Cora Cohen Trust

Stirring Up Some Trouble: Cora Cohen and the Big Macho Painting

Monograph cover

May 19, 2026

Stirring Up Some Trouble: Cora Cohen and the Big Macho Painting

Anne Thompson

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

In summer 2022, Cora Cohen wrote to her alma mater, Bennington College. She hoped to donate one of her paintings in honor of abstract painter Pat Adams, a former professor who, Cohen said, deserved greater recognition.

Cohen had two Bennington degrees—a BA from 1964 and an MA from 1972. Adams had been a friend throughout. Would the college be interested in this donation? And could I, as director of the college art gallery, help facilitate it? I knew Cohen’s work from a painting already at Bennington, Horse Latitudes (1979), a vigorous, mostly blue horizontal. I was excited to talk with her.

On a sunny morning in April 2023, I took an elevator up to Cohen’s apartment in Long Island City, arriving to find her seated at a table with her assistant, Benjamin Langford. Cohen had a painful knee that hindered walking. She couldn’t come to the studio—Langford would take me—but we could chat here first. Over refreshments, Cohen reminisced about Bennington and Adams, a brilliant artist who, Cohen said, was outrageously overlooked because of sexism not only in the culture but also, paradoxically, at the liberal and historically all-women’s college.

We moved to topics including my hope that this was the start of a longer conversation and that Cohen and I might do something together. She gave a big smile and said, “I bet we could stir up some trouble.”

As I headed to her studio, I asked Cohen if there was anything she wanted me to keep in mind as I looked at her work.

“Just pick out a big macho painting for Pat,” she said.

Two months later, Cohen died.

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Shortly before receiving a cancer diagnosis, Cohen in May 2022 started contacting institutions that already collected her work about future acquisitions. Struggling with her health yet energized by an upcoming exhibition at Morgan Presents—her first New York solo show in six years—she was naturally thinking about her legacy.1 Her Bennington offer reflects this impulse with meaningful specificity. It shows that Cohen was thinking about not only her career but also the educational base from which she launched it and the women who impacted her along the way.

Cohen’s desire to honor Adams thus prompts reflection on her work in relationship to friends and influences. Yet within this reflection, it’s impossible to ignore the factor of the “big macho painting for Pat.” Though delivered with off-the-cuff humor, Cohen’s directive contains a delicious provocation. It raises the stakes for an otherwise straightforward gift, introduces questions of gender politics, complicates Cohen’s intentions—and therefore warrants serious consideration.

There is an intriguing twist. Adams, ninety-six at the time of this writing, remembers Cohen with tremendous respect but dismisses any notion that she, Adams, experienced discrimination at the college or in the art world. Honored by Cohen’s donation, Adams does not connect with the impulse within it that lobs a retroactive salvo against sexism on her behalf. She doesn’t see the need.2 This conundrum does nothing to diminish Cohen’s tribute but instead makes it more interesting. Any gift says something about the giver. In this case, despite—even because of—its contradictions, the “big macho painting” reveals much about Cohen and the nuances of her practice. Though declared to be “for Pat,” the “big macho painting” is better understood to be “for Cora”—something Cohen does for herself.

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Sexism, specifically the art world patriarchy, comes up in Cohen’s writings and interviews across her career. It’s reasonable to read the “big macho painting” as a gesture toward women in general claiming space. Given the Bennington context, though, Cohen’s donation also reads as a blow against sexism combined with another “ism”—modernism. “I have resisted the Modernist authoritarian canon,” Cohen wrote in 1991, a position she repeated frequently. And central to this resistance was the modernist priest-critic Clement Greenberg. A force at Bennington when Cohen was a student, Greenberg’s meshuggaas—her word—about formalism helped define her painting practice by giving her something to reject.

Cohen’s undergraduate years, from 1960 to ’64, coincided with the school’s high-testosterone modernist heyday, when seemingly every important painter or sculptor was on campus teaching, having an exhibition, or hanging around amid the nearly all-female student population. Adams wasn’t on the faculty yet; her husband Vincent Longo was.

This scene had been cooking since the 1950s but received fame and a nickname with a 1966 Vogue story titled “The Green Mountain Boys.” Showcasing Bennington faculty Anthony Caro, Paul Feeley, and Jules Olitski, along with Kenneth Noland, who kept a studio near the college, the article anointed the four as modernist heroes akin to the American Revolutionary War militia—the original Green Mountain Boys—that helped win independence for Vermont.3

And if these were the soldiers, their general was Greenberg. After visiting Bennington with alum Helen Frankenthaler in 1951, Greenberg became a frequent guest critic. He also engineered exhibitions of artists he championed: Jackson Pollock, Adolph Gottlieb, Hans Hofmann, Barnett Newman, Noland, Olitski, and so on, plus Frankenthaler, the lone woman. The level of mythmaking and machismo reverberates in a comment by former ceramics faculty Stanley Rosen, who, recalling the Greenberg era, said with fondness: “I saw it as one continuous expectation of the millennium—the house full of Nolands, Olitskis, Caros, Feeleys, and all the other Saints, and cigar smoke.”4

Greenberg was, as one college administrator put it, the “mentor” of art at Bennington.5 His influence there continued years after it started waning in New York. And because of Greenberg’s prolonged importance at Bennington, Cohen got a double dose. She was around for the Green Mountains Boys moment and then, as a grad student, for Greenberg’s legendary Bennington Seminars, a nine-evening lecture-and-conversation marathon in April 1971.

Did Cohen attend? We can’t be sure, as her name doesn’t appear in the transcripts. Some audience question-askers are identified, others go unnamed. But it’s hard to imagine Cohen not going, given the magnitude of the spectacle and because the event was initiated by none other than Pat Adams.

Adams—who joined the faculty in 1964—saw a fresh sensibility in the way Greenberg spoke during student critiques. She thought he had new things to say that could invigorate conversations that were turning stale. “At the height of Greenberg’s power, everyone started to become a kind of baby Greenberg, and they were all mimicking his way of speaking,” she remembers. “So we set up these informal lectures where he could speak and there would be a lot of questions. [The seminars] were trying to reawaken his strong sense of form and shake him up.”6

A shake-up did not occur. Greenberg repeated his ideas about Kant and taste, style, culture, and quality to the edification of some and the frustration of those wanting more, chiefly Adams and some of her colleagues. They learned nothing new.7 But in terms of understanding “the big macho painting”—Cohen’s sympathy for Adams, her antipathy for Greenberg, and the gender politics of the moment—the Bennington Seminars are illuminating.

In sessions spread over three weeks, Greenberg expounded on art history and philosophy to an overflowing 120-seat auditorium and afterward sparred with the audience. Moments of casual misogyny leap from the transcripts. On the first night, Greenberg notes that the pressure of the event is alleviated by the low-stakes comfort he feels speaking at a “girl’s college.” Then, on the final night, he flips it, apologizing, in part, for the event’s lack of epiphanies by blaming the audience: He expected too much from discussion with undergraduates who have little knowledge of art rhetoric.8 During seminar six, Greenberg describes how “girl” and “homosexual” critics and curators fall for the “terrorizing” strategies of downtown conceptual and minimalist artists: They “get scared” into supporting the work. He gets a laugh, and when questioned about his seriousness, says he’s not joking. “When you’re talking facts, the humor is inadvertent. And this is a fact.”9

Determined throughout, Adams prompts Greenberg to explain a point or address a particular subject but with mixed results. One can imagine her disappointment. Add in the sexism of the moment, seen from a contemporary perspective, and it’s no wonder Cohen wanted to donate “a big macho painting for Pat.”

What becomes clear about Cohen’s education is how the Bennington Seminars represent negative and positive poles of influence. Greenberg and his modernist bombast, wrapped in all that cigar smoke, repel Cohen. Adams and her openness—her hunger for new conversations and fresh air—draw her in. Cohen shared this openness. It defined her practice and was central to her lifelong friendship with Adams, who, remembering Cohen, said, “For six decades, Cora and I talked of existence and the revelations loosed in painting.”10

Cohen also maintained a conversation—really, an argument—with Greenberg. With notable frequency, in writings and interviews, she invoked his name as the epitome of everything her artwork stood against: dictations of taste and quality; insistence on a signature style; primacy of one style over another; and, especially, adherence to a formalism that ignores the psychological, political, or economic conditions under which a painting is made. “Greenberg’s formalism,” Cohen said in 2013, has been “utilized to remove a sense of the world from the practice of painting. . . . I refute this both obliquely and explicitly.”11

To enact this refutation, Cohen inserted—or, in opposing Greenberg, restored—a sense of the world in painting practice through research and reference. While holding fast to gestural abstraction, she often started bodies of work with images of political and personal significance, obscuring this source material through process yet imparting traces of what she was thinking or experiencing. In between apartments and studios, she makes a series referencing Jean Prouvé’s “nomadic” designs for temporary housing. Mourning losses during the AIDS crisis, she begins painting directly on the roentgenographic surfaces of AIDS patients’ X-rays. Critical of postmodern discourse about paintings as signifiers, she plays around with literal signs by deploying the syllabary and ideograms of Linear B script.

Given Cohen’s sensitivity to sexism she experienced or witnessed—and the fact that this was on her mind late in life—we might wonder if gender was part of the world she brought into her work. Hints of feminism appear in the 1980s, in abstract paintings Cohen saw as portraits of women and that she titled accordingly. Yet beyond her formative rejection of modernism, Cohen unfurled an umbrella rejection of “isms” overall. She was suspicious of art movements and evidently political movements too—including feminism. Asked to reflect in 1992 on “The Feminine in Art,” Cohen winds up rejecting it entirely. Fresh from seeing the Anita Hill–Clarence Thomas hearings, she muses that “masculine” and “feminine”—indeed, all labels—are control tools of the patriarchy. This includes names of art styles, she writes, adding that postmodern efforts to designate paintings as “signs” strips them of uniqueness and makes them commercial products.

Fittingly, this train of anti-discrimination—even anti-capitalist—thought leads Cohen straight to Greenberg: “Specifically articulating the feminine in painting maps the reality of the patriarchy. It is not an approach to challenge or change. . . . It is reminiscent of Clement Greenberg’s meshuggaasthat some kinds of paintings . . . have an advantage over other kinds. That advantage was called ‘quality,’ and guess who decides? The advantage is now called ‘feminine.’ Who decides now?”12

All of which further complicates the meaning of the “big macho painting for Pat.” Cohen’s gift resounds as a feminist gesture, yet Cohen likely would have balked at calling herself a capital-F feminist. Too much of a label. Plus, how could a painting even be “macho,” if such terms are hollow inventions of the patriarchy? Does the idea just cancel itself out? Was provoking questions about labels, gender and otherwise, what Cohen intended?

Is this what she meant by “stirring up some trouble?”

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In her 2011 essay “AbEx and Disco Balls,” painter Amy Sillman advocates for nuance in reevaluating Cedar Tavern–era caricatures of masculinity and femininity. Such stereotypes, Sillman writes, “wipe away the possibility of looking at all the really interesting vagaries and conflicts within AbEx, like the fact that [Lee] Krasner actually was man enough to bend hot-pink planes with her bare hands, and the fact that [Joan] Mitchell was no feminist.”13 And Pat Adams, too, was and still is by her own declaration “not a feminist.”14 Mitchell and Adams both belonged to a generational swath of women artists sidelined by the boy’s club who nonetheless yearned to join the club: Judge our paintings on their own terms, equal to and no different from those made by men. Leave gender out of it.

Cohen aspired to a similar toughness in attitude and painting chops, evidenced by the relationship she forged with Mitchell. Unlike Adams, a teacher Cohen encountered by circumstance as a young woman, Mitchell was a mentor Cohen sought with intention as a mature artist. In her forties—and, incidentally, making paintings she would show to acclaim at Morgan Presents the year before she died—Cohen befriended Mitchell through a mutual connection and, in 1985, visited the legendary artist at her home in Vétheuil, France.

A picture of their relationship emerges from interviews Cohen conducted with Mitchell for BOMB magazine. Mitchell, a known contrarian, evades Cohen’s questions as they cover topics from painting techniques (working wet into wet) and studio habits (how long can one paint at a stretch) to fear of rejection and the struggles of women in the art market. Mutual affection and respect are evident, as are moments of generational disconnect. At one point, they tussle over New York gallery politics and whims of fashion—the “isms.” After agreeing that contemplating a “new season” in the art market is “repulsive,” Cohen—correctly—disputes Mitchell’s claim that she never had to network to get a gallery. Mitchell responds that, despite few opportunities for women, artists back in the day supported each other. Plus, she adds, styles cycle in and out of favor.

JM: If you can hold out, you can make it. Maybe not for the next season,

CC: I’m going to be both. I’ve always thought I could be both.

JM: Fine sweets. You want it all ways. You’re a spoiled girl.15

It’s a telling passage. “Being both” and “wanting it all ways” are phrases emblematic of Cohen’s general sensibility. She speaks here about hopes for a consistent career, which, in a quiet way, she achieved, with regular exhibitions though little commercial splash. Yet both-ness and multiplicity also reflect the openness and flexibility with which she approached the potentials of painting. Because a central move—if not the central move—in Cohen’s resistance to “the authoritarian Modernist canon” was her refusal to have a signature style. She insisted on a nonhierarchical approach to painting; she wanted no outcome or method to dominate.

Vigilant in distrusting art movements and art historians, Cohen framed her position—her style of having no style—within philosophical sources including Roland Barthes’s binary-destabilizing ideas of “the neutral” and John Keats’s notion of “negative capability”—the moment when the artist, in conflict, rejects formulas and embraces uncertainty to achieve a breakthrough. This attitude for Cohen extended beyond the studio and the completion of a painting. When installing her exhibition at Morgan Presents, she experimented with the orientation of hanging the paintings, reconsidering, in 2023, the best way to present works made fifty years before. She often asked those with her in the gallery which direction looked best.16

In other hands, such openness might have been a liability. For Cohen, it was her superpower. Her in-betweenness—generationally between Mitchell and Sillman, philosophically between art movements and styles, politically between outrage at the patriarchy and wariness of feminism-qua-feminism—was an asset in her painting practice. She centered herself in the field of negative capability, of infinite possibility, and stood there, firm and unflexing. Another contradiction, perhaps, or better, a koan.

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So what, in actuality, constitutes “a big macho painting for Pat”?

At Cohen’s studio with Benjamin Langford, a block from her apartment, I considered options from racks of large paintings. Unclear about what “macho” entailed, I focused on “big” and chose a work from 2004—sixty-nine by seventy-one inches, made with acrylic paint, charcoal, copper, Flashe, oil pastel, pastel, and pigment on muslin.

Heart of Darkness is a painting of contradictions. It is nearly but not quite square. Its palette balances muted in-between colors, like purples verging on browns, with bursts of fluorescents—red, pink and green. Its swirling composition contains a catalog of mark-making: splatters, pours, scrapes, sprays, scribbles, and brushstrokes of all sizes and textures. Paint has been applied, apparently, by accident and intention. A metallic turquoise form, resembling a fern or jellyfish, seems poured from a distance, the result of chance. Areas of intense scribbling, with pastel or crayon, seem to evidence Cohen’s hand close to the surface. A central tree stump-like form shifts between foreground and background, in and out of legibility.

The overall impression is one of simultaneous aggression and delicacy. Paint seems to do impossible things. Most mysterious: a surface that from afar looks thick with layers and impasto is actually, up close, paper-thin and flat. How is all that paint on there? It seems to dis- and reappear.

Cohen, on the phone with Langford, approved my choice. “It’s a good one,” she said, but added, “That’s not a macho painting.”

Bemused, yet thinking I would speak with Cohen later, I didn’t ask questions. Now, with many questions, I contacted Langford, who worked closely with Cohen for three years. His best guess: however ironically intended, Cohen’s idea about the “macho” concerned her process. Making Heart of Darkness involved a prolonged back-and-forth engagement to realize its various gestures and marks. A more “macho” painting might have been more of a one-shot action, with bigger and more uniform brushstrokes.17

If this is the case, the Cohen painting initially at Bennington, Horse Latitudes, is a more likely candidate. It’s big—approximately 6 by 8 ½ feet—with declarative brushwork forming a blue rectangle framed by swaths of yellow and black. As a more mature painting, though, Heart of Darkness embodies the openness to experimentation and resistance to old-school formalism that made Cohen’s practice radical and complex.

In the end, both works have significance given the ideas contained within “the big macho painting.” Cohen metaphorically, ironically, and literally punches back at macho-modernism, hitting it where it lives. Cohen’s gesture “for Pat” is fundamentally about invading a space essential to her understanding of how painting, and gender dynamics, could and should evolve. To this end, her paintings at Bennington claim symbolic territory: Heart of Darkness hangs in the building where Greenberg gave his Bennington Seminars. Horse Latitudes hangs in the building where Greenberg curated the first Pollock retrospective18 among other exhibitions that helped cement his—and Bennington’s—primacy in the history of modernism. Cohen is there now.

Notes

1. Cohen received her cancer diagnosis in June 2022.

2. Pat Adams, interview with the author, June 17, 2024.

3. See Alan Solomon, “The Green Mountain Boys,” Vogue, August 1, 1966, 104–9, 151–52, https://archive.vogue.com/article/1966/8/the-green-mountain-boys

4. Peggy Schiffer Noland, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Clement Greenberg: The Bennington Seminars, ed. Schiffer Noland (1995), n.p. Schiffer Noland transcribed audio recordings of the 1971 seminars as part of her graduate work at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. The audio files are held at Crossett Library, Bennington College.

5. Ibid. This is referring to Bennington administrator Kendall Landis.

6. Pat Adams,interview with the author, November 21, 2024.

7. Along with Adams, Bennington faculty member Sidney Tillim expressed disappointment that the seminars produced no new material from Greenberg. See Schiffer Noland, “Editor’s Introduction.”

8. See Clement Greenberg, Clement Greenberg: The Bennington Seminars, Seminar 1, page 4, and Seminar 9, page 36.

9. Ibid., Seminar 6, page 54.

10. “Bennington College Receives Cora Cohen ’64 Painting,” Bennington College Alumnae News, January 10, 2024, https://www.bennington.edu/news-and-features/bennington-college-receives-cora-cohen-%E2%80%9964-painting.

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

12. Cora Cohen, “The Feminine in Art,” symposium moderated by Anna Chave, Sandra Gering Gallery, New York, 1992.

13. See Amy Sillman, “AbEx and Disco Balls: In Defense of Abstract Expressionism II,” Artforum 49, no. 10 (Summer 2011): 321–25.The quoted passage appears on p. 321.

14. Adams, interview with the author, June 17, 2023.

15. “Interview: Joan Mitchell by Cora Cohen and Betsy Sussler,” BOMB Magazine, October 1 1986, https://bombmagazine.org/articles/1986/10/01/joan-mitchell/.

16. Ben Langford, interview with the author, December 11, 2024.

17. Ibid.

18. The Bennington building now called Deane Carriage Barn was until the late 1960s known as the New Gallery. It has been the site of numerous historic exhibitions, including the Pollock retrospective in 1952.

Monograph cover

May 19, 2026

Stirring Up Some Trouble: Cora Cohen and the Big Macho Painting

Anne Thompson

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

In summer 2022, Cora Cohen wrote to her alma mater, Bennington College. She hoped to donate one of her paintings in honor of abstract painter Pat Adams, a former professor who, Cohen said, deserved greater recognition.

Cohen had two Bennington degrees—a BA from 1964 and an MA from 1972. Adams had been a friend throughout. Would the college be interested in this donation? And could I, as director of the college art gallery, help facilitate it? I knew Cohen’s work from a painting already at Bennington, Horse Latitudes (1979), a vigorous, mostly blue horizontal. I was excited to talk with her.

On a sunny morning in April 2023, I took an elevator up to Cohen’s apartment in Long Island City, arriving to find her seated at a table with her assistant, Benjamin Langford. Cohen had a painful knee that hindered walking. She couldn’t come to the studio—Langford would take me—but we could chat here first. Over refreshments, Cohen reminisced about Bennington and Adams, a brilliant artist who, Cohen said, was outrageously overlooked because of sexism not only in the culture but also, paradoxically, at the liberal and historically all-women’s college.

We moved to topics including my hope that this was the start of a longer conversation and that Cohen and I might do something together. She gave a big smile and said, “I bet we could stir up some trouble.”

As I headed to her studio, I asked Cohen if there was anything she wanted me to keep in mind as I looked at her work.

“Just pick out a big macho painting for Pat,” she said.

Two months later, Cohen died.

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Shortly before receiving a cancer diagnosis, Cohen in May 2022 started contacting institutions that already collected her work about future acquisitions. Struggling with her health yet energized by an upcoming exhibition at Morgan Presents—her first New York solo show in six years—she was naturally thinking about her legacy.1 Her Bennington offer reflects this impulse with meaningful specificity. It shows that Cohen was thinking about not only her career but also the educational base from which she launched it and the women who impacted her along the way.

Cohen’s desire to honor Adams thus prompts reflection on her work in relationship to friends and influences. Yet within this reflection, it’s impossible to ignore the factor of the “big macho painting for Pat.” Though delivered with off-the-cuff humor, Cohen’s directive contains a delicious provocation. It raises the stakes for an otherwise straightforward gift, introduces questions of gender politics, complicates Cohen’s intentions—and therefore warrants serious consideration.

There is an intriguing twist. Adams, ninety-six at the time of this writing, remembers Cohen with tremendous respect but dismisses any notion that she, Adams, experienced discrimination at the college or in the art world. Honored by Cohen’s donation, Adams does not connect with the impulse within it that lobs a retroactive salvo against sexism on her behalf. She doesn’t see the need.2 This conundrum does nothing to diminish Cohen’s tribute but instead makes it more interesting. Any gift says something about the giver. In this case, despite—even because of—its contradictions, the “big macho painting” reveals much about Cohen and the nuances of her practice. Though declared to be “for Pat,” the “big macho painting” is better understood to be “for Cora”—something Cohen does for herself.

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Sexism, specifically the art world patriarchy, comes up in Cohen’s writings and interviews across her career. It’s reasonable to read the “big macho painting” as a gesture toward women in general claiming space. Given the Bennington context, though, Cohen’s donation also reads as a blow against sexism combined with another “ism”—modernism. “I have resisted the Modernist authoritarian canon,” Cohen wrote in 1991, a position she repeated frequently. And central to this resistance was the modernist priest-critic Clement Greenberg. A force at Bennington when Cohen was a student, Greenberg’s meshuggaas—her word—about formalism helped define her painting practice by giving her something to reject.

Cohen’s undergraduate years, from 1960 to ’64, coincided with the school’s high-testosterone modernist heyday, when seemingly every important painter or sculptor was on campus teaching, having an exhibition, or hanging around amid the nearly all-female student population. Adams wasn’t on the faculty yet; her husband Vincent Longo was.

This scene had been cooking since the 1950s but received fame and a nickname with a 1966 Vogue story titled “The Green Mountain Boys.” Showcasing Bennington faculty Anthony Caro, Paul Feeley, and Jules Olitski, along with Kenneth Noland, who kept a studio near the college, the article anointed the four as modernist heroes akin to the American Revolutionary War militia—the original Green Mountain Boys—that helped win independence for Vermont.3

And if these were the soldiers, their general was Greenberg. After visiting Bennington with alum Helen Frankenthaler in 1951, Greenberg became a frequent guest critic. He also engineered exhibitions of artists he championed: Jackson Pollock, Adolph Gottlieb, Hans Hofmann, Barnett Newman, Noland, Olitski, and so on, plus Frankenthaler, the lone woman. The level of mythmaking and machismo reverberates in a comment by former ceramics faculty Stanley Rosen, who, recalling the Greenberg era, said with fondness: “I saw it as one continuous expectation of the millennium—the house full of Nolands, Olitskis, Caros, Feeleys, and all the other Saints, and cigar smoke.”4

Greenberg was, as one college administrator put it, the “mentor” of art at Bennington.5 His influence there continued years after it started waning in New York. And because of Greenberg’s prolonged importance at Bennington, Cohen got a double dose. She was around for the Green Mountains Boys moment and then, as a grad student, for Greenberg’s legendary Bennington Seminars, a nine-evening lecture-and-conversation marathon in April 1971.

Did Cohen attend? We can’t be sure, as her name doesn’t appear in the transcripts. Some audience question-askers are identified, others go unnamed. But it’s hard to imagine Cohen not going, given the magnitude of the spectacle and because the event was initiated by none other than Pat Adams.

Adams—who joined the faculty in 1964—saw a fresh sensibility in the way Greenberg spoke during student critiques. She thought he had new things to say that could invigorate conversations that were turning stale. “At the height of Greenberg’s power, everyone started to become a kind of baby Greenberg, and they were all mimicking his way of speaking,” she remembers. “So we set up these informal lectures where he could speak and there would be a lot of questions. [The seminars] were trying to reawaken his strong sense of form and shake him up.”6

A shake-up did not occur. Greenberg repeated his ideas about Kant and taste, style, culture, and quality to the edification of some and the frustration of those wanting more, chiefly Adams and some of her colleagues. They learned nothing new.7 But in terms of understanding “the big macho painting”—Cohen’s sympathy for Adams, her antipathy for Greenberg, and the gender politics of the moment—the Bennington Seminars are illuminating.

In sessions spread over three weeks, Greenberg expounded on art history and philosophy to an overflowing 120-seat auditorium and afterward sparred with the audience. Moments of casual misogyny leap from the transcripts. On the first night, Greenberg notes that the pressure of the event is alleviated by the low-stakes comfort he feels speaking at a “girl’s college.” Then, on the final night, he flips it, apologizing, in part, for the event’s lack of epiphanies by blaming the audience: He expected too much from discussion with undergraduates who have little knowledge of art rhetoric.8 During seminar six, Greenberg describes how “girl” and “homosexual” critics and curators fall for the “terrorizing” strategies of downtown conceptual and minimalist artists: They “get scared” into supporting the work. He gets a laugh, and when questioned about his seriousness, says he’s not joking. “When you’re talking facts, the humor is inadvertent. And this is a fact.”9

Determined throughout, Adams prompts Greenberg to explain a point or address a particular subject but with mixed results. One can imagine her disappointment. Add in the sexism of the moment, seen from a contemporary perspective, and it’s no wonder Cohen wanted to donate “a big macho painting for Pat.”

What becomes clear about Cohen’s education is how the Bennington Seminars represent negative and positive poles of influence. Greenberg and his modernist bombast, wrapped in all that cigar smoke, repel Cohen. Adams and her openness—her hunger for new conversations and fresh air—draw her in. Cohen shared this openness. It defined her practice and was central to her lifelong friendship with Adams, who, remembering Cohen, said, “For six decades, Cora and I talked of existence and the revelations loosed in painting.”10

Cohen also maintained a conversation—really, an argument—with Greenberg. With notable frequency, in writings and interviews, she invoked his name as the epitome of everything her artwork stood against: dictations of taste and quality; insistence on a signature style; primacy of one style over another; and, especially, adherence to a formalism that ignores the psychological, political, or economic conditions under which a painting is made. “Greenberg’s formalism,” Cohen said in 2013, has been “utilized to remove a sense of the world from the practice of painting. . . . I refute this both obliquely and explicitly.”11

To enact this refutation, Cohen inserted—or, in opposing Greenberg, restored—a sense of the world in painting practice through research and reference. While holding fast to gestural abstraction, she often started bodies of work with images of political and personal significance, obscuring this source material through process yet imparting traces of what she was thinking or experiencing. In between apartments and studios, she makes a series referencing Jean Prouvé’s “nomadic” designs for temporary housing. Mourning losses during the AIDS crisis, she begins painting directly on the roentgenographic surfaces of AIDS patients’ X-rays. Critical of postmodern discourse about paintings as signifiers, she plays around with literal signs by deploying the syllabary and ideograms of Linear B script.

Given Cohen’s sensitivity to sexism she experienced or witnessed—and the fact that this was on her mind late in life—we might wonder if gender was part of the world she brought into her work. Hints of feminism appear in the 1980s, in abstract paintings Cohen saw as portraits of women and that she titled accordingly. Yet beyond her formative rejection of modernism, Cohen unfurled an umbrella rejection of “isms” overall. She was suspicious of art movements and evidently political movements too—including feminism. Asked to reflect in 1992 on “The Feminine in Art,” Cohen winds up rejecting it entirely. Fresh from seeing the Anita Hill–Clarence Thomas hearings, she muses that “masculine” and “feminine”—indeed, all labels—are control tools of the patriarchy. This includes names of art styles, she writes, adding that postmodern efforts to designate paintings as “signs” strips them of uniqueness and makes them commercial products.

Fittingly, this train of anti-discrimination—even anti-capitalist—thought leads Cohen straight to Greenberg: “Specifically articulating the feminine in painting maps the reality of the patriarchy. It is not an approach to challenge or change. . . . It is reminiscent of Clement Greenberg’s meshuggaasthat some kinds of paintings . . . have an advantage over other kinds. That advantage was called ‘quality,’ and guess who decides? The advantage is now called ‘feminine.’ Who decides now?”12

All of which further complicates the meaning of the “big macho painting for Pat.” Cohen’s gift resounds as a feminist gesture, yet Cohen likely would have balked at calling herself a capital-F feminist. Too much of a label. Plus, how could a painting even be “macho,” if such terms are hollow inventions of the patriarchy? Does the idea just cancel itself out? Was provoking questions about labels, gender and otherwise, what Cohen intended?

Is this what she meant by “stirring up some trouble?”

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In her 2011 essay “AbEx and Disco Balls,” painter Amy Sillman advocates for nuance in reevaluating Cedar Tavern–era caricatures of masculinity and femininity. Such stereotypes, Sillman writes, “wipe away the possibility of looking at all the really interesting vagaries and conflicts within AbEx, like the fact that [Lee] Krasner actually was man enough to bend hot-pink planes with her bare hands, and the fact that [Joan] Mitchell was no feminist.”13 And Pat Adams, too, was and still is by her own declaration “not a feminist.”14 Mitchell and Adams both belonged to a generational swath of women artists sidelined by the boy’s club who nonetheless yearned to join the club: Judge our paintings on their own terms, equal to and no different from those made by men. Leave gender out of it.

Cohen aspired to a similar toughness in attitude and painting chops, evidenced by the relationship she forged with Mitchell. Unlike Adams, a teacher Cohen encountered by circumstance as a young woman, Mitchell was a mentor Cohen sought with intention as a mature artist. In her forties—and, incidentally, making paintings she would show to acclaim at Morgan Presents the year before she died—Cohen befriended Mitchell through a mutual connection and, in 1985, visited the legendary artist at her home in Vétheuil, France.

A picture of their relationship emerges from interviews Cohen conducted with Mitchell for BOMB magazine. Mitchell, a known contrarian, evades Cohen’s questions as they cover topics from painting techniques (working wet into wet) and studio habits (how long can one paint at a stretch) to fear of rejection and the struggles of women in the art market. Mutual affection and respect are evident, as are moments of generational disconnect. At one point, they tussle over New York gallery politics and whims of fashion—the “isms.” After agreeing that contemplating a “new season” in the art market is “repulsive,” Cohen—correctly—disputes Mitchell’s claim that she never had to network to get a gallery. Mitchell responds that, despite few opportunities for women, artists back in the day supported each other. Plus, she adds, styles cycle in and out of favor.

JM: If you can hold out, you can make it. Maybe not for the next season,

CC: I’m going to be both. I’ve always thought I could be both.

JM: Fine sweets. You want it all ways. You’re a spoiled girl.15

It’s a telling passage. “Being both” and “wanting it all ways” are phrases emblematic of Cohen’s general sensibility. She speaks here about hopes for a consistent career, which, in a quiet way, she achieved, with regular exhibitions though little commercial splash. Yet both-ness and multiplicity also reflect the openness and flexibility with which she approached the potentials of painting. Because a central move—if not the central move—in Cohen’s resistance to “the authoritarian Modernist canon” was her refusal to have a signature style. She insisted on a nonhierarchical approach to painting; she wanted no outcome or method to dominate.

Vigilant in distrusting art movements and art historians, Cohen framed her position—her style of having no style—within philosophical sources including Roland Barthes’s binary-destabilizing ideas of “the neutral” and John Keats’s notion of “negative capability”—the moment when the artist, in conflict, rejects formulas and embraces uncertainty to achieve a breakthrough. This attitude for Cohen extended beyond the studio and the completion of a painting. When installing her exhibition at Morgan Presents, she experimented with the orientation of hanging the paintings, reconsidering, in 2023, the best way to present works made fifty years before. She often asked those with her in the gallery which direction looked best.16

In other hands, such openness might have been a liability. For Cohen, it was her superpower. Her in-betweenness—generationally between Mitchell and Sillman, philosophically between art movements and styles, politically between outrage at the patriarchy and wariness of feminism-qua-feminism—was an asset in her painting practice. She centered herself in the field of negative capability, of infinite possibility, and stood there, firm and unflexing. Another contradiction, perhaps, or better, a koan.

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So what, in actuality, constitutes “a big macho painting for Pat”?

At Cohen’s studio with Benjamin Langford, a block from her apartment, I considered options from racks of large paintings. Unclear about what “macho” entailed, I focused on “big” and chose a work from 2004—sixty-nine by seventy-one inches, made with acrylic paint, charcoal, copper, Flashe, oil pastel, pastel, and pigment on muslin.

Heart of Darkness is a painting of contradictions. It is nearly but not quite square. Its palette balances muted in-between colors, like purples verging on browns, with bursts of fluorescents—red, pink and green. Its swirling composition contains a catalog of mark-making: splatters, pours, scrapes, sprays, scribbles, and brushstrokes of all sizes and textures. Paint has been applied, apparently, by accident and intention. A metallic turquoise form, resembling a fern or jellyfish, seems poured from a distance, the result of chance. Areas of intense scribbling, with pastel or crayon, seem to evidence Cohen’s hand close to the surface. A central tree stump-like form shifts between foreground and background, in and out of legibility.

The overall impression is one of simultaneous aggression and delicacy. Paint seems to do impossible things. Most mysterious: a surface that from afar looks thick with layers and impasto is actually, up close, paper-thin and flat. How is all that paint on there? It seems to dis- and reappear.

Cohen, on the phone with Langford, approved my choice. “It’s a good one,” she said, but added, “That’s not a macho painting.”

Bemused, yet thinking I would speak with Cohen later, I didn’t ask questions. Now, with many questions, I contacted Langford, who worked closely with Cohen for three years. His best guess: however ironically intended, Cohen’s idea about the “macho” concerned her process. Making Heart of Darkness involved a prolonged back-and-forth engagement to realize its various gestures and marks. A more “macho” painting might have been more of a one-shot action, with bigger and more uniform brushstrokes.17

If this is the case, the Cohen painting initially at Bennington, Horse Latitudes, is a more likely candidate. It’s big—approximately 6 by 8 ½ feet—with declarative brushwork forming a blue rectangle framed by swaths of yellow and black. As a more mature painting, though, Heart of Darkness embodies the openness to experimentation and resistance to old-school formalism that made Cohen’s practice radical and complex.

In the end, both works have significance given the ideas contained within “the big macho painting.” Cohen metaphorically, ironically, and literally punches back at macho-modernism, hitting it where it lives. Cohen’s gesture “for Pat” is fundamentally about invading a space essential to her understanding of how painting, and gender dynamics, could and should evolve. To this end, her paintings at Bennington claim symbolic territory: Heart of Darkness hangs in the building where Greenberg gave his Bennington Seminars. Horse Latitudes hangs in the building where Greenberg curated the first Pollock retrospective18 among other exhibitions that helped cement his—and Bennington’s—primacy in the history of modernism. Cohen is there now.

Notes

1. Cohen received her cancer diagnosis in June 2022.

2. Pat Adams, interview with the author, June 17, 2024.

3. See Alan Solomon, “The Green Mountain Boys,” Vogue, August 1, 1966, 104–9, 151–52, https://archive.vogue.com/article/1966/8/the-green-mountain-boys

4. Peggy Schiffer Noland, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Clement Greenberg: The Bennington Seminars, ed. Schiffer Noland (1995), n.p. Schiffer Noland transcribed audio recordings of the 1971 seminars as part of her graduate work at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. The audio files are held at Crossett Library, Bennington College.

5. Ibid. This is referring to Bennington administrator Kendall Landis.

6. Pat Adams,interview with the author, November 21, 2024.

7. Along with Adams, Bennington faculty member Sidney Tillim expressed disappointment that the seminars produced no new material from Greenberg. See Schiffer Noland, “Editor’s Introduction.”

8. See Clement Greenberg, Clement Greenberg: The Bennington Seminars, Seminar 1, page 4, and Seminar 9, page 36.

9. Ibid., Seminar 6, page 54.

10. “Bennington College Receives Cora Cohen ’64 Painting,” Bennington College Alumnae News, January 10, 2024, https://www.bennington.edu/news-and-features/bennington-college-receives-cora-cohen-%E2%80%9964-painting.

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

12. Cora Cohen, “The Feminine in Art,” symposium moderated by Anna Chave, Sandra Gering Gallery, New York, 1992.

13. See Amy Sillman, “AbEx and Disco Balls: In Defense of Abstract Expressionism II,” Artforum 49, no. 10 (Summer 2011): 321–25.The quoted passage appears on p. 321.

14. Adams, interview with the author, June 17, 2023.

15. “Interview: Joan Mitchell by Cora Cohen and Betsy Sussler,” BOMB Magazine, October 1 1986, https://bombmagazine.org/articles/1986/10/01/joan-mitchell/.

16. Ben Langford, interview with the author, December 11, 2024.

17. Ibid.

18. The Bennington building now called Deane Carriage Barn was until the late 1960s known as the New Gallery. It has been the site of numerous historic exhibitions, including the Pollock retrospective in 1952.

Texts: Press