The Brooklyn Rail

“Logic doesn't get in the way exactly. I try not to let it.”

–Cora Cohen

 

I met Cora Cohen about a decade ago through the artist Bill Jensen. I really needed a job, and I was currently homeless because my building in Brooklyn had broken in half, and I’d been evicted by the Red Cross. Bill thought Cora and I would be a good fit because she’d also had a loft in a building that was condemned and was forced out. Bill set up a call, and she hired me over the phone. My takeaway from that first impression of Cora was one of fierceness.

After I became her employee I would help her in her studio stretching paintings and un-stretching paintings somewhat endlessly. She would always be playing NPR and we would talk about art and poetry throughout the day. Some days she wouldn’t want to paint, so she would get wine and cheese and invite an assortment of people to the studio to discuss painting. 

Cora was a relentless and ambitious maverick. She was constantly reinventing her work. She wouldn’t settle, wouldn’t stop exploring abstraction. The paintings always seemed to lead her. 

I stopped working for Cora after a couple years, and we would connect to walk through exhibitions in the Lower East Side together. She always wanted to see what young artists were doing. She harbored real generosity and commitment toward younger generations. 

Cora had a way of saying exactly what she thought unedited. When she didn’t like a work or a show she would usually say so somewhat loudly on exiting the gallery. Cora once wrote to me that she was with a group of artists who all loved a painting of mine hanging in the back room of a gallery, and she felt the need to tell me she didn’t like that painting whatsoever. 

The last time I was in the studio with Cora was when I brought over Morgan Aguiar-Lucander to see her paintings. We pulled out works from the 1980s and ’90s that hadn’t been unboxed in decades. After the visit we spoke on the phone, and she was convinced Morgan was not going to offer her a show. Morgan wrote to her the next day and offered her his September slot. She was blown away by the enthusiastic response to her work. We had lunch after her show sold out and she was in disbelief. Cora’s modesty and thoughtfulness will always stick out in my memory. 

After Cora found out she was sick, she asked me to help run her trust and estate with her partner Jeffrey Jones. I was very surprised by her illness, and I am honored to help bring her work forward for people to discover and rediscover.

I worked with the editors Phong Bui and Charlie Schultz at the Rail to invite writers, gallerists, and artists for this tribute to offer a perspective of the different eras of Cora’s life, practice, and career. 

–Sam Jablon

Morgan Aguiar-Lucander

Cora Cohen cared little for looking back at the past. To my eye, she found it slightly indulgent, and in opposition to her unwavering engagement with the present and new work. For in Cora’s mind there was always new work requiring attention—attention that could therefore not be squandered on the past.

Together, Cora and I staged the last exhibition of her work as a living artist. I was introduced to Cohen by fellow artist Sam Jablon, as a colleague and close friend to us both. Our meeting was warm and respectful. As she began to speak about her work, it became clear that Cora was interested in the puzzle of painting, both in terms of process and as an independent object.

She did not strive to reach the finish line of each painting, but rather lingered and enjoyed the discovery and challenge in the reworking of pictures, until they reached a point of completion—whether they resolved themselves or not, that was not Cora’s primary concern. Once paintings were finished she of course enjoyed them, but more as old acquaintances rather than as points of pride, for she was consistently preoccupied and excited by new work.

As we pulled out a selection of historical works, from close to forty years prior, Cora recalled intimate details about each painting, yet always with a mind to the use of material in each, rather than her feelings at the time of creating them. The elements that gripped her were of the present, the orientation they would hang in, and how they could inspire, or more accurately modulate, the paintings she was currently working on.

I recall a slight nervousness when I sent the draft for the exhibition text of Cora Cohen: Works from the 1980’s to her. For one of the first things one learned in any conversation about painting with Cora, was that she was very precise in her use of language. She would challenge the selection of a word such as lyrical—not through the lens of criticism, but rather due to a sincere curiosity of what had led you to this word, and why you had chosen it in particular, rather than melodic, rhythmic or expressive.

Cora was incredibly intentional. She insisted that each painting be considered under the integrity of its own internal logic: consistently refuting the grouping of her work, or herself as an artist for that matter, under any larger conceptual system or movement.

In a 2013 Hyperallergic interview with Sam Jablon, Cora asserted:

Although I don’t know formalism on any deep art critical level, I do know that it 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.¹

This certain refutation makes me smile, for on painting Cora never trembled.

In recognition of Cora’s unwavering dedication to the present, we should consider how we could best use the past to inspire the new. There is no question that Cora’s work is her resounding legacy, and while we should certainly recognize that this work was at times overlooked in comparison to the caliber it bore, it is more important, and would certainly be more appreciated by Cora, to ask how we carry it forward with us.

To allow an indulgence which Cora would have never permitted, or at least squirmed uncomfortably in its utterance: I am proud to be friends with Cora Cohen, honored to have had a part in stewarding her work, and miss her greatly.

1. Sam Jablon, Hyperallergic, “The Formative Formlessness of Cora Cohen,” August 22^nd 2013. https://hyperallergic.com/80124/the-formative-formlessness-of-cora-cohen/

Barbara MacAdam

Cora Cohen was a standout artist—contradictory in a rather droll, low-key way. She modestly yet assertively generated her own abstract painted gestures to produce an up-to-date version of expressionism, one capable of penetrating surfaces and probing thickly painted depths. She showed how a genre could remain in play indefinitely despite critics who tried to suggest its demise.

Working in a variety of media, including painting, drawing, photography, and altered x-rays, she developed a distinctive expressive style—wild yet controlled. A real New Yorker in fact and spirit, she attended the High School of Music and Art and went on to Bennington College, where she earned a B.A. and M.A., studying with the likes of Paul Feeley and Lawrence Alloway. The independent attitude of her work, borderless with an international bent, calls to mind that of Joan Mitchell, with whom she spent considerable time in France. Her intensity had an orchestral quality, whereby we, as viewers, can get caught up in the rhythm of her paintings and almost hear their sounds and sense the weight of their various passages as if they could tumble into one another. At the same time, there was a talky quality to her painting, hinting at the poetic nature of her thinking, which enabled her to communicate with the audience, not in a pretentious way, but in a spontaneous, albeit complicated one.

She was in no way locked in time. Her paintings take us back to the Impressionist landscape painters and to the dense frenzy of Chaim Soutine as well as into the deep reaches of Constable’s investigations of nature, and to the ominous darkness of Caspar David Friedrich’s German Romanticism and yet also to the gestural warmth and lyricism of some of Helen Frankenthaler’s canvases and contrastingly, to the heaviness of Hedda Sterne’s anxious Abstract Expressionist inflected paintings.

Cohen’s paintings from the 1980s, which made a brilliantly orchestrated surprise post-pandemic exhibition last September at Morgan Presents on the Lower East Side, demonstrated her reach and exciting embrace of materials, art history, and of her own history. They appeared as particularly fresh and new—marking a re-debut.

As the critic Michael Brenson wrote in the New York Times about her 1984 show at SoHo’s Max Hutchinson Gallery exhibition “Portraits of Women”: "The works are dense, brooding and yet elated. The turbulence of the paint not only looks but also feels like freedom.” Such is an assessment that remained apt throughout her intense and varied art, which the late Linda Nochlin described as “‘hot’ art rather than cool: it is multifarious in its motifs and polymorphous in its pigmentation, deploying the most varied range of media.” It also revealed, Nochlin wrote, “how much intelligence has gone into the construction of these works: how much knowledge of and engagement with the history of abstraction itself.” [Cohen’s], Nochlin continued, “is an art, a sense of form which is the opposite of minimalist or reductive. Imperiously rejecting reductivism as a goal of abstraction, these canvases might be thought of as “maximalist” if the term could suggest the inclusiveness of vision and the expansiveness of formal reach the artist achieves in them.”

But the works—poetic and muscular—are also in continual self-referential flux taking us back and forth through Cohen’s own trajectory, as she was thinking and rethinking her output. The Bennington College magazine quotes her as revealing, “My sense that life was not infinite, and that what I had not finished might never get finished unless I finished it right away, took over.”  She further, tragically, explained, “Because they had been begun at different periods, I saw them as bridges between past and present, between the past and a radically uncertain future.”

Mary Boone

I believe I met Cora when she came to the gallery. Usually, if an artist came to the gallery the first step was that Ron Warren or Susan Inglett would look at their slides and, if they thought they were a fit, we would sit down and have a discussion. Sometimes though, I was at the front desk and if an artist came in and I liked the work, I’d go to the studio. I believe I went to Cora’s studio for the first time in the early 1980s. She had a shy but demonstrative manner, so while she was very quiet she was very self possessed and had the kind of presence you don’t see very often. I remember seeing that in her work too, it stuck with you, and it was unmistakably hers. In the late seventies, when this was happening, I had made commitments to a number of different artists already and was just opening my gallery. It was for that reason that Cora and I didn’t end up working together. But, as time passed, I would see Cora’s work and every time I was struck by its presence—the same way I was the first time. She explored a lot in her career, as all great artists who live long lives do, but each painting had the same quiet, but unmistakable presence and intensity that she herself had. I regret that we never worked together, and that I didn’t get to know her as well as I might have, but I think we are all fortunate for Cora’s life and career.

Sharon Butler
When I Met Cora Cohen

In 2013, Cora invited me for a studio visit. She was working in an austere industrial space in Long Island City with few comforts and barely any heat. Several large paintings hung on the walls, punctuated by a few small ones reflecting the same dark, gauzy paint handling. They reminded me of color field painters like Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis, except with more layering and less color.

Cora, whom I had never met before, was beguilingly reticent about her process and meaning. I wasn’t sure what her criteria for a successful painting were, so it was hard for me to talk about her work on its own terms. But it soon became clear that the paintings didn’t need explanation. They had a distinct presence—a quiet sullenness that lent gravity to the unlit space.

She sat down and pulled a small silver thermos of coffee out of her bag. She gave me the palm-sized cup and filled it with coffee while she drank straight out of the thermos. We talked, but what we said wasn’t as important as the transcendent aesthetic moment that Cora, in her quietness, allowed her work to create. I’ll never forget the morning I spent looking at those powerful paintings and drinking coffee with their warmly enigmatic maker. A few months later, I was delighted to learn that Cora had received a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Heidi Howard

Dear Cora,

My mother absorbed your attraction to contradictions before I was born

So when we met the sprayed paint tangled into oil seemed like it had always been there

You were another New York lonely girl, only child, feeling the organism of the city closer than a close friend, more constant than any lover

I can’t wait to see the paintings grow, beyond your body, marks of our brief time on this earth

Benjamin Langford

I interviewed with Cora for a studio assistant position in 2020, when COVID was still at its peak. I remember a somewhat quiet, socially distanced conversation during which she asked me, just a couple minutes in, “So, what do you think? Do you want to work here?”—I was caught off guard by how quickly the question seemed to come up, saying something like “Oh, don’t you need to think about it or meet other candidates?” She simply replied: “That isn’t how I do things.”

Her confidence after such a limited interaction struck me as unexpectedly hasty; but—as was often Cora’s way—I believe she simply trusted her intuition and knew we would get along. She was right; Cora soon became for me a receptive and caring mentor and eventually came to feel like family to me.

She once told me “decisions are easy for me,” as she considered a major studio move. There was an ease in the way Cora operated in the world, a deeply held confidence and conviction that I believe is reflected in every artwork she made.

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.

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

Although there was not much for me to physically be involved with in the printing process, I felt like a kind of translator, between two generations and two drastically different methodologies. Cora texted me the evening after printing “Thank you for your help today. I know it may have seemed as if you just sat around– what you did was super helpful.” I could feel that Cora was genuinely grateful for my presence that day, and that the experience illuminated a commonality and joint understanding between us.

Those silkscreen paintings were the last large works that Cora was physically fit enough to work on. Cora’s studio routine soon included my help walking her from her apartment to the studio—especially to cross the train tracks along the route, which she dreaded most. I look back fondly on these walks we would take each day, sharing insights and updates on our lives. When we would arrive at the train tracks, Cora would pause for a moment and gently take grasp of my elbow before proceeding across. I feel lucky to have been able to guide her across those tracks each morning, a small gesture in return for all the guidance she provided me.

Marina Adams (and Stanley Whitney)

I must have met Cora in the eighties. I think it was through Dona Nelson who I had met through Stanley, who in turn knew both Cora and Dona since the seventies. I remember dinners at Cora’s, in her studio downtown in the cast iron building at the corner of Reade and Broadway … a big table would be pulled out and set up in the middle of the loft, with adhoc studio chairs around it. Dinner was always delicious. Wine, food and conversation flowed all night. Cora did everything with a seeming ease, a natural offhanded sophistication and flair … like the crisp white, slightly oversized men’s shirt that she would wear over jeans with so much style. She had a theatricality about her that I loved.

The paintings would be there, naturally, as we were in her space, her studio. And they were just like her … beautiful in a delicate but strong, tough way … very ambitious, mysterious, almost secretive, hard to pin down. They were part of a language that I understood from looking at the work of previous generations of New York Painting, an abstract language, gestural, full yet spare, ambitious in her scope of what paint can do, reminding me a bit of the Joan Mitchells that I was seeing at Xavier Fourcade Gallery.

Cora was generous and interesting as well as interested. We all saw each other after that, visiting each other’s studios and exchanging thoughts on painting and on the work we were doing … and then, as she often did, she left for Cologne.

Mary Jones

When I moved from LA to NYC in the late eighties, it was Cora’s work that defined everything I wanted from painting at that time: the urbanity and grit of the city and an ungraspable depth that I saw as unique to her thinking and process. In 1992, her work in the four person show, Painting Invitational at Sandra Gering, solidified these feelings. Four painters—but it’s only her work that I remember from that show and I remember it vividly. One painting in particular included a solidified polyurethane circle excavated from the top of a five gallon drum. It rose like a toxic sun from pinky gray sludge, an urban lotus for a cynical age. Her paintings were casual, elegant, and industrial in equal measure, with all the ab-ex DNA of past generations distilled within a complicated morass of process. I was eager to know the woman who made these paintings and I pursued this relationship for almost thirty years. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever worked as hard at a relationship as I did with Cora. It wasn’t easy to get her to be friends with me and it was often painful. Her attention wasn’t easily granted, but I was persistent. Cora was well aware of her influence on my work, and having her in my studio was an exercise in anxiety. When I came into a trove of x-rays, I first offered them to her. It was only because she didn’t want them that I could begin to utilize them as my own material. She was incredibly generous to me in this way, which is not to say that I wasn’t also leveled on a few occasions. We eventually agreed to trade paintings, a drawn out transaction that took me to the breaking point with my feelings for her. But after too many years, she came through with her part of the bargain. I’ve learned incredible things from this painting, not only about who she is and was, but about who I am not.

Her show at Jason McCoy in 1994 was equally revelatory, one of the most ambitious of her career. During a talk by Barry Schwabsky at the gallery, he described her work as alchemical and in her inimitable way, she interrupted him and said, “No, it’s chemical.” I’ve never stopped reveling in this remarkable ability of hers, to be “sedimental,” and to consistently reject any implications of the sentimental. This was her personal magic—how pours, powders, and indefinable stuff that looked like residue scraped from the bottom of a turpentine jar could be so tender in her hands. She always said her work was about the body. She also always said she didn’t know what she was doing. I remember hearing this at her studio table, when I would pick up the mysterious vials from Kremer and ask her how she used them. She said, “I don’t know.” I believed her and I chased that with unconditional curiosity and admiration. Joan Mitchell famously said, “I carry my landscapes with me.” I think that Cora carried her studio with her. From Tribeca to spaces in Long Island City, the airy atmosphere and imprint from her Broadway loft prevailed, there was always the soft toned vintage couch, the de Kooning-esque rocking chair, and work in progress.

The last ten years of her life she had time for me in a way she hadn’t before. Maybe I’d just worn her down. No matter, Cora was worth waiting for. She was a marvel, a koan, and continually surprising to me. There was nothing predictable about her thinking. I can only describe it as elliptical. She was remarkably compassionate, yet there was no harbor in her life for weakness, especially any of her own. It was hard to get her to laugh and yet, she had a delightful sense of humor. She had complete disdain for anything she deemed “showy,” either in criticism or painting. Our conversations about art were often prickly, but I got used to it. She was stylish, regal, curious, and animal-level instinctive.

I wondered how I could end this piece, but Cora did it for me. I was at my teaching job at RISD, sitting on the floor with a dazzlingly inventive sophomore who was inspired by poetry and Jung. Among the scattered detritus of her artmaking was tattoo transfer paper, which she uses in drawing, spray paint, markers, and everything else imaginable, including Kandinsky’s book, Concerning the Spiritual in Art. Looking at me intensely she held up Cora’s catalog, the same one I have in my studio. She said, “Do you know Cora Cohen?” I said, Yes I do.

Rebecca Ness

Cora and I were still in the “getting to know you” phase when she passed. We first met at the opening for her show Cora Cohen: Works from the 1980’s at Morgan Presents Gallery in the fall of 2022. Our first conversation was about paint, how it follows you everywhere. I had just arrived from my studio, and we realized I still had some Prussian blue on my arm. We laughed about how our art never lets us escape, no matter how hard we try. Or maybe it was just me laughing. At dinner later that evening, we sat across from each other and, between bites, continued the conversation about matters of composition and color. In the way that artist friendships develop, we eventually spoke of swapping studio visits. However, we were never able to. 

Several weeks after meeting Cora I bought a work of hers; a ghostly green painting titled Klein Creature from 2012. Our shared dealer told me that the orientation of the work was in flux, so I could hang it any way I wanted. When I first brought it home, I hung it in my bedroom. I sent Cora flowers in hospice and told her it was keeping me company there. Then, soon after, an urge came over me, and I moved it out to my living room.

It feels “right” to have Cora’s work hanging in my living room, right at home with the books. Her life, like her work, was packed full to the brim with history and stories. When Cora passed just a few months after we met, I felt our friendship was just beginning. Paintings live much longer than us; pigments and canvas are much more archival than our bodies. The moves in the material act as suggestions or stories, based on Cora’s incredible life. The impression of Klein Creature sticks around like that Prussian blue and follows me; leaving me to wonder how I could also leave a lasting impression through brushstrokes long after I’m gone. Cora will be deeply missed, but her work carries her personality onward. 

David Rhodes

I first met Cora through our mutual friends Carol Szymanski and Barry Schwabsky. During a dinner at their place here in New York City, Cora and I talked about painting. There was an impressive painting of hers on the wall across from where we were eating. Cora’s wry and intelligent take on many things included her interesting painting category “dirty painting.” Over the years we continue to have many conversations on painting, and on many other topics, sometimes at her studio or apartment in Long Island City, sometimes by email, these are conversations that I miss. Her time spent in Europe, particularly Germany, meant we also had this in common as I had lived in Berlin before moving to New York. Her painting had that Ab Ex and European abstract painting combination that didn’t at all rely on or imitate those styles, like Joan Mitchell’s Cora’s painting was singular, both within those painting traditions and something new.

In March 2013 I was happy to have had the opportunity to write a review of Cora’s exhibition at Guided by Invoices, for artcritical magazine. “Dirty/clean painting is a term Cohen uses without wanting to define the term—it’s simply a question to ask, nothing to do with hygiene yet everything to do with being embodied. Dirty painting embraces this, clean distances it and puts a gloss on the world—something this artist clearly has no intention of doing.” Cora was not one to put an unnecessary gloss on anything, which didn’t make her distant or remote, this is someone who always offered to stop by with a bowl of her chicken soup if I was enduring a particularly bad cold: she had a particularly sharp awareness of a friend’s situation, even when as with a cold, it happened to be minor.

The exhibition Cora Cohen: Works from the 1980’s at Morgan Presents in 2022 testified to an artist that was already highly developed and still intent on evolving further. On the last day of this exhibition the gallery was full of visitors, many of whom were artists glad to see these works again or for the first time, and speak with Cora: including colleagues and friends, old and new. Cora herself looked great as usual, and she was her wry, warm and very smart self. I was very happy to see her, and in that moment had no idea that it would be for the last time.

Barry Schwabsky

I first became aware of Cora Cohen’s work back in 1984, right around the time I started writing for art magazines. Bill Zimmer wrote an article in Arts Magazine on her show that year at the Max Hutchinson gallery. I was just about to start writing for Arts, and the image caught my eye. This looked like my kind of painting, but by the time I saw Bill’s article, I had already missed the show. And unfortunately I haven’t been able to put my hands on the copy of that issue of the magazine, which I still have in a box somewhere, but I get a pretty good reminder of what the show I missed was about from a review by Michael Brenson in the New York Times. The show was called Portraits of Women and some of the paintings were given names of women from history or myth. But of course they weren’t portraits in any ordinary sense; they were abstract paintings. And yet they must have been full of feelings about people. “The works are dense, brooding and yet elated,” Brenson wrote. And he continued, “The turbulence of the paint not only looks but also feels like freedom.” That all sounds like the Cora I later got to know.

I probably didn’t see Cora’s work in person until her next one-person show four years later, at the Wolff Gallery, at that time one of the unmissable spots on the New York art map. And when did she and I meet? Strangely, I don’t remember. But that only testifies to the fact that we became such fast friends that it quickly came to seem that we had always known each other.

Looking over the few things I’ve written about Cora’s work over the years, in a catalogue essay from 2004 I came upon a statement I had totally forgotten about. Or rather not quite a statement but a sort of subjective quasi-statement transmuting into a question: “I want to say that you are the master of something,” I told Cora, according to this essay, “but just what is it you are the master of?” Apparently she denied having a mastery of anything. I couldn’t agree with her, but still had to understand how certain kinds of mastery involves letting go of other kinds of mastery. I had to admit that while “my desire to praise her mastery was not inappropriate … her consciousness of how much potential mastery she’d had to renounce was still truer.”

And then I went to point to the rather amazing title of one of Cora’s then-recent paintings: Things belong to her and she belongs to other things, saying, “it articulates how the painting has been made in part through a sense of control but also through a sense of being controlled.” I think that dialectic of control and loss of control, of will and randomness, of structure and the dissipation of structure, was the key to the entire development of her art. And the never-ending vitality of that art came precisely from the fact that it never settled into a conclusive balance of these contradictions. And this reminds me of another of Cora’s titles that stuck with me: Paradoxes and Oxymorons. She borrowed that title from a poem by John Ashbery. But she didn’t really need to have borrowed it; she could have invented it. Cora lived the contradictions, paradoxes, oxymorons of her art with aplomb.

This realization accords with the solution to my puzzle about the nature of Cora’s mastery. I proposed that it was “a mastery over anxiety, specifically over the anxiety occasioned by the loss of overt and stable structure that was necessary to attain a deeper, more elusive yet resilient one.” Today I would possibly articulate a little differently, avoiding the word “anxiety” that is so redolent of the post-World War II ethos of existentialism and Abstract Expressionism—not that those are irrelevant to Cora’s art. But still, today I’d describe this non-mastery mastery by way of a longer story, and I’d speak instead about what John Keats wrote of in a famous letter to his brothers George and Tom, in 1817, a quality that he thought quintessentially defined the genius of Shakespeare above all others, and to which he himself aspired: he called it negative capability, “that is,” he said, “when man”—or of course a woman—“is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” I think Cora was there, she had that capability, and I think that explains why her art was so broad and encompassing. With time, more and more people will come to appreciate this.

Jason Stopa

I met Cora Cohen in the summer of 2022. Well, that’s only partly true. She actually sent me an email. It was an invite to her solo exhibition in New York at Morgan Presents. The email read, “I have read and enjoyed your writings (particularly your review of a favorite of mine—John Zurier) and seen and enjoyed your paintings, although I don’t think we’ve met. Attached is a flyer for my upcoming exhibition—I  am excited that these paintings from the eighties will be out in the world.” I replied, “I love your work.  I often show it in class to my students.  Exciting to see some paintings from the eighties on view. I will be at the opening.” Needless to say, I saw the show.

After the opening we began a series of exchanges leading up to an interview. When Cora spoke about painting she wanted to get around questions concerning meaning or signification. She had questions about my questions. This was a recipe for a difficult interview. Édouard Glissant wrote a lot about encounters, he believed encounters reveal to us the changing face of the Other over time, but do not reveal a totality. What’s more, such exchanges might only reveal the Other’s opacity. Cohen’s paintings, which revel in densely layered applications of paint as if she were trying to dig her way out of it, are by turns mystifying and vulnerable. It is what makes her work so important today.

Cora and I spoke over email and Zoom for most of early 2023. On one particular Zoom, Cora told me she was feeling ill. She planned to revisit edits after she was feeling better. That day never came. And the interview never quite crystallized, but it got close. What follows is some of the last of her reflections on painting on record.

Cora was contrarian and stubborn to a fault. For those that knew her well, these were also some of her more endearing qualities. Our interview began as follows:

Jason Stopa: I don't know your process. Do you start with studies or drawings?

Cora Cohen: I think process is one of the most uninteresting things to talk about.

Jason Stopa: We can skip it.

Case in point. What at first appears evasive on second glance reveals a deeper commitment altogether. In that same interview, Cohen remarked, “I dislike narratives. Like I don't read novels. (However, I think I like a lot of the image based work by some young people—it seems both sophisticated and earnest.)” Cora’s relationship to painting and language was rooted in a historical moment, the heyday of post-structuralism and postmodernism, where artworld discourse favored the linguistic readings of art over the retinal. Cohen, alongside peers like Louise Fishman and Dona Nelson, adopted an adversarial position in contrast to it.

Cohen saw painting as a process where the image is arrived at by way of seeking, destroying and reclaiming. This Ab Ex tendency may now seem retrograde, but seen another way her antagonism to language was an opportunity for painting to act discursively. Today, that discursive tendency works against the celebrity culture of painting, painting as spectacle, painting as propaganda, painting as a fetish commodity, looking at painting as a social media activity, and our post-discourse era where some painters buy into the pedestrian notion that painting is simply an image-making strategy concerned with style.

As for any hangups about this in the twenty-first century, her own words say it best:

Jason Stopa: Do you feel any baggage with respect to art history? Or do you feel like that doesn't factor in? I think of your relationship to painters like Joan Mitchell.

Louise Fishman was another painter, forming around a similar moment as you, who embraced the tenets of Abstract Expressionism only to introduce a feminist sensibility into it. Do you share a kinship with her?  Is yours a way of introducing content into abstraction once seen as off limits?

Cora Cohen: Now I love many of those paintings and admire them very much but I think I was formed by art in general which is to say, Chinese painting mainly Yuan dynasty, and “modern” European art, like Miro and Ernst, and early Spanish painting more than Italian, and of course American Modernism. I’m more inclined towards Joan Mitchell paintings made directly after the war which seem to be influenced by art informel—it was a period of her work she did not like and we used to argue about it.

For a period I was friends with Louise Fishman and I admired (and do admire) a lot of her work. And I do love much of Joan Snyder. Sometimes I wish I could paint a little more like Joan Snyder. I like how they are not cohesive. I did one drawing that I considered riffing off of for a painting and knew immediately it would be too mannered, too Twombly but Snyder brings it off at times.

I think the way in which one knows the content of a painting is through a combination of factors, including who and what the person who painted the painting is. There is something with many of Snyder’s paintings that makes me think “Big mama’s gonna break that grid,” and I like that attitude and how they’re painted. With Louise’s work I feel they are very fine paintings in an established tradition. The ones with words do announce identity and gender and retain an attachment to an established aesthetic.

How content might inhere in an abstract painting, or any painting, for that matter, is important. Isn’t it usually at least in part, the relationship of surety to the tentative, the known vs. the unknown?

May your work live forever between the known and unknown, Cora.

Carol Szymanski

If anyone can be called a high priestess (cohen), Cora could. A force to be reckoned with, she held to an astute vision and lived for and up to the highest of standards, especially when it came to painting. Our conversations over thirty years showed me that she genuinely wished to understand thoroughly her thoughts and mine. Cora was a generous, loving soul who was never prejudiced in favor of her ideas over anyone else’s. She just seemed to search for the core of things and in this sense, her name served her well. Nothing was ignored in her own or others’ words and vision. She had a love for knowledge and her paintings depict this. Precision comes to mind with all her marks and remarks to be remembered.

Saul Ostrow

Cora Cohen was born in New York City (1943), attended Bennington College in Vermont (1960-64 & 1970-72), died (2023). She began exhibiting her work in 1974 in the US and in Germany in the 1990s. Her work is without a signature style, this is because Cora’s focus over the years would shift from color, to trace, to fluidity, to chance to… What remained consistent was her concern for painting’s materiality.

I’m not quite sure when and where I met Cora—it must have been in the mid- to late-1970s. For some reason I identify the initial introduction to her and her work with Bykert Gallery—she may have had a painting hanging over Klaus Kertess’s desk. This was the wall where he hung things that he wanted to think about, get used to, or showcase. At the time, though I was a conceptual artist, I had an interest in the painters identified with Post-Minimalism such as Ralph Humphrey and Robert Ryman—I was probably dismissive of Cohen’s because it was non-conceptual, nor formalist—it all would have seemed to me derivative of Second Generation Abstract Expressionist—this opinion would have been reenforced by the fact that Cora was also among a group of women abstract painters who knew and venerated Joan Mitchell. This judgement also made sense given she had graduated from Bennington, and to us smart-ass radicals that was no better than having gone to the Studio School. All of this is to say we traveled in different circles and had very different interests.

Fast forward ten years to maybe 1986. In the intervening years my tastes and views had become more catholic. Having turned away from analytic conceptual art, I turned to making paintings and sculptures using political and social iconography—ironically, though my own work was never abstract, my principal interest was abstract art. It was about this time I had started to curate and write as well. Given modernism was being ushered out and ArtForum in 1974 had pronounced painting as being dead, I figured the most radical position I could take in the spirit of “postmodernism” was to seek to critically sustain the validity of abstract painting and to demonstrate that modernism was still a viable proposition. During this period, I came to be re-introduced to Cora—this time perhaps by the Second Gen. Ab EX painter Michael Goldberg or more likely the painter Craig Fisher, I had been introduced to Goldberg by Klaus Kertess, while Fisher I had met through the painter Gary Stephan. Or it might have been through my association with BOMB Magazine’s publisher Betsy Sussler. Either way, I was told by a number of artists, I should look at Cora’s work.

Her somewhat ethereal and process-oriented paintings now made sense to me in a way previously they had not. I slowly realized that what drove her paintings was a striving for the poetics of sensation—each painting was an event in itself. Truly, Cora was a Heideggerian, seeking to escape language, which for her was not a medium of explication—it was a burden, which she tolerated. When conversing with her, I realized I would have to change my approach to talking about art given Cora would become lost in a labyrinth of meanings, which made it difficult for her to respond directly to a comment. When speaking with her one needed to use words that were grounded in the tactile or a cognitive impression.

The non-linearity of her thinking permitted her to take risks—to make paintings which were formal without being reductive that at first appear to be ambiguous, nearly arbitrary yet in the end considered. One could only make sense of her paintings by coming to “see” the decisions that had gone into their making. It was these qualities that led me to include Cora’s work in my 1991 exhibition Strategies for the Next Painting, which sought to catalog the range of contradictory things that could be included in the category abstract painting. Here her work was placed alongside painters such as Gerhard Richter, Brice Marden, Jonathan Lasker, Harriet Korman, and Jules Olitski, Carl Ostendarp, among others. All of these artists seemed to me to bridge the modernist, postmodernist gap.

I included her in other shows as well and would mention her in articles, but as often happens we drifted apart in the early 2000s given I was spending much of my time out of NY. It was only in recent years we became reconnected—it began with Cora calling me, to tell me she liked a catalogue essay I had written on Mike Goldberg that she had recently re-read. This led to a studio visit, then lunch, phone conversations, plans for drinks, which never happened given her demise.

On the occasion of her exhibit in 2022, at Morgan Presents, in acknowledgement of her hard-won achievements of keeping her work always new, I wrote:

Cora Cohen’s works from the 1980-early 90s, rather than echoing the gestural spontaneity of Abstract Expressionism, form occurrences that resonate with the ethos of European L’informale (formlessness). Each painting in this exhibition consists of the clash between thin painterly process-oriented color field-like, gestural grounds upon which she has built up the type of autographic gestural marks associated with expressionism. Yet, the results are not expressionist in the vernacular sense the word has come to connote—Cohen does not seek to evoke emotions. Cohen’s brushwork instead forms abstract impasto configurations—baroque-, Soutine-esque aggregates of short, single stroke-like marks. The other is that of the ground image, it sits upon. The two do not interact, literally she gives us a figure and a ground, it is as if two paintings were occupying the same canvas. As such as with Cohen’s work in general these works now almost thirty years old remain indeterminate.

Liz Phillips

I first met Cora at Bennington College when I was an undergraduate and she was a graduate student. She taught my drawing class and played a work of music for each drawing class. Cora was the person who affirmed my vision of drawing, mark-making that was not strictly representational. I introduced her to new music, at the time: John Cage, Anthony Braxton, Pauline Oliveros, Steve Reich, Maryanne Amacher and my own sound work. We soon spent many evenings meeting in each other’s studios, looking and listening to work, and then eating late-night snacks at the local French restaurant. I had a car so we drove to get food. But even back then, Cora was very careful to carve maximum time for her work.

College was the beginning of a long friendship, mostly spent observing and discussing artwork together. Cora always had wonderful studios with many windows. So we sat and talked while I observed the light changing on her paintings. During our discussions, she did prep and clean up while I looked. We both felt like sculptors: deeply interested in the body, human-scale work, new materials and patinas. Abstraction was a natural way to decompose and recompose our world. Labels and categories were not serious interests at that time. We were makers and busy discovering and investigating mediums, all to create deep resonance and space.

Cora had a way with layers and paint that I loved. No mark was completely destroyed. There was always a trace or residue of each idea, gesture or event. Cora used a mix of materials: a multiple of glosses, rabbit skin glue, raw pigments and more so that as the light shifted different elements, strokes and densities of matter became visible.

Many of my favorite artists deal with particles and layers, masses in sound, paint, and various media. As an interactive sound and media artist, I have longed to find a way to freeze and contain my events as successfully in archival material as Cora learned to do with paint on canvas, often on her very special rectangles. I might watch a painting for hours to see it reveal the results of her time-based exploration as the light shifted. These paintings often began as a spill or happening or event. Ideas and images were layered and collected. They built a painting of color shifts and densities. Like Maryanne Amacher, Sarah Sze, Xenakis, Earl Howard, I see how her work explores deep spaces, ambiguity and complexity. You often cannot name (or reproduce) the color or form. You cannot tell where one part begins and ends. There are many conflicting yet connecting associations, directions, and relationships that your mind and eye receive.

Over the last forty years, as our meetings were less frequent, a visit to Cora's studio was like going on vacation, like a walk into a new sound or landscape. I realize how precious this was now. A rare glimpse into deep processing of surfaces. Her paintings belong in New York’s museums’ collections. But there is no place here to go and see Cora’s paintings.
Like Cora, I express my thoughts, ideas and connections with a conviction that many find bold and abrupt. This is what allowed us to make uncompromising art and to continue with minimal institutional support. We shared our varying status.

One last story: Cora saved my life. I had been doubled over in the college infirmary for about twenty-four hours with a stomach ache. When Cora found me there, she screamed at the doctor that I was very sick (I was almost delirious!) and I must immediately be transferred to a hospital. She accused the doctor of neglecting me; the doctor assumed I was there to skip classes. They listened to her. My appendix had almost ruptured when it was finally removed. I lived as she lived, taking care.

Archie Rand

New York: Cora and I met in the seventies in that generous, fluid muck of creatives, whose nuclei could waddle unchecked into crossover. The cohort was relatively small and all the disparate approaches maintained low hedges. Although stretched by osmosis, the nourishing hubs of each grouping were still historically/theoretically identifiable.

Substrates were active but a satisfied chunk of loyal Clement Greenberg abstractionists had purchase on a temporary dominance. Cora and I were crammed under the umbrella of this camp by default but did not trumpet our peripheral party membership. The last gasps of that horde marched smugly behind Clem’s shepherd’s crook dutifully parading in advance of a known trajectory. Cora and I shared a rejection of the Greenbergian straitjacket finding the militancy of its simple aesthetics laughable and dangerously autocratic.

Being a Bennington person gave her favored camp access and we talked a lot about Paul Feeley and the oddly unfittable Sidney Tillim, whom we both knew well. That pedigree carried enough weight to position her near the center of consideration but she rebuffed the constraints of the expected aesthetic enlistments.

She was visible enough in that circle to have been given a show by James Harithas, Director of the Everson Museum, as Harithas was well disposed towards Clem’s approved visual product, as were several other museum directors for whom Clem’s selected cadre provided an exhibition pool.

As Cora didn’t make work that displayed the prescripted formal allegiance there was, still, nowhere else to place her output as the classification categories were limited by a frugal appraising lasso, convenient to the neat expedience of academic shelving.

We would meet for coffee, exchanging empathy, recognizing the mutual feisty streak in our shared isolate orbits on the sidelines. Cora could be sharp-tongued in her expositions on the insipid and false. Her small social circle contained unclassifiables, a loose confederacy, emitting cultural discomforts in defense of their independence. An armature of integrity sutured fast a clasping of Cora Cohen’s identity.

We bonded over an appreciation of Terry Riley, La Monte Young and Steve Reich’s music. I introduced her to Cecil Taylor and she accompanied me to Slugs’ to hear him. We became friendly over that recognition of our distance from that available core to which we and some others were loosely but still critically tied.

She wanted a recognition that was coldly blocked by active gender prejudice—but also if not equally by the original aesthetics of her work. Hotly disturbed by the smug, dominant machismo keeping her out of the lineup she maintained a simmer while trekking with fierce focus into undeveloped territories.

Although she and her work remained subcutaneously present, there was little critical matrix extant into which her works could be wedged. Her production got only past the stage right wings, just shy of the spotlight.

There were sparse discursive pyramids onto which her discoveries could be annealed. Without ready theoretical templates that could be slapped onto an estimation of her work she suffered from the lack of acknowledgement that would have otherwise offered to list her relentless uncoverings.

I marveled as her unbridled approaches would turn on a dime, grasping evolving possibilities as they came around the bend.

She so needed to breathe outside of the deeded atmosphere that her work wasn’t comprehended by many abiding in the marketplace—even though, when her work faced refusal it still attracted some nosey peeks, wanting to keep check on some assurance that she wasn’t jumping ship. She was.

One could taste that Cora Cohen’s work was secretly tethered, flavored with tinges of post-war Europe, indicating that the conversely lyric and old world tragic was wafting just above her canvas. Resignation is assigned quarters, quelling the hubbub, while the sleek shellac of monosyllabic American declaration is absent. Her paintings resolve to a somber situation of narrative exposition that sees the insertion of compositional cleverness as a falseness, a lethal liability.

“If the music is true, the form takes care of itself”
-Cecil Taylor

A fearless wrenching resides that resists encrustation of the prevailing mannerisms. In Cora’s work, the contrarian parrying of successive impulses devolves to the governance of a finality that is numbed, fatigued by the carnage of its construction. Story visits, settling on the painting and even the motley dispossessed find encampment within its periphery.

Surreptitiously her paintings hang side by side in galleries which host canvases whose leaks of facile disengagement seek to neutralize the atmosphere. Cora’s paintings flirt with mythic engagement, inviting the viewer’s circumspection. There seems the undeniable, faint sound… Cora didn’t depict—she inhabited—and her paintings reek of allure.

“To paint is a possessing rather than a picturing.”
-Philip Guston

An admirer of Fautrier and the Tachistes, her work shares the self-evident melancholic resolve of Bram van Velde—but it is a wizened, burnished, nearly confident melancholy, devoid of his helplessness.

Entertaining the academic notions of transgression are beneath the dignity of her moral intelligence. She was a diaristic journalist sending accurate reports of her entropy, each series piercing further out of the concentric bands. As such she actually has few intentions in common with other groundbreaking female artists who share her time frame as there is little of the rebellious proclamatory in her work. It is more a Picassoid “finding,” dating back to belief in painting as icon through which devotions can be transmitted.

The dynamic reveal of her work from the 1980s, recently shown at Morgan Presents, enrolled her accomplishments, once again, to the fore of art chatter. The work, previously unexhibited, was blatant poetry, announcing her belief in paint’s ability to embrace, pulling the unwilling viewer towards extended dwelling. The entrance to dialogue, furiously pried open, presented a companion of solace and meditation.

Cora located the abode of the irrational low humming magic that lived in the paintings from which she sucked her sustenance. Her uncommon embrace of the metaphysical powers of abstraction rejected the simplistic aesthetic recognitions of theoretical, symbolic or structural conclusions. Cora heeded what a priest recently warned a friend of mine that “beauty in the service of pragmatism is ideology.”

Her work is free of pontification claiming fealty to an ancient, darker knowledge of belief transported by illusion—the transformation of a 2D surface to a 4D conversation. Cora Cohen, a painter gifted with enormous understanding, was an unruly, revered practitioner of those mystic arts.

Nora Griffin

Cora Cohen, her last name in Hebrew means “Priest,” her first name, one letter off from my own, her birthday, three days after mine. A true Libra, revolving in the air, moving in light, space, and paint, lover of Montauk and the old Tribeca with its slanting sunlight hitting industrial brick. Cora was a New York City Painter in the vein of Joan Mitchell (before she escaped to France); there was nothing finer to Cora than the neon orange of a construction site edging up against concrete, stones and sky. She could appreciate the complex beauty of grey skies as if they were the bluest blue. In one of the last meaningful encounters we had—I recall the meditative attention she gave to the cloudy skies of Montauk—“I actually prefer this weather!” she said with a typical Cora burst of enthusiasm in the face of what others would see only as a ruined beach weather.

I want to emphasize Cora’s role as a friend and mentor to me—and indeed to many other younger artists. The first role of a mentor is to give space, to listen, to take in fully what the younger artist has to say and offer. It is a relationship of cherished mutual respect. You cannot mentor someone whom you do not respect, and with Cora, I felt so much of our dynamic was due to her empathetic interest in my own progress as an artist.

Some memories stand out: Meeting Cora at the Met to see the Alice Neel show, the Francis Bacon show, meeting Cora at the Whitney to see Paul Thek, to see Kerry James Marshall, and countless other shows, her clear and thoughtful voice echoing in my head, always ending our outing with the same refrain: “I’ll need to go back and visit the show another time,” her enjoyment of art always struck me as intensely private. Much like her own studio practice. She was happy to meet me and share the experience of strolling through the halls of a museum, catching up about our mutual friends, and trading gossip and tales about the art world. But the real work for her would occur alone—back in the studio, back at the Metropolitan, solitary, taking in the paintings.

Another scene: Meeting Cora for a glass of white wine on the Lower East Side or in Chelsea, talking about her career in the 1980s, about her time at Bennington in the late ’60s, about her childhood in the 1950s in Washington Heights—she revealed her life story in fragments—and when things got too complicated (in her life or in mine), when we struggled with heartbreaks, new relationships, or career challenges, she would always return to a mantra that was like a definitive closure on any narrative structure. “I am an Abstract Artist!” she told me when I asked her to go into some details, or when I wanted her to clarify something. But she said this phrase with a smile and an edge of irony—not with any malice or intolerance towards figurative art. She was taught by Formalists and came of age in the ’60s under the influence of second generation Ab Ex painters, but she was herself too European-centric, too admiring of Art Informel and post-war German painting ever to be a basic, formalist paint-splasher. She looked for the grit and glitter in the surface and wanted the paintings to surprise her, to breathe, to live. “What is it?” or “What do you see?” are questions Cora was not afraid to ask studio visitors—she wanted to be surprised by my comments to her, and in fact that was expected. Cora had no time for platitudes or compliments, she wanted to really get into the work. I welcomed this honesty, and it made our dynamic ever changing, and ever honest, above all else.

Cora’s bookshelves are legendary. She loved Roland Barthes, especially his book, The Responsibility of Forms, and I borrowed it from her when I wrote about her paintings in 2013 for The Rail. Writing a review of Cora’s work was a way to honor her and thank her for the time she spent with My work—visiting my studio and encouraging my voice as both a painter and a writer. The first time she visited my studio was when I was twenty-four, living and working in a railroad apartment in Williamsburg, and I can say now that the interest that Cora showed in me and my art at this time, when I was still very much developing a language, and not yet sure of my path forward, is one of the reasons I am still a painter today. I wanted to get better and grow because of her influence, and I began to expand my circle of artists, partially through Cora and her recommendations. She was deeply rooted in many art world(s) in a way that is antithetical to the virtual, social-media machine of today.

One last scene: Cora’s loft on lower Broadway was quiet and cool and enormous, I noted an ancient encyclopedia open on a table with a magnifying glass laying across it. It looked like something out of a Borges short story—the painter and the Encyclopedia. It was the summer of 2007 and I was in my early twenties, and Cora was a new acquaintance—soon to be a friend—who was forty years my senior. There was a rapport that sometimes comes from one native New Yorker to another, we could speak in a shorthand about the changing city—I liked her wry sense of humor and thoughtful pauses between words, searching for just the right way to describe a person or a painting. And she was often correct in her assessment of both. We sat in rocking chairs in front of enormous canvases in the studio portion of the loft. I can remember the feeling perfectly – talking in subdued voices about the paintings, the elegance of the space and Cora herself, a consummate studio host, not giving explanation to her work, but instead letting an atmosphere of charged inquiry waft around us.

In the late ’80s and early ’90s Cora wrote and conducted interviews for Bomb Magazine. This is from a piece she wrote about the artist Ralph Humphrey:

My natural inclination is toward apprehending work sensually; toward art which is optically complex; toward art which is generous, inclusive, not worked over toward a signature style, towards artists who have more ideas than they know what to do with; towards vision, not the adjustments thereof; and an art which goes all over the place, sometimes literally.

I can hear Cora’s cadences, her gentle, wryly thoughtful voice, and I can see her animated expression, her inquiring mind, her unbridled love of art and artists. We are sitting together in her studio, the time is always sunset somehow, the city skyline just out of reach, the wall of books behind us, the paintings imperfectly stacked ahead of us.

Dirk Schroeder

I am a retired antitrust lawyer and an avid art collector. The latter came quite naturally, having grown up in a family that valued art highly. I remember how my father brought back works by Rauschenberg and Warhol from a trip to the US in the sixties. Earlier still, I remember playing among oil drums arranged by Christo in a Cologne gallery. My brother still has a wrapped coffee grinder from that time.

Cora and I first met over dinner at my favorite Michelin-starred restaurant in Cologne in the late eighties. Like so many American artists at the time, she had been attracted by Cologne’s vibrant art scene. Cologne gallerists were inviting artists, offering them studios. Other artists followed their peers. All benefited from a lively community; some are still in Cologne today.

I got to know Cora a little better in 1996, when she had a studio in Cologne at Thürmchenswall. At that studio, she was working on a painting that I ended up buying. For ten years, I had that painting in my dining room hanging across from where I sat, so I got to know it quite well. This painting, called Pigment Threat, became the first of many of her paintings that I bought over the years. If you are familiar with a quality of Cora’s paintings, you know that they will grow on you over the years, and they will never cease to amaze you.

I saw Cora regularly over the years either in New York or in Germany, and it was always a delight. She was not only a very pleasant person; she was also an erudite interlocutor. I first learned that—also back in 1996—when she and I went to Paris to see an exhibition called “L’informe” at the Centre Pompidou. The makers of the exhibition translated “l’informe” as “formless” or “formlessness.” I am still not sure what they meant by that—their main goal seemed to be to undermine other concepts, or depriving them of their boundaries. The show itself was a juxtaposition of artists such as Dubuffet, Rauschenberg, Manzoni, Fontana, Picasso, Pollock, and Twombly. Cora and I spent a lot of time discussing this show.

In 2011, Cora was an artist in residence at Raketenstation of Insel Hombroich in Neuss, which gave me the occasion to see her more regularly. She made an exhibition of her altered X-rays at the place, and had a very productive time there in general. Cora tried to have the joyous spirit of that summer spill over into work she did in New York. I continue to enjoy her work from that period, including Continuation of Insel Hombroich 1-3.

Cora came to Cologne regularly and usually stayed with her publisher/artist friends Sophie and Matthias Groebel. One occasion for her to be back in Cologne was an exhibition in 2016 at the Leopold-Hoesch-Museum in Düren called Artists’ Painters. By the way, this modern art museum is a charming place, consisting of a well-preserved Art Nouveau building in the front and a modern annex in the back. They were showing seven artists that I collect (each artist had a room of his or her own)—all of them with the exception of Pierre Alechinsky either from the US or the UK and all having lived and worked in Cologne for a certain time. The show’s catalogue is a box with individual catalogues for each painter. Cora’s is called Paintings Altered X-rays Drawings.

Currently, I have seven paintings of Cora’s hanging at my office. They help me think of her.