George Cohen

1919—1999

Artist George Cohen gained recognition beginning in the 1940s for his distinctly figurative oil paintings and mixed media constructions with mirrors and objects. Born in Chicago in 1919, Cohen received his B.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and completed graduate work at the University of Chicago. In 1948 he began an esteemed academic career teaching at Northwestern University where he became a full professor in 1963 and was both President’s Fellow and Distinguished Faculty Lecturer.

George Cohen is of the generation of Chicago figurative painters who disengaged from the dominant approaches to abstraction and Abstract Expressionism that characterized post-war art in New York. As such, he played an important role in defining a new vision for figurative art that would become identified as the Chicago School. This group, coined “The Monster Roster” by critic Franz Schulze, was a porous network of artists that included Leon Golub, Cosmo Campoli, Seymour Rosofsky, and Ted Halkin, among others. In this way, and as an elder member of this group, Cohen is considered a major influence on and precursor to the widely known Chicago Imagists, an eclectic group of artists who rose to prominence in the 1960s, also known for their colorful, stylized, and idiosyncratic re-invention of art world trends.

Inclusion in exhibitions such as Huit Artists de Chicago at Galerie du Dragon in Paris (1962),

and The Chicago School, 1948-1954, at the Hyde Park Art Center (1964) cemented his affiliation to The Monster Roster, but according to an archival artist statement, Cohen disagreed with “this characterization of his work.” Cohen hoped to move people beyond “shock or fear,” and towards “contemplation.” Early influences on his work include history, classical theory and mythology, which he studied at the University of Chicago, as well as a period spent in Rome in 1960, where his experiences with Roman and Etruscan painting were formative.[1]

For his singular contributions to the field of painting, he was also recognized nationally as a key figure, particularly in the New York market, with solo exhibitions throughout the 1950s and 1960s at the Zabriskie, Alan, and Feigen galleries. He was the recipient of solo exhibitions at major institutions including the La Jolla Art Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Cleveland Museum, and the Art Institute of Chicago. Over these decades, his works spanned paintings to mixed media constructions. They often incorporated iconic, flattened female figures and legforms or disembodied limbs and heads into brightly painted, quasi-abstracted visual tableaus. As Schulze wrote, Cohen was a “a surrealist first, an expressionist after.”

Cohen’s inclusion in genre defining group exhibitions Art of Assemblage and Dada, Surrealism and Their Heritage, at the Museum of Modern Art, as well as the Carnegie International in 1968 cemented his relevance as an artist beyond Chicago. 

Throughout the 1970s Cohen, focused on teaching, showing infrequently. Over two decades would pass from his last major solo show in 1965 until several notable showings in the 1980s, including an exhibition at Frumkin-Struve Gallery in 1982 and a solo exhibition of 22 watercolor paintings at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1981. 

In 2016, Cohen was included in Monster Roster: Existentialist Art in Postwar Chicago

at the Smart Museum of Art, and the subject of George Cohen: Artist of the Chicago Avant-Garde at the Norton Museum of Art in 2021.
 

Throughout his career, Cohen was the recipient of many awards and prizes, including the National Endowment for the Arts, Ford Arts Council, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His work is included in numerous private and corporate collections, and it is held institutionally at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Minneapolis Art Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, among others.

George Cohen was married to Constance Teander Cohen, also a painter, who died in 1995. They raised their children Paul Cohen, Frances Tietov, and Susan Evans in Evanston. Cohen died on April 18, 1999.