Arthur Cohen: Ripped Terre Verte

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.
—Henry Ward Beecher¹

Thus it is true both that the life of an author can teach us nothing and that—if we know how to interpret it—we can find everything in it, since it opens onto his work.
—Maurice Merleau-Ponty²

The enigmatic paintings of Arthur Cohen, mounted elegantly on the walls of the Scully Tomasko Foundation, exude both linearity and painterliness. In this exhibition, titled Ripped Terre Verte, lyrical abstractions blur the boundaries between the finished and unfinished, between unity and disunity of forms, recalling the tenets of the outstanding exhibition Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible, held at the Met Breuer in 2016. Within these paintings by Cohen, a relatively constrained gestural abstraction articulates biomorphic motifs whose contours meander around and through the linear, the painterly, and the spaces in between.

The figure-ground relationships of Cohen’s paintings emerge from arched and arabesque motifs, where serpentine forms adjoin, overlap, and intertwine. Concave and convex figures float across the picture surface, recalling the visual syntaxes of such modernists as Wassily Kandinsky, Arshile Gorky, and Willem de Kooning. Oil paint applied to the linen surface with palette knife and the artist’s gloved hand has given way to a translucent painterly facture that allows subtle chromatic exploration. Cohen’s abstract embodiments of undefinable figures are rich with possibilities of interpretation, enticing the beholder’s imagination.

Austere and loaded with gravitas, the two paintings titled In the Deep Water Now No. 1 and In the Deep Water Now No. 2 (both 2020), are among the most successful. Here shades of plum, maroon, and burgundy interact with olive drab and reddish orange, giving way to suggestions of inexplicable landscapes and anomalous organic forms. Cohen’s composition of forms, along with the soft and coarse materiality of the oil paint, evoke Kandinsky’s The Waterfall (1909), while his diaphanous layers of color call to mind Gorky’s autobiographically-charged Agony (1947). At the same time, the biomorphic shapes and gestural strokes in this pair of paintings conjure up several of the formal devices found in De Kooning’s Gansevoort Street (ca. 1949).

In the early seventies Cohen’s representational paintings depicted the grand theatrical spaces of Francesco Borromini, as in the architecturally themed and perspectively imposing paintings Baroque Chapel #3 (1972) of the Whitney Museum and Baroque Chapel #5 (1973) of the Dallas Museum of Art. These exemplary postmodern works would be followed by highly painterly geometric images produced over a span of eight years, marking a turn from architectural motifs to architectonic abstractions. Cohen would thereafter shift his practice toward mischievous self-portraits that demonstrate his technical prowess while scrutinizing the process of collegiate teaching and raising a family. Later, remarkable depictions of bulls would stand out as another significant chapter of the artist’s career—representations of isolated bulls in charging motion seem to take on the existential weight of the aging process itself. In Cohen’s most recent series, decipherable shapes are in retreat, as the subtext of Baroque aesthetics is finally sublimated into his practice. As Leslie Roberts astutely observes in the exhibition catalogue, Cohen is now “down to the basic element: paint … he moves visceral, jewel-like pigments across huge canvases, to court the unknowable.”³

The visceral Ripped Terre Verte (2020), Sunlight in a Tube (2019), and Grey and Yellow (2019) bring to mind Titian’s masterpiece The Flaying of Marsyas (1570s), as Cohen’s hands-on application of paint evokes the elderly Titian’s use of his fingers to create transitions from halftones to highlights. Cohen had first encountered Titian’s painting at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC in 1986, and he would subsequently return to it at the Met Breuer in 2016. For Cohen, the process of painting and the unfinished figure and ground would become the raisons d’etre of his latest series. The darker organic forms in Ripped Terre Verte are constructed in frosting-thick impasto, counteracting a yellow expanse at upper right that recedes from the picture surface. In such paintings, the distinctions between abstraction and figuration are rendered volatile, as the entanglement of memory and mark-making both shape and reveal the work’s formative process.

Referring to Francis Bacon’s practice and his Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953), the philosopher Gilles Deleuze explains that when setting to work, everything the painter “has in his head or around him is already in the canvas…so that the painter does not have to cover a blank surface but rather would have to empty it out, clear it, clean it.”⁴ Like Bacon, Cohen has emptied out illusionism from his most recent paintings, though the strikingly biomorphic forms that appear in such paintings as Family Portrait (2022) and Dutch Brown Rip (2023) conjure up the intense dynamism of, for example, Peter Paul Rubens’s The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus (1617-18). In 1963, Cohen made a monumental abstracted adaptation of this painting from a reproduction, only to encounter the original in 1968 at the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. Already, the pictorial sensuality and chromatic effulgence of Rubens had come to condition Cohen’s practice—and this influence has not waned in the years since. We see it in the rounded shapes in black, brown, and green that billow and swirl upon the surfaces of paintings like Dark August Painting and Memories of Cobalt Green Deep (both 2022). Throughout the Scully Tomasko Foundation’s gallery, Baroque forms rupture flat surfaces with whirling folds that emanate both vitality and loss.

Viewed on their own, the slippery, organic abstractions of this exhibition tap into a powerful language of color. Yet perceived through Arthur Cohen’s broader practice and biography, these paintings reveal highly metaphysical dimensions of art and life.

Endnotes

1. Henry Ward Beecher, cited in The Life and The Work: Art and Biography, ed. Charles G. Salas (LA: Getty Research Institute, 2007), p. 17.
2. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, cited in The Life and The Work: Art and Biography, p. 18.
3. Leslie Roberts, “Arthur Cohen’s New Paintings,” in Arthur Cohen: Ripped Terre Verte (Altenburg, Germany: DZA Druckerei zu Altenburg GmbH, 2023), p. 42.
   
4. 4. Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith (London: Continuum, 2003), p. 86.