Köln

Köln (Cologne): 1996–2020

In April of 1996, I went to Europe to live and work. I had become friends with a young woman from Köln (Cologne), and she invited me to stay with her there. New York had become predictable, in its busyness and values. City life was not helping me or my work. I was also discouraged by this country on political and social levels. And it was an opportunity: Germany was so important in relation to the art of the past, and in contemporary art—especially painting—there seemed a freedom and license to be and do whatever one wanted.

I wouldn’t have gone without the art. I was always drawn to Central and Northern European painting. I had been influenced by Joseph Beuys from the time he visited America in the early 1970s, and by the works of Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke in the ’80s. I wanted to see the work of Wols, Jean Fautrier, and European abstraction in general, which was not possible in the United States. I came to visit wonderful places not only in or near Köln but all over Germany: established institutions as well as small museums dedicated to a single artist, like the Max Ernst Museum in Brühl. Or a place like Insel Hombroich, a former NATO base between Düsseldorf and Köln, where eventually, in 2011, I had the opportunity to work. I had a studio in a former hangar on this small island, where I lived and slept on my own for two months over a rather cold summer, working, walking around, or cruising on a bike. I could even use what they were growing in their garden. Everything seemed to be part of nature, a cultivated wilderness in the middle of nowhere, with buildings you could visit and see great art without doors, locks, and people. This all seemed to show how Germany in general, and particularly in the Köln/Düsseldorf region, values art: People there like their art, and I liked that reinforcement, the seriousness of people, their quiet determination. And while I didn’t expect much, I also liked Köln right away.

It isn’t really an inspiring place visually, but Köln has a neutrality that other cities in Germany don’t have, and that neutrality allowed me to change and grow. The city doesn’t make you feel you have to conform. It’s an open, relaxed, rather low-pressure environment, a little sleepy even, with a lot of room for other things. It’s a city that’s still small and manageable, privileges art, and let me discard my former behaviors. So I rented a studio and started to make art and look at paintings. I didn’t know if I could fit in. No one wanted to look at my work, but that was a relief. I was more experimental and took a lot of time with each painting. I found myself wanting to spend time with work that had more immediate handling, work that had a greater emotive resonance and even a psychological pull.

Soon, Köln began to feel like my second home. I liked so many parts of it: the tacky corners at the train station, the galleries in the north, the elitist character of the Belgian quarter but also the hominess of the Southern districts, with its old hippies. There were other parts with ethnically diverse populations that reminded me of New York.

After 1996, I divided my time between New York and Köln. While they were entirely different from each other in every way—geographically, physically, culturally, socially—they now formed the base of my life, albeit a destabilizing one. For that reason, I also began making drawings and photographs to reflect the psychological and physical spaces of both places, to grasp their differences and stabilize myself. 10-98 New York / Köln (1998) (p. 000) is a mapping of my daily bicycle commute in Köln from my home to my studio. It delineates my route in keeping with the ring configuration of this old Roman city, laid over an earlier, erased drawing based on New York City’s grid configuration. The ring is palpable when traveling by bicycle. One’s entire body feels the never-ending curve. This drawing and others like it began as an attempt to ground myself in another place and culture.

In much the same way, my photographs annotate and comment on aspects of my daily life that I would otherwise forget or neglect. In Köln, they present the residue of difficult events of Germany’s past. Hansaring (1996) (p. 000) records my complex responses as an American Jew of Russian immigrant heritage to a sector of the city, now inhabited largely by Germany’s migrant-worker population, which still bears traces of World War II devastation.

Sectors like Hansaring—rebuilt cheaply in haste—have memorials to those tortured and killed shown alongside the visual, hedonistic Rhineland culture. The reverence for art and beauty there is so strong that streets are named after classical composers. Yet racial and ethnic prejudice is endemic. Mozartstraße (1996)(p. 000) represents these contradictory elements. The historical marker reads “In memory of the dead and a warning to the living, on this site was the regional headquarters of NSDAP in the ‘Braune Haus’ where the SA and the SS tortured their victims.” These photographs serve as my form of resistance to a dominant culture, despite its attractiveness.

More than other places in Germany, Köln is acceptable and accepting at the same time. And this is an attitude that you don’t find in America, not even in New York. Köln offers you an opening to make something, anything. It is basic, plain, unembellished, neutral. You can keep everything simple there. It is more possible to manage your daily life—walking, shopping, medicine—at least, compared to New York. Although my sense of orientation is not good, I managed to explore Köln by bus, subway, and walking. I love Köln’s Rhine-based character instead of the grid-based structure of New York, with its noise and the mess of the subways. And I love the gray of Köln—that it’s not sunny—because I don’t like the sun. I prefer a damp, misty climate. Being in Köln is good for my mental health. It’s sweet, quiet, and you can ride a bike. I really miss it when I can’t go.

—Cora Cohen, 2022

Images included in this essay

Cora Cohen at Altered X Rays, Institute Hombroich, Neuss, Germany, 2011
Photo courtesy the artist

10-98 New York/Köln (1998), 1998
Charcoal, conté crayon, and graphite on paper
19 1/2x 27 1/2 in.

Hansaring (1996), 1996
Chromogenic print
8 x 10 in.

Mozartstraße (1996), 1996
Chromogenic print
4 x 6 in.