (the concept of image presupposes a possible distinction between form and matter, and it is this distinction, insofar as it is an abstraction, that the operation of the formless tries to collapse.)”24 While admitting in a 2013 interview that the “exclusionary, esoteric nature” of Bois and Krauss’s book “feels even more exclusionary and esoteric now,” Cohen recalled how “at the time, their terminology (‘base materialism,’ ‘horizontality,’ ‘entropy’) was a relief.”25

The concept of a collapse of form and matter is deeply relevant to Cohen’s work in which entropically dispersed paint rarely coalesces into any kind of “image.” Two of the artists central to Bois and Krauss, Jean Fautrier and Wols, were also important to Cohen, who was drawn to their work by what she called its “odd materiality.”26 (It’s worth noting that Cohen’s discovery of Fautrier and Wols, as well as other informel painters, came at a time when, Formless: A User’s Guide notwithstanding, few American painters were interested in or even aware of postwar European abstraction.) In both artists she found an unusual disconnect between line and form:

Wols’s line is so abstract—as it is with Agnes Martin—it has nothing to do with describing the forms on which they are drawn. . . . Taking one’s time looking at his paintings and drawings, one becomes aware of a renunciation of form as an organizing element, and a rejection of quotidian psychological space. The abstraction of Fautrier and Wols counters the striving toward logic that is inherent in people—all people, those who make art objects and those who view them.27

The liberation of line from shape first becomes visible in many works on paper from the early 1970s, long before her discovery of Wols and Fautrier. Only later would it become a frequent fixture in her paintings. In the painting Reflection of Space, for instance, jagged lines overlay broad areas of blue and white paint while seeming to deliberately miss opportunities to coordinate with them. Similar effects are visible in several 2016 paintings that include the word “meander” in their titles, and in the provocatively titled Reject. In a very late painting, Point Counter Point, a variety of ghostly lines form biomorphic shapes whose contours seem to blithely ignore the underlying areas of pastel color. Another enthralling late painting, Portrait of an Artist, takes the dissociation of line and shape even further; it looks as if the painting has been begun and abandoned several times, with no effort made to erase the false starts. Given the work’s title, Cohen seems to be telling—no—showing us something fundamental about her process. Such disjunctions should not be seen as examples of Surrealist-inspired automatism—as always, chezCohen, there is clearly a series of deliberate choices being made: when to change mediums, tools, colors, thickness of line, density of color. Yet she shares with automatist painters (and others) a determination to avoid “good” composition and all comfortable protocols of abstract painting in order to access other ways of seeing. In many ways the artist Cohen most resembles in her renegade spirit is Sigmar Polke, not only for the German’s painter’s attraction to the irrational and his penchant for frustrating lazy viewers, but also because of their mutual fascination with conducting pseudo-alchemical experiments on the surfaces of their paintings.28 But Cohen arguably took matters further than Polke in her quest for paintings that were “unstable” or “fluid,” where, as she put it in some 2012 lecture notes, “figure and ground shift and reform continually, and absence and presence change places.”29 If the power of Cohen’s work depends heavily on a deep understanding of her materials and processes acquired over decades of studio practice, she also knew when to trust intuition and illogic, when to let the painting make itself. Underlying this quest for fluidity and openness was a set of ethical beliefs about aesthetic experience. As she declared in her 2012 lecture notes, “I am against art that tries to control how the viewer sees the work, where the artist lays down laws about what art should be, thereby limiting the participation and the autonomy of the viewer.”30

One of Cohen’s last assistants, Benjamin Langford, who was able to watch the artist at work, has eloquently described how she balanced the deliberate and the accidental:

In looking at one of her works, you can see her decisions show profound daring—marks and layers that threaten to muddy, unbalance, or destroy a work—yet she embraced these elements and maintained a precarious balance and beauty. Her confidence did not come from a foolhardy place, but a place of accepting and moving with the ebbs and flows of life. Her work seems so at home alongside the accidental abstractions of the world: spills, damage, or dust—but also primordial growth, like nature has begun to reclaim her canvases. Cora could appreciate and accept the world in its ambiguity and struggles—and her work acts to inspire such an understanding.31

Of all Cohen’s departures from conventional materials, the Altered X-Rays paintings of the 1990s are arguably the most extreme. Emerging early in the decade out of Cohen’s persistent anger at the US government’s initial failure to take the AIDS epidemic seriously because so many of the victims were gay or trans or intravenous drug users, this series consists of paintings made on exposed roentgenographs (mostly the standard size, 17 by 14 inches).32 As Sidra Stich explained in a 1996 essay, Cohen “effaced sections of the film—and the body imagery—by dissolving, shriveling, or burning the surface with chemicals [and in other cases] enhanced the film’s black-and-white appearance and homogeneously smooth, slick surface by applying globs, rivulets, and sprays of pigment and textural substances like metallic powders (copper, silver, aluminum), mica, enamel, paper, wax, and polyurethane.”33 In effect, Cohen treated these products of the medical industry the way she treated the linen supports of her paintings (apart from actually destroying the surfaces). While the first Altered X-Rays focused only on roentgenographs from AIDS patients, by the end of the decade Cohen had expanded her sources to include medical image records of, as she put it, “strangers, friends, and colleagues with a wider variety of disorders.”34 She also drew on products of newer imaging techniques such as sonograms and neuromagnetic resonance. When exhibited, the Altered X-Rays are hung slightly off the wall, creating shadows as the light filters through the transparent film. For Cohen, these works were not only a form of protest and mourning but also a metaphor for one of her abiding concerns: the play of the material and the immaterial.

The Altered X-Rays can also be seen as a version of Cohen’s passion for photography—an interest, it’s worth noting, that she shared with Wols. For much of her life, she loved to wander the streets of whatever city she happened to be in, taking photos of random, odd details of the urban landscape. In 1999, Abaton Press published a small pamphlet of photographs she had taken in Berlin and New York. Titled The Record, the Death, the Surprise, it represented, in Cohen’s own words from the brief preface, her “efforts to record and in some sense assimilate the unfathomable.”35 This psychogeographical dimension of her work was explored more fully in a 2007 exhibition titled Oblique Forms: Spray Paint Paintings, Photographs, The Hybrid Indexical Adventure Series, at Abaton Garage, a small artist-run gallery in Jersey City. In a text about the show, artist-critic Stephen Maine described how the various components of Cohen’s practice cohered:

Cohen’s photographs of the streets of Manhattan and Berlin engage the textures and tonalities of neglected spaces within the metropolis. They provide the evidence that, though the paintings suggest spaces of oceanic vastness, they are anchored to the world of appearances. The photos—snapshots by an artist who seeks out the unfiltered—are field notes, specimens, raw data. They often show features of the public domain refit to private ends, which is precisely analogous to Cohen’s studio procedure. The Spray Paint Paintings (acrylic, oil, spray paint on linen), in particular, are tethered to the quotidian by the use of spray enamel in colors such as fluorescent orange and aluminum, evoking not graffiti so much as the utilitarian marking of construction workers and maintenance crews.36

Cohen always seemed to have paid attention to her surroundings and drawn inspiration from them, whether walking the streets or looking out from her studio window. (An episode about Cohen on the cable television series 13 Artists in the Studio37 opens with a fascinating montage of what Cohen could see from her Lower Broadway studio in the mid-1990s.) Her sensitivity to the world outside her studio subtly changed whenever she moved. In a late interview she recalls her thoughts after moving to her second studio in Long Island City at the end of 2019:

And I soon realized that here in my new place, the relationship of the inside space to the outside world is different. At the start of being here, in addition to seeing water and barges and trains, I could also see debilitated military veterans from the shelter for homeless veterans across the way. The inside space and the outside world are more continuous and, as such, that called to mind my thoughts about New York City in 2007, when my studio was in Chelsea [this was during her nomad years, between leaving 287 Broadway and moving to Long Island City] and Chelsea was changing to a place for luxury and I was becoming acutely aware of the neighborhood’s income disparities.38

As much as Cohen drew energy from the unpredictable juxtapositions offered by city life, it was hardly her only source of inspiration. While her titles could be blatantly matter-of-fact (for instance, Brown with Drips or Blue Horizontal, they are far more often allusive. Some reference modern poets such as Wallace Stevens and Delmore Schwartz, while others evoke Jewish history and culture, such as The Baalshem Reveals Himself, which points to the eighteenth-century Jewish mystic known as the Baal Shem Tov, who had been considered an unremarkable person before he famously revealed himself as a powerful spiritual healer. The 1998 painting Nebel is titled with the German word for “fog,” and the painting does indeed feature a turbulent mass of foggy gray paint, but Cohen would surely have known from Alain Resnais’s groundbreaking Holocaust documentary Night and Fog of the Nazi use of the phrase “nacht und nebel” to describe their policy of “disappearing” political prisoners. The titles of many other works hint at her debt to French theorists such as Maurice Blanchot and Roland Barthes.

Cohen seems to have shared Barthes’ skepticism toward approaching creative works in quest of singular meanings, and definitely adopted the French writer’s idea of “dodging or baffling the paradigmatic, oppositional structure of meaning . . . [and] the suspension of the conflictual basis of discourse.”39 There is a persistent concern in her art to baffle the conventional expectations of her viewers in order to keep painting, and abstract painting in particular, radically open. Interestingly, her campaign against simplistic varieties of meaning, against easy resolution, has perhaps more affinities with some distinctly non-abstract artists (one thinks of early David Salle or Mel Bochner’s conceptual work of the 1960s) than it does with Cohen’s Abstract Expressionist and Color Field influences.

A solo exhibition provocatively titled Come in a Little Closer at Michael Steinberg Fine Arts in Chelsea in 2007 gave Cohen an opportunity to expose her thoughts about painting without, as she put it, “relying on a stylistic or formal organization.”40 In the critical responses to the show it’s evident that viewers were beginning to better grasp her painting, to see it as a distinctive project. Writing in the Brooklyn Rail, artist-critic Joan Waltemath observed that “Cohen defies the classical organization of foreground and background,” and how, when abstract “images” do appear in the work, they are usually “transitory and dissolve again after a moment, not allowing the painting to coalesce into a specific ‘thing’, but rather keeping the perceptual experience open to exchange.”41 Picking up on the deliberately disparate choice of work, another reviewer, Jennifer Riley, appreciated how “rather than following a single stylistic thread, the ten paintings on view tend to follow thematic paths; each distinguished by its own surprising internal logic.”42 Riley also eloquently described the constant metamorphoses experienced by viewers of Cohen’s work: “Forms become clouds, then spills, then bones, then traces of footprints in mud, then strokes, then spills, then clouds again! What may initially recall the dirty clay and rubble floor exposed during infrastructure upgrades can just as eloquently evoke oxidized, faded frescoes of a Cimabue at Assisi. Just as the systematic opening and then closing of a street’s surface seems to have a physical counterpart in the activity of Cohen’s studio, colors from both inside and outside the history of painting are fluently put into play.”43

In the works where she uses very liquid paint, broad gestures are subsumed into ever-broader veils of color, and when the paint is thicker she lets it accumulate into boulder-like shapes, often so dark that it’s hard at a glance to detect the countless marks employed. The predominance of dark and muted colors in Cohen’s work, especially in the paintings, can lead one to overlook her gifts as a colorist. Often the understated colors are the result of Cohen’s unusual technique of applying watercolor to linen, resulting in thin, barely-there tints of color. Her fondness for pale, watery brushstrokes can give her paintings, even the very large ones, the feel of spontaneous experiments in a sketchbook, a causal informality that allies her art to that of older painters such as Kimber Smith and Bram Van Velde. Something similar can happen with her use of screenprinting, though the areas printed with silkscreen ink tend toward gray and black. She also frequently obscured areas of bright color with expanses of dense black. But she was hardly chromophobic. Her oeuvre is full of bold colors, as in the slab of orange-red hiding at the bottom of the otherwise muted Little Nomad 8, or the smear of pink in Contingency, a small painting dominated by icy green and white and darker areas of raw linen. Nor was she afraid of pretty colors: The small painting Pink and Blue, for instance, features an entanglement of flowing blue and pink brushstrokes redolent of chiffon and cotton candy. Some of her late works on paper are similarly vibrant with joyful palettes. Reviewing her 2013 exhibition at Guided By Invoices, artist-critic David Rhodes observed how the thin layers of paint that Cohen so often favored “seem to both emit and trap light.”44

The variousness that pervades Cohen’s work, even among paintings made more or less simultaneously, is all the more surprising in that she tended to work on multiple paintings, of different sizes, all at once. “They sort of breed each other,” is how she once described what happened in her New York studio.45 One of her assistants, painter Samuel Jablon, recalls how Cohen “was always dragging the paintings around. She would stretch them and I [would] stretch them, cut them up, and glue them to each other. Sometimes they would just be used as tables and placed on saw horses. She liked the stains and the spills . . . one painting would start on the floor, and then be a table for a while, and then once it was kind of stained enough she took it to the wall or painted on blocks.”46

After being forced out of the Lower Manhattan studio that was also her home in late 2007, Cohen bounced around New York, living and working in various places. One positive thing that emerged from this serious disruption was Nomads, a series of small paintings featuring pieces of wood veneer. She got the idea of using wood veneer from her discovery of the twentieth-century French architect and furniture designer Jean Prouvé, known for his portable prefab structures such as the Maison Tropicale, an aluminum house he designed for use in equatorial Africa. Fascinated by his furniture designs, Cohen began cutting pieces of wood veneer to match Prouvé’s shapes with the idea of possibly using them in her paintings.

In an interview, she describes what happened next:

I found unexpected curves and moves that I had not seen or known of in advance—the forms seemed animated. Those discoveries caused me to discard my expectation of what the form first signaled. The resulting slippages and discrepancies prompted me to include disparate elements in the rest of the painting—like a seemingly random brush stroke. I guess I saw Prouvé’s forms eliciting in me an inclination to follow my own bent. The Nomads would best be seen in liminal and odd spaces, at irregular intervals, on a wall of a staircase, opposite an elevator, in an elevator, on the exterior wall of an exhibition space. These spaces would be provisional way stations for the works, and I hoped that the irregular intervals and placements would allow—even encourage—the viewer’s consideration of our uncertainty in the world.47

In most of her work, Cohen tends to elide the differences between gesture and shape to compelling effect, but inserting pieces of wood veneer into the paintings allowed her to play with more distinct shapes. In Nomad 2, for instance, the veneer is surrounded by equally solid painted shapes.

In 2011, a solo exhibition of Cohen’s work was held at the Raketenstation Museum Insel Hombroich, a museum set within a nature preserve in Neuss, Germany. In 2013, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. For the next nine years, apart from a small 2016 exhibition of the Meander drawings at the New York Studio School, Cohen would go without a solo show in any New York gallery, which made the recognition and financial support of a Guggenheim all the more important. Out of this near-decade would emerge an immense amount of work, paintings and works on paper as compelling and distinctive as anything that had come before. She continued to make small Nomad paintings with Prouvé-inspired veneers, larger more gestural works exploring her reawakened interest in Linear B, Meander paintings that foregrounded her love of drawing, and, in 2018 to 2019, a powerful group of paintings in which nuanced screenprinted fields and jagged splotches of dense, dark brushwork nearly obliterated the entire linen support. (These latter paintings had their start with a group of monochrome screenprints of paintings she had made more than fifteen years earlier.) Along with incorporating aspects of Linear B (graphic fragments of logograms and pictograms) into her work, Cohen also perceived in the lengthy and convoluted efforts to decipher the mysterious ancient script a reflection of her own artistic journeys. She especially relished the fact that the person who finally cracked the code, Michael Ventris, was an amateur archeologist.

In December 2019, Cohen moved to a new studio in Long Island City. As the COVID-19 pandemic hit the city just a few months later, she decided to take advantage of the imposed isolation.

I wanted to go back to my own beginnings as a painter—my love of making things with my hands. So I started making work in our living room, going back into small unfinished paintings and drawings from various periods of my life that I had left unfinished and then abandoned. My sense that life was not infinite and that what I had not finished might never be finished unless I did so right away took over. The works I made in the spring of 2020 had that sense of urgency. Because they had been begun at different periods, I saw them as bridges between past and present, between life and death, life and the possibility of an afterlife, and between the past and a radically uncertain future.48

Across every period of her career it’s impossible to predict from one painting (or work on paper) to the next what kind of compositional strategy Cohen would adopt. She was just as likely to push the dominant linear motifs off to the side, ceding the center of the composition to the washes and stains of muted color, as she was to fill near the entire support with a single rough block of dark color or a curtain of translucent brushstrokes. What she seemed to be looking for in this constant variation was a way to disrupt, just as her models Wols and Fautrier did, that “striving toward logic that is inherent in people.” Perhaps the body of work that best exemplifies this anti-strategic strategy are the watercolors she made in the last several years of her life. Generally created on 22-by-30-inch sheets of paper and sometimes including touches of the Flashe paint Cohen loved, these works often feature clumps of watery marks in colors that range from decaying leaves and pond algae to crushed berries and wine stains. Other smaller late drawings employ graphite and matte medium. To peruse these late works on paper is to accompany the artist’s restless imagination as she constantly shifts between casual-looking, wildly decentered compositions and allover veils of translucent color. In one 2022 watercolor there’s an unmistakable still-life image of a pink flower in a vase, an anomaly in Cohen’s overwhelmingly non-objective work.

To the end of her life Cohen delighted in creating paintings with unconventional combinations of materials, as if she could only realize her particular vision via working methods that resembled no one else’s. The 2022 painting Wind in Pines is a large horizontal composition of countless broken-up translucent planes achieved with a Cohenesque (that’s to say, unlike any other painter) set of ingredients: Flashe, pigment, silkscreen ink, and watercolor.49 The title suggests not only a possible inspiration in nature but also that the artist was contemplating the relationship between the visible and the invisible or, as she put it, between “life and the possibility of an afterlife.” As must happen to us all sooner or later, Cora Cohen the person, the painter, the thinker about painting, has herself become invisible, but the artworks that she has left behind remain magnificently visible. Indeed, their visibility is just beginning.

Notes

1. Cora Cohen, quoted in “Artist, in Court, Tells Owners to Reopen Landmark Building, Tribeca Trib, October 31, 2011, https://www.tribecatrib.com/content/artist-court-tells-owners-reopen-landmark-building%C2%A0-0.

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

3. Ibid.

4. Cora Cohen & Manfred Engeser, “220724 Engeser Interview,” 2022. On the artist’s website, http://www.coracohen.com/texts/archive-1.html.

5. Ibid.

6. Michael Brenson, “Cora Cohen at Max Hutchinson,” New York Times, March 16, 1984. On the artist’s website: http://www.coracohen.com/texts/about-21.html.

7. Cora Cohen & Manfred Engeser, “220724 Engeser Interview.”

8. Ibid.

9. Cora Cohen and Betsy Sussler, “Joan Mitchell” (interview), BOMB magazine 17, Fall 1986, https://bombmagazine.org/articles/1986/10/01/joan-mitchell/.

10. Michael Brenson, “Art: Works by 7 Women, ‘Aspects of Abstraction,’” New York Times, January 22, 1988. https://www.nytimes.com/1988/01/22/arts/art-works-by-7-women-aspects-of-abstraction.html

11. “Interview with Cora Cohen,” Bentley Gallery, Phoenix, November 1998. On artist’s website, http://www.coracohen.com/texts/about-15.html.

12. Ibid.

13. Cora Cohen, “Narrative_long,” 2011. On the artist’s website, http://www.coracohen.com/texts/archive-11.html.

14. Roberta Smith, “Art in Review,” New York Times, June 26, 1992.

15. Holland Cotter, “Art in Review,” New York Times, August 7, 1992.

16. Cora Cohen & Manfred Engeser, “220724 Engeser Interview.”

17. Ibid.

18. Shirley Kaneda, “Painting and Its Others: In the Realm of The Feminine,” Arts Magazine 65, Summer 1991, pp. 58-64. Reprinted in Terry R. Myers, ed., Painting: Documents of Contemporary Art, Whitechapel Gallery, London, and The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2011, pp. 72-80.

19. Linda Nochlin, “Cora Cohen: Recent Paintings,” in Cora Cohen: Recent Paintings (New York: Jason McCoy Inc., 1994). On the artist’s website, http://www.coracohen.com/texts/about-19.html, accessed May 25, 202, accessed May 25, 2025.

20. Cora Cohen, “Narrative_long.”

21. David Ebony, “New York’s Top 10: Cora Cohen,” artnet.com, September 1997, http://www.artnet.com/magazine_pre2000/reviews/ebony/ebony9-23-97(7).asp.

22. Artwork subsequently destroyed.[So many of the artworks mentioned appear in the Monograph that I thought it important to flag one we know was destroyed.

23. Yvette Brackman, “Cora Cohen at Jason McCoy,” Time Out New York, October 1997. On the artist’s website, http://coracohen.com/texts/about-17.html. This artwork was subsequently destroyed.

24. Yve-Alain Bois, introduction to Formless: A User’s Guide, ed. Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss (New York: Zone Books, 1996), 29.

25. Cora Cohen, quoted in Samuel Jablon, “The Formative Formlessness of Cora Cohen.”

26. Cora Cohen & Manfred Engeser, “220724 Engeser Interview.”

27. Ibid.

28. In her contribution to the Brooklyn Rail tribute to Cohen, Mary Jones, a friend of the artist’s, recalls how during a talk Barry Schwabsky gave about Cohen at Jason McCoy Gallery in 1984, he described her work as “alchemical” and Cohen “in her inimitable way. . . interrupted him and said, ‘No, it’s chemical.’” See “A Tribute to Cora Cohen,” The Brooklyn Rail, February 2024, https://brooklynrail.org/2024/02/in-memoriam/A-Tribute-to-Cora-Cohen/.

29. Cora Cohen, “2012 Lecture Notes,” 2012. On the artist’s website, http://www.coracohen.com/texts/archive-8.html

30. Ibid. Cohen also expressed this sentiment in other lectures, as well as her interview with Engeser.

31. Benjamin Langford, in “A Tribute to Cora Cohen.” The Brooklyn Rail, February, 2024. https://brooklynrail.org/2024/02/in-memoriam/A-Tribute-to-Cora-Cohen/

32. This was Cohen’s preferred term for roentgenograms (ed.).

33. See Sidra Stich, Cora Cohen: Paintings and Altered X-rays (1983–1996) (Tuscaloosa, AL: Sarah Moody Gallery of Art, , 1996).

34. Cora Cohen & Manfred Engeser, “220724 Engeser Interview.”

35. Cora Cohen, The record, the death, the surprise (Newton, NJ: Abaton Book Company, 1999), not paginated.

36. Stephen Maine, “Keeping It Real,” in Oblique Forms: Spray Paint Paintings, Photographs, The Hybrid Indexical Adventure Series (Jersey City: New Jersey, Abaton Garage, 2007), available online, http://www.coracohen.com/texts/about-9.html, accessed May 25, 2025.

37. 13 Artists in the Studio: Cora Cohen, Morgan Snyder St John, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juiT3HqZBT4, 2014

38. Cora Cohen & Manfred Engeser, “220724 Engeser Interview.”

39. Roland Barthes, The Neutral (Lecture Course at the College de France 1977-1978), translated by Rosalind E. Kraus and Denis Hollier (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). Cohen’s studio library included a copy of the paperback edition, and she referenced the influence of his ideas in a series of lectures she gave between 2011 and 2016.

40. Cohen, draft of biographical essay for Guggenheim Fellowship application, 2011.

41. Joan Waltemath, “Cora Cohen: Michael Steinberg Gallery,” The Brooklyn Rail, November 2008, available on Guided by Invoices website, https://guidedbyinvoices.us/artists/CoraCohen/Press/2008_11_Cora_Cohen_The_Brooklyn_Rail.pdf, accessed May 25, 2025.

42. Jennifer Riley, “Cora Cohen: Come in a Little Closer at Michael Steinberg,” artcritical.com, October 2008, available at. http://coracohen.com/texts/about-7.html

43. Ibid.

44. David Rhodes, “Dirty/Clean Painting: Cora Cohen at Guided by Invoices,” artcritical.com, March 6, 2013, https://artcritical.com/2013/03/06/cora-cohen/.

45. “Interview with Cora Cohen,” Bentley Gallery, Phoenix, November 1998, available online, http://www.coracohen.com/texts/about-15.html, accessed May 25, 2025.

46. Samuel Jablon, email to the author, January 22, 2025.

47. Cora Cohen & Manfred Engeser, “220724 Engeser Interview.”

48. Ibid.

49. The screenprinted image in Wind in Pines is derived from Cohen’s 2008 painting Curtain. According to Benjamin Langford, for Wind in Pines “the screen was rotated 180 degrees after printing and printed again to make a horizontal composition.” Langford, email to Jeffrey M. Jones, March 29, 2025.

Images included in the article

Orange Series 01, 1963
9 x 12 in.
Paint on paper

Sacagawea, 1983
Oil on linen
77 x 77 in.

Ruby, 1983
Oil on linen
78 x 78 in.

Massacre of the Icons, 1980
Oil on linen
77 x 104 in

Molloy at Tournus, 1987
Flashe and oil on linen
97 x 103 in.

Nebel, 1998
Acrylic medium, copper, latex, and pastel on muslin
47 x 43 in.

The Baal Shem Reveals Himself, 1986
Flashe and oil on linen
66 x 70 in.

Contingency, 2006
Acrylic medium, Flashe, and opaque watercolor on linen
17 x 19 in.

Texts: Press