Corbett vs. Dempsey

works by George Cohen

George Cohen was born and raised in Chicago where he has been producing challenging and disturbing work for half a century. In 1946, he graduated from both Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he had been taking classes since 1937. In 1942 he married Constance Teander, a painter, and in 1948 he received an MA and a PhD in art history from the University of Chicago. While a student, he worked at the Field Museum and spent time studying the ethnographic art collections that strongly influenced his painting. By that time Cohen, along with Leon Golub, June Leaf, and other Chicago painters, had developed a style consisting of direct, disturbing, rough-surfaced, neo-primitive images that earned them the name the "Monster Roster." Anticipating assemblage, Cohen often embedded other materials, including gold leaf, aluminum foil, and black lace into the grainy, impasto surface of his paintings. His assemblages of the early 1950s that he later grouped under the title "The Phenomenology of Mirrors" explore real and imaginary space and the nature of time through distorted, repeated reflections. Anybody's Self-Portrait, an assemblage from the series that was included in MoMA's 1961 exhibition "The Art of the Assemblage," was purchased for the museum's permanent collection, acknowledging its importance as an early pre-Pop object.

His work was also included in a Surrealism show at MoMA in 1968. In 1984, after a long hiatus from publicly showing his work, Cohen displayed large, carefully rendered canvasses full of art-historical allusions at Frumkin/Struve Gallery in Chicago. His technical style had changed radically from the stiff, hieratic symbols of the earlier paintings, but his use of mirrors and the intellectually challenging, surreal quality of his work continued.

Cohen participated in all of the Exhibition Momentum shows from 1948 until 1957. He was in a number of the Art Institute's Chicago & Vicinity shows during the 1950s and 1960s and had many shows at Feigen Gallery in Chicago throughout the 1960s. His work has been featured in galleries in New York, Los Angeles and Paris, as well as at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in D.C. (1959), Contemporary Arts Center, Houston (1960), San Francisco Museum of Art (1963 and 1964-65), The Arts Club of Chicago (1960 and 1962), and La Jolla Museum of Art, California (1965). Cohen participated in a two-person exhibition with his wife at Jan Cicero Gallery, Chicago, in 1994. He has taught in Illinois at the Evanston Art Center, ID, and Northwestern University, where he was a professor of art from 1963 to 1984.

Biography by Laura Stoland, from Art in Chicago 1945 - 1995