George Cohen - aged artist - Interview

George Cohen became known in the forties and fifties for his paintings and board constructions with objects and mirrors affixed to them. He is considered a major influence on and harbinger of the Chicago imagists, as well as an important contributor nationally to developments in painting in the fifties and sixties. Born in Chicago in 1919, he received his B.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute and did graduate work in art history at the University of Chicago. In 1948 he began teaching at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, a position he held until his retirement. He has been the recipient of many awards and prizes, including the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim, and his art is owned by private and corporate collectors as well as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh. Cohen has shown for many years with the Zabriskie Gallery and the Charles Alan Gallery in New York and with Richard L. Feigen in Chicago and New York. His most recent museum show was in 1981 at the Art Institute of Chicago, and in 1982 he exhibited his paintings at the Frumkin Struve Gallery in Chicago. Cohen and his wife, the artist Constance Teander-Cohen, reside in Evanston in a nineteenth-century house brimming with paintings, books, and musical instruments (two of their three children are professional classical musicians). Half of this interview in the summer of 1991 took place there; the other half was in George's studio in downtown Evanston, which was also full of art and smelled of fresh paint.

Judith Raphael: Now that I'm middle-aged, it seems more natural to contemplate the subject of aging as an artist than it was twenty years ago when the issue wouldn't have crossed my mind.

George Cohen: You mean, when you were immortal?

J.R.: Yes, but tell me, are there significant changes in your life and work since middle age?

G.C.: I don't see any disconnection. I'm not sure that my particular sort of introspection is directed towards the way I've changed. I find in my painting, though, that I'm delighted with whatever the changes are which have taken place. The painting I now do seems to be less and less about me and more about its possibility of becoming and, if it clicks, a source of exhilaration. Succeeding with a painting gives me a sense of joy I don't remember having in the past.

J.R.: Were you more concerned about external responses and pressures?

G.C.: I think so. Now I don't care as much. I mean I do care about a response, but after seventy one wants to be alive, and the act of painting vivifies. There is a rediscovery and regeneration in the notion that things happen. Maybe it is kind of a cliche, but when you paint, it's like a generative process in language. Every new construct is a new statement, one that is different from any that has gone on before, and that is how it is when painting. The work has become more complicated. It seems to have its own logic, and I feel like someone who is not quite the editor but the one who judges the resolution.

J.R.: How is this process different from when you were younger?

G.C.: When I was younger the images seemed more clear-cut. It was exciting and of course new for me and, I hope, for others. Now the presence and appearance of my imagery is more gradual. It's familiar and keeps reappearing.

J.R.: Your work looks very youthful to me. Is this a conscious effort? Do you think about the notion of currency?

G.C.: I'm glad you think that the work stays young. I wish I could say the same for me. I don't think I can consciously keep up with new trends or ideas. If I do, it's because independently the internal nature of my painting may have kept up.

J.R.: I can think of a major difference between our lives right now. I teach full-time and you are a professor emeritus. How does that feel after years of structuring your life around your teaching?

G.C.: Well, obviously I spend a lot more time painting. I was serious about teaching, and I must say how wonderful it is now, when I'm walking down the street, that instead of thinking about what I'm going to say tomorrow, I can actually think about the painting that I'm working on. When you have ideas and you are serious about them, your class becomes your material, and you use your ideas in class. A friend once described teaching as "reinventing the students for themselves." That made me realize that I didn't have the luxury of reinventing myself. Perhaps now I have the luxury. It is much more isolating, and maybe it has to be. I don't know whether to love or hate it, but here I am with the painting.

J.R.: I've seen you at openings with a couple of people from your art-school days at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. One is Connie Cohen, the artist, who is also your wife. Do you still see other colleagues from those days?

G.C.: A lot of my friends from art school moved away. I have been associated with the university |Northwestern~ for a number of years, and I have very close friends in various departments who are not artists. Of course, I see Connie, and I see Ted Halkin. Recently two of my closest associates died, one of the things you have to deal with when older . . . memories rather than realities, at least with old friends.