Page 47 - Studio International - June 1972

The work of Bernard Cohen

Basil Bernstein

A boy used to help his mother clean the house. singlemindedness, often with great courage, joking; it's for real. This is no superficial
The house was small, and cluttered. The living in visual form. He has undertaken a journey gesture, nor an obsessive act. These great panels
room contained large pieces of furniture, only in the end to arrive at the beginning of its are in the nature of a celebration, and take their
dark with highly polished surfaces. Against one repetition. meaning from what has gone before. The coiled
wall was a large, oblong sideboard with drawers This can be most clearly seen in the final full world of the ribbon paintings, dense,
arranged in hierarchies. Doors at each end white paintings, beneath whose ritualised prolific, preoccupied with the search for the
gave access to two deep cupboards, each layered surfaces luminous marks announce white discs which are the ritual expression of
divided into shelves. Looking at the sideboard implicitly latent possibilities. The slate can their completion, has been wiped clean.
from the other side of the room, one might see never be wiped clean; the ring of dust on the Through a series of canvases the coils become
the outline of hierarchies and panels. Their surface of the sideboard always remains. A smaller, tighter, more intricate, frozen, stuck on
surface faintly patterned by the figuring of the mark both of the past and of the future. A to a large white background like the medallion
wood, and interrupted by curved, brass handles contrived mark, accidental only in its placing. which appeared in the first (Fable 1964). In
The top and inside of the sideboard was What Cohen offers us as the apogee of his this painting, the coils move outwards from
filled with clutter. No apparent principle current period are great panels of luminous the medallion in loose spirals, covering a series
distinguished the nearness of things. Dust layered whiteness in oil and acrylic, interrupted of events which in turn are imbedded within,
settled easily on the dark, shiny surfaces. When only by occasional nascent marks; paintings so rather than floating upon, an opaque luminous
objects were removed, pools, squares, panels, vast that the eye cannot experience their totality; cloud As always with Cohen, the organic
ribbons, whirls were revealed, created and paintings which defy immediate and total relationships between the paintings makes it
framed by the dust. The boy took a duster and recognition; paintings which can never be difficult to trace a beginning. In the same
cleaned the surface, but not completely. He reproduced. Room after room of pain and joy, way as he is obsessed with the final mark, the
left a small ring of dust rather like a discs like embryos, the informal beneath the end of the creative act, so it is difficult, except
thumbmark on the surface. This was his usual formal anticipate the future. This man is not superficially, to place a mark with any confidence
practice.
I spent many hours at the Bernard Cohen
retrospective exhibition at the HAYWARD
GALLERY. The Hayward is a vast barn, broken
by levels and partitions. High walls of dazzling
whiteness create great blocks of space.
Cohen's paintings transform the gallery
not into a communication centre for
contemporary rhetoric, but into a centre of
communion. Although the paintings, chosen
and arranged by Richard Morphet, who also
introduces Cohen's work in the catalogue, are
in chronological sequence, the impact is less
one of linear progression but more an impact
of the underlying organic structure of Cohen's
imagination. In the end is the beginning, and
in the beginning is the end. Beneath the
surface of the last paintings is a new
exploration of the possibilities in the first.
Cohen is less interested in progression, but (Top left) Casino 196o
intensely preoccupied with repetition. His Oil and charcoal on canvas
2440 x 2440 mm (96 X 96 in.)
work is a magnificent set of variations on a Coll the artist
theme. Cohen is concerned with nothing less
than the process of creativity itself; the (Top right) Shepheard's 1961
Oil on canvas
exploration of the relationship between the first 2440 x 3050 mm (96x 120 in.)
random mark and the finality of the logic of the Coll: Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester
form which is nascent within it. Cohen has
(Left) Memphis 1901-62
grasped the fundamental dialectic between the Oil on canvas
formal and the informal, between chance and 183o x 244o mm (72 x 96 in.)
Waddington Gallery
order, between play and ritual, between the
emergent and its form, and he has expressed
these relationships with intense

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