ASPECTS OF THE THAMES: READING THE LONDON RIVERSCAPES OF ALFRED COHEN

ASPECTS OF THE THAMES: READING THE LONDON RIVERSCAPES OF ALFRED COHEN SARAH MACDOUGALL

EXTRACT FROM This is the full original essay. DATE 2020 SOURCE Published in Max Saunders and Sarah MacDougall, eds., Alfred Cohen: An American Artist in Europe – Between Figuration and Abstraction (London: The Alfred Cohen Art Foundation & Ben Uri Gallery and Museum, 2020), pp. 80–89. https://benuri.org/exhibitions/alfred-cohen/

Aspects of the Thames: Reading the London Riverscapes of Alfred Cohen In October 1961 Alfred Cohen’s third London exhibition, Aspects of the Thames, opened at the Kaplan Gallery in St. James, Mayfair. 1 Newly arrived in London, but already with two successful London shows behind him, as well as a Parisian profile, Cohen fitted well into the Kaplan’s eclectic mixed stable of established and rising artists which included Picasso, Pascin, ‘the two Roberts’ (Colquhoun and MacBryde), and the latest Paris sensation, Swiss ‘metamechanic’ sculptor Jean Tinguely. Initially, Cohen showed 24 oils of the River Thames, all painted in a few short months between 1960 and 1961; they sold so quickly that he had soon to replenish the gallery’s stock with a further five works. An atmospheric reproduction of a detail from Lambeth Pier (1961) on the front cover of the exhibition catalogue set the scene with the dark form of a masted vessel and pier-end dominating the foreground, the shadowy docklands emerging hazily behind. Aptly, the whole image is saturated in red. Although this would have been the catalogue designer’s choice, it nonetheless draws attention to one of the three dominant colours (the others being blue and white), employed not only in this series but also consistently throughout Cohen’s oeuvre. Indeed, an annotated copy of the catalogue in the hand of one R. D. L. Felton (Cohen Archive) reveals how these dominant palettes (red was noted in eight of the paintings and blue in another four) struck this viewer as noteworthy. 2 Cohen’s robustly painted evocations of the river, often drenched in bold colour, yet sensitively observed and filled with light, are among his finest paintings. As a body of work, they also provide a comprehensive overview of the Thames in this period and include some of its best-known landmarks including Westminster Palace, Parliament, St Pauls and Tower Bridge, but Cohen’s particular focus was the busy working Docklands area, known as the Pool of London3 – stretching from London Bridge to below Limehouse at locations ranging as far south as Lambeth, Wapping and Rotherhithe – spanned by bridges, piers, terminals and dolphins (mooring points) and punctuated by the tropes of industry: cranes, towers, cathedrallike warehouses and grid-like constructions lining the banks. He painted them at specific moments: emerging like ghosts from morning mists, aflame at sunset, or descending into the darkness of the night.

Cohen had always felt strongly rooted in Europe. Indeed, by 1965, this identification was so strong that America no longer felt like home. He observed, ‘I feel more of a foreigner there 1

than I do anywhere in Europe’.4 Nonetheless, in painting London he had joined that special band of immigrant observers, who brought their own perspective to their artistic interpretations of the capital city of their new host country. As Viennese émigré art historian Edith Hoffmann – herself then resident in London – observed of Oskar Kokoschka’s Great Thames View (1926) in her 1948 monograph of the artist: ‘Such a picture could only be painted by one who was enamoured of the spirit of the city which he could see better than anyone else because he was a stranger with well-trained and eager eyes [my italics]’. 5 Both Kokoschka and Cohen as painters of the Thames fit into the larger history of immigrant painters who also brought their ‘well-trained and eager eyes’ to focus on the river. This essay explores some of the parallels and divergences in their treatment of this subject, particularly in relation to Kokoschka and also asks if his immigrant status is helpful in reading Cohen’s paintings of the Thames, which, are also located within a greater framework of other possible historic and contemporary influences. In his 1982 book on Artists’ London David Piper highlights that ‘formidable band of temporary immigrants who paused from time to time to observe London and discover in her so many different aspects, some of which native Londoners had not dreamed existed until they were pointed out’.6 This wider ‘band’, stretching as far back as Canaletto’s topographical riverscapes, 7 is centred firmly on the Thames: from Whistler’s misty nocturnes, painted after his night-time boat trips along the river; to Monet’s shimmering canvases (which Piper calls ‘The moodiest, most haunting visual poetry that has ever been spun out of London’),8 painted when he and Pissarro were in exile in London during the Franco-Prussian War (Sisley was to follow three years later); 9 to Derain’s emphatically Fauve interpretations. For Piper, however, the master of this scene was above all, Kokoschka, whose Thamesscapes he believed to be, ‘the latest, and perhaps the last, of the great variations’ on this panoramic theme, observed from a high vantage point as if the artist were ‘poised half-way up the sky to heaven’ in order to survey the river ‘as the expression of London’. 10 Kokoschka’s engagement with landscape had begun in 1919, after his appointment as professor of painting at the Dresden Academy. Following a series of excoriating portraits which laid bare the inner lives of his sitters, he had freed his brushwork and broadened his vision through his study of the old masters and Venetian painting.11 He began painting Dresden, as viewed from his studio balcony and the neighbouring roofs, taking in the wide river, its graceful bridges and baroque buildings, all of which became key motifs in his future 2

cityscapes and the focus of his painting throughout his wide travels between 1924 and 1930 in Europe, north Africa, and the Middle East, as well as his paintings of the Thames.

Kokoschka made his first ten-day visit to London in 1925, staying at the Abbotsford Hotel in Upper Montagu Street, from where he painted the first of his Thames views: Tower Bridge (1925, Minneapolis) takes a long vista of a yawning stretch of the Thames, accented by cranes and masts gathered in the foreground, spires to the left and culminating in Tower bridge as the distant focal architectural point. Overall, his colourful varied palette is handled in a broadly expressionist manner, yet each brushstroke is also carefully delineated with single colours foregrounding individual architectural details. This was the painting which inspired Hoffmann’s earlier comment and which, writing in 1948 – some twelve years before Cohen’s Thames series was begun – she considered:

perhaps the only picture ever painted that adequately conveys an impression of the peculiar character of London’s dock area: boats cut across the river, cranes, spires and chimneys point innumerable fingers skyward. Noise, movement, activity and infinite variety are conveyed in a mysterious, undefinable way. […] the only quiet element is the river that majestically wends its way through a mass of iron and bricks. 12

Kokoschka returned to London in spring 1926, briefly living in style in a house in Park Lane, before moving to the eighth floor of the Savoy Hotel, first occupying Room 818, then Room 811 along the corridor, a move that allowed him not only to enjoy one of his favoured ‘birdseye’ views, but to view the river, as he said, ‘from two different angles of vision, so that I doubled the width of my visual field’. 13 From this vantage point he painted Waterloo Bridge, looking downstream, with Somerset House on the left, and St Paul’s and the city in the distance. Hoffmann praised his skill in transforming the prosaic old iron bridge into ‘a grandiose theme’, its weighty presence forming an effective barrier separating the ‘light, airy city’ beyond.14 Kokoschka’s Large Thames View, also painted in 1926 (Albright-Knox Art Gallery, New York), a view upstream showing Victoria Embankment, busy with traffic, this time accents Cleopatra’s needle on the north bank of the Thames, directly beneath the Savoy, at the point where the river curves, with Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament visible in the distance. On 3

the south bank, opposite the artist’s vantage point, is the old Shot Tower (now gone) with (from left to right) Waterloo, Hungerford and Westminster bridges radiating off like the spokes of a wheel, combining the busy action of the city with the ‘meditative ambiance of the river at dusk’, with colour richly applied in Kokoschka’s characteristically vigorous manner.

Kokoschka created in all a further ten canvases in 1926 and established a personal connection with the Thames. As Richard Calvocoressi has observed, ‘In these elevated panoramas, with their rejection of single vanishing-point perspective in favour of an ‘all-over’ illusionistic space, Kokoschka reveals most clearly his debt to the baroque’.15 His love of bridges, common to all the immigrant painters in Piper’s list, was also shared by Cohen, as was the particular focus on the atmosphere conveyed by light. While Kokoschka favoured a wide, open panoramic sky, typically enlivened by ‘a rich palette of cobalt blue, yellow ochre, and burnt sienna’, however, Cohen preferred a moodier, atmospheric evocation, drenched in a single principal colour.

Kokoschka spent the war years in England, having arrived in London in 1938 from Prague, where he had been resident since 1934, and remained until 1953 (he was naturalised in 1947). He attempted only one Thames painting during this period: a picture of St Paul’s – that indomitable symbol for Londoners throughout the Blitz – but it was unsatisfactory, unfinished and later destroyed. When Kokoschka returned to paint the same view in 1954, he also included the new Festival Hall, which had opened three years earlier. Just as he painted the new Waterloo Bridge, remarking ‘All my London pictures have already become historical documents, because the river, as well as the outline of the city and the fortunes of England, have changed to the point of unrecognizability’. 16 Cohen, too, working on the cusp of this transition, would also be able to make this claim; both men regretted the loss of the old London skyline. Kokoschka’s final great landscapes of the Thames date from his later visits to London, after he had settled in Villeneuve in Switzerland. No longer a stranger, but certainly a non-native, perhaps re-engaging with familiar landscapes after a long absence also rekindled his love affair with the city, inspiring paintings including the panoramic Chelsea Reach (1957), painted from the balcony of Lindsey House17 (where, coincidentally, shortly afterwards, Cohen would have his studio), as well as a great suite of later lithographs of London landmarks. 4

Cohen’s own engagement with the Thames began almost immediately after he settled in London in 1960. Partly this was an outcome of his recent pictures of the French channel fishing ports, where he ‘painted light and water and the effect of light on water’ and attempted to capture atmosphere. The Thames series drew on his sensitivity to these effects, derived from his childhood summers swimming in Lake Michigan, and his keenly trained navigator’s eye. In Paris he had painted the Seine – just as Kokoschka had painted the main rivers of Dresden and Prague – and then he had moved on to the channel ports, painting en plein air in all weathers, so that it seems entirely natural that he should next turn his focus to the Thames, that great artery of the city, when he arrived in London. Cohen had been raised on stories of Europe, especially the London in which his father had lived before moving to Chicago, which had fired his imagination. As part of his continental tour, Alfred first visited London in 1948 with the proceeds of his art prize, but was shocked to find it war-torn, devastated and deprived, and did not attempt to paint it. When he returned a decade later for his exhibition at Ben Uri Gallery in 1958,18 the era of austerity was coming to an end, gradually giving way to the ‘swinging sixties’. Following his second London exhibition at the Obelisk Gallery in the spring of 1960, featuring paintings of tugs and trawlers, Cohen went to stay at the Savoy Hotel (just as Kokoschka had once done) where, from the riverside suite of his actor friend Anthony Quinn, he made his first Thames sketches. It is interesting to speculate whether Cohen knew Kokoschka’s Thames paintings at this stage. Certainly, Cohen’s expressionist self-portrait (1956),19 appears to pay homage to the older painter’s celebrated Self-portrait as a ‘Degenerate’ Artist (1937, on loan to National Galleries Scotland), painted as a riposte to the Nazi’s inclusion of his work in the notorious Entartete Kunst exhibition in Munich. Kokoschka’s international reputation was reinvigorated by his retrospective in Basel and Zürich in 1947, at the Venice Biennale in 1948, and a subsequent touring exhibition in the USA, which Cohen could have seen. Ironically, the London Tate Kokoschka retrospective – that proved revelatory to a British audience – only took place in 1962, when Kokoschka had settled permanently in Switzerland, and when Cohen, who attended the exhibition and even met the ageing master there, was already bringing his own Thames suite to a close.

As a resident American in Paris, Cohen had been steeped in the artistic heritage of Europe. As a painter, his own Latvian-Jewish roots may have drawn him instinctively to the painters 5

of the Ecole de Paris. Lewis Ritman, his teacher at the Chicago Institute, had been a friend of Soutine’s, but also introduced Cohen to the work of Courbet, Renoir and Bonnard, and the influence of Impressionism remained, resurfacing in Cohen’s London work, where it also combined with more contemporary influences. In Paris he had become familiar with Abstract Expressionism, as the city reluctantly began to cede dominance as the artistic centre to New York. He knew the Californian painter and printmaker Sam Francis whose early work combined this influence with that of French Tachisme and took over his studio in the area later known as Cité Fleurie. Francis had served as a pilot with the American armed forces during the war and taken up painting when recovering from a flying accident in 1944. Influenced by the Impressionists (particularly Monet) and the Post-Impressionists, in paintings such as Around the Blues (1957, 1962–3, Tate), Francis may also have drawn upon his wartime experiences to create immense abstract canvases that have been likened to aerial views.20 Although Cohen, as one obituarist noted, in abandoning Paris at this crucial moment and settling instead in London, took the contrary route to the Abstract Expressionists, ‘indicating that he would make his way regardless of artistic fashion’,21 he was not immune to contemporary influences, as Peter Stone in his 1963 description of Cohen as an ‘Atmospheric Expressionist’, noted.

In Paris he would also certainly have been aware of Nicolas de Staël, part of the Second School of Paris, whose painting in bold slabs of colour – usually reds, whites or blues, such as Le Bateau (1954, National Galleries Scotland) – also combines elements of abstract expressionism and Tachisme in a personal, highly idiosyncratic manner. Blue was the corollary to Cohen’s red Thames paintings: Docklands Night (1961), for example, is steeped in a deep Prussian blue, while Docklands Morning (1961), washed with white, combines the watery effects of light and colour to evoke the river at dawn. Lambeth Pier (1961), one of the most remarkable of Cohen’s Thames paintings, employs a similar palette to Docklands Morning, but is distinguished by a Cézanesque handling in which the building on the left, painted in facets or squares of red or blue toned colour, also emerges from an overall wash of misty colour. In his review of Aspects of the Thames, the critic P. M. T. Sheldon-Williams seems to invoke de Staël when he draws attention to Cohen’s ‘slablike’ handling in his painting of St. Paul’s, ‘set in an empirical mass of buildings that cling limpet-like about the cathedral’s base and lose themselves in the uncertain mists above the river itself,’ but instead the ‘flavour of Paris’ Sheldon-Williams detected was ‘the Paris of Hélion’s rooftops’. 22 It is interesting to note that the French modernist Jean Hélion, resident in America since 1936 6

(with the exception of the war years), had initially worked as an architectural draughtsman before establishing his early reputation as a leading abstract painter in both Paris and New York, but had latterly rejected abstraction.

Another possible contemporary influence was Portuguese painter Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, who had also returned to Paris after the war. Her postwar paintings favoured cities irrevocably altered by natural disasters such as fires and flooding ‘blur[ing] the specificity of place with generic prototypes – nature, culture, the city, the grid’. 23 Like Cohen, she worked en serie, reconfiguring similar scenes ‘in endless variation, yet in each painting an underlying structure and order shines through’. 24 The grid-like structure is integral to Cohen’s Thames paintings, which often feature elaborate and intricate constructions, a legacy perhaps of the architectural interiors of his Parisian and London studios, and perhaps a reaction to - or reflection of - his sense of London being rapidly rebuilt after the war and into the 1960s. This is specifically alluded to in the title of Construction in Lambeth (current whereabouts unknown) and can be read as perhaps a visual pun between the subject and its mode of presentation. It is also interesting to note that the original purchaser of Cohen’s painting The Pool of London was Lord Palumbo, later Chairman of the Arts Council of Great Britain, who in the 1960s commissioned Mies van der Rohe to build a tower in London (although the design was never realised).

Cohen himself recalled the pivotal moment that initiated his Thames series as his settling in a studio on Chelsea Reach – a location already celebrated in engravings after Thomas Girtin (1775–1802) and J. M. W. Turner (the only comparison that Cohen himself invoked), as well as Kokoschka. Cohen commented:

one morning I walked out and saw the light on the river and the houseboats and I knew that’s what I had to paint. I didn’t want to set up an easel on the shoreline.

The

river was moving and I had to move with it. So[,] I wheedled a pass from the port authorities and rambled round the docks where I managed to hitch lifts on the tugs which plied between Gravesend and Hammersmith. 25 The crews were marvellous. I’d sit there on deck and sketch whatever was going on. They never made me feel in the way. Their world was something different, something on its own, and I think they shared something of my own excitement in seeing me get it down on paper. 26 7

This sense of travelling along the river can perhaps be best felt in Cohen’s moody, atmospheric evocation of Tower Bridge, looming up Cathedral-like out of a ghostly mist. Cohen’s style here is near to Impressionism than Expressionism, more reminiscent of Monet or of Turner. Unlike Kokoschka, whose Thames bridges, always viewed from afar, have been read as ‘an endlessly recurring symbol’, bringing together and strengthening ‘the bonds between men living on different shores’,27 Cohen’s unpeopled riverscapes can be viewed through a different lens – the more direct experience of travelling upon the river, exposed, like Turner, to the elements and the effects of light. These ethereal effects also recall Whistler’s moody nocturnes of the 1870s and Victor Pasmore’s later Impressionistic Hanging Gardens of Hammersmith, No. 1 (1944-47, Tate). Elsewhere, the bold handling of Cohen’s spectacular Sunset from Blackfriars Bridge (1961), in which the viewer looks west into the setting sun, can be immediately located within the unrestrainedly Fauvist tradition of Derain (who also felt the pull of the Pool of London area). In Cohen’s sunset, sky and river melt into one fiery whole, spreading out into the water until it too catches flame. Clearly, it is the sunset itself and not the view which is the intended focus of this painting; an insistence on mark-making also captures the intensity of the rays of the setting sun reflected out onto the water, radiating life and energy. The critic Peter Stone saw a direct connection to Cohen’s wartime experiences: ‘his long reconnaissance flights, flying at a low altitude for hours, his eyes fixed on the sky and the sea (light and water) searching for aircraft, ships and submarines. Dawns and sunsets are doubly intense seen from the air, and there would be sudden changes of weather producing light effects that astounded him’.28

Like Kokoschka, Cohen favoured a high vantage point, but he went further still; delighted to gain permission to climb to the very top of the new Vickers Building with the Millbank Tower skyscraper then being constructed on the Embankment (completed in 1963), a dominant landmark (which Kokoschka also painted). Cohen explained:

The roof of London was a natural place for me after four years as an aerial navigator. I felt like a bird, soaring over the surface of the river, dipping down when I wanted to. And what was also important to me was that I was the first to see it that way. The paintings were impressionistic – watery, Turneresque, suffused with light. 29 8

One journalist described Cohen as ‘The Spiderman Painter’, snapping him in a contemporaneous photograph, dated 1961, sitting at a vertiginous height atop of the Vickers Building, his legs dangling and his sketchbook nestling on his lap with the outline of St Paul’s tantalizingly visible on the open page. Cohen was not the first painter to climb a building to view St Paul’s; towards the end of the Second World War, the artist David Bomberg, a firewatcher in the city, who had contemplated the bombed city at different times of the day and night and from many different angles, obtained permission to climb to the top of St Bride’s in Cheapside to view the cathedral from the east side. In his resulting oil, the war-scarred landscape, looking out towards the dome, is bathed in evening light and suffused with colour, capturing the spirit of the Blitzed city aflame. Cohen’s higher perspective and cooler palette capture the ever more crowded contemporary 1960s’ skyline. St Paul’s West View (1961) is also reminiscent of Russian-American modernist Max Weber’s aerial view of New York (1912, University of Reading Art Collection), one of several paintings recording the ‘vehement crowding’ of that ‘altitudinous city’.30 First reviled - and then revered - for introducing Cubism to America, Weber’s name must have been familiar to Cohen, especially hailing from Chicago, a city equally celebrated as New York for a skyline boldly peppered by skyscrapers. Together with his photographer friend Alvin Langdon Coburn, Weber had famously climbed to the top of the Singer Building in New York, where the two men had spent a day photographing and painting the Liberty Tower building against the city’s famous skyline.31 The Spiderman photograph shows us that Cohen’s works were well planned, although few preliminary sketches have survived. By contrast, Kokoschka claimed to ‘hardly ever make preliminary drawings for my pictures, but [to] start painting straight away; and neither routine nor technique is any help to me. I depend very much on being able to capture a mental impression’.32 Although Kokoschka’s influence on Cohen’s Thames paintings, such as his preference for ‘hot colours, sweepingly laid on’, was noted by the critic Edward Lucie-Smith (Arts Review, 1961), upon a closer reading there are as many differences in Cohen’s approach as 9

commonalities: instead of Kokoschka’s carefully delineated palette, Cohen’s Thames works favour an overall saturation of colour, his palette often dominated by a single colour: most often, crimson red or Prussian blue, occasionally misty white. Sometimes colour is vigorously applied in an Expressionist manner, probably using a palette knife. Red dominates in: Towers — Tower Bridge (1961), Parliament (1961) – recalling Turner’s famous depictions of the old Houses of Parliament on fire – as well as Thames View III (1961) and Harbour Approach (1960–63). Cohen shared Kokoschka’s ‘well-trained and eager’ eyes and a similar enthusiasm for his subject. The older painter continued to revisit the same scenes at intervals over an almost 50year span, while Cohen’s Thames-scapes were limited to the early sixties but ceased completely when he left London for Kent. Perhaps it was easier for Cohen, so steeped in London’s history that he felt immediately at home, to bring his cycle to a definite conclusion. Kokoschka’s longer cycle may have been one result of his ambiguous experience as an immigrant in Britain. For although he had been offered shelter and the freedom to continue his painting during wartime, Kokoschka’s new host country had otherwise taken very little notice of him while he lived there. His Thames cycle would continue for another decade, and in 1972 his 50-year treatment was celebrated by the publication Oskar Kokoschka London Views – British Landscapes, even though by then Kokoschka had been resident in Villeneuve for almost 20 years. Fittingly, it was published by Thames and Hudson – the publishing firm established by émigrés, whose name fittingly celebrated and conjoined the two major rivers of London and New York. Cohen’s Aspects of the Thames was well received by critics. Anita Brookner in the Burlington Magazine praised what she called Cohen’s ‘abstract impressionist compositions […] enlivened by an acute charm of colour’. 33 Robert Wraight of the Tatler admired the ‘rich sense of colour’ and also drew attention to the ‘little gem[s] of abstract painting’ within the wider canvas.34 Lucie-Smith admired their construction, finding ‘the architecture is nearly always firm and logical. […] I admire these pictures most as virtuoso demonstrations of technical skill. They have immense panache and glitter, and yet they are self-consistent’.35 Together these reviews emphasise the appeal of Cohen’s painting as well as his place within the wider art historical narrative that allowed him to connect to European painting on the one hand and to American Abstract Expressionism on the other, and to apply these techniques to the postwar London riverscape which so irresistibly attracted him. In one sense these 10

paintings are timeless, but they also capture a specific moment of postwar prosperity and optimism in the docklands before they fell into a 20-year decline. Cohen’s Thames pictures are a particular highlight in his oeuvre, in which, as critic Peter Stone noted in 1963, he fulfilled his potential as an ‘atmospheric expressionist’, whose ‘vivid memory of light on water ha[d] never left him’. 36

Shortly, before his death Cohen revisited and reworked his 1961 painting, The Pool of London, which had suffered some damage in the interval. The earlier (upper) part of the painting relies on the structural emphasis of the buildings – the opening of Tower Bridge with the vessel passing through and the buildings emerging from the morning mists, appears unchanged. The lower right area of the picture, however, with its remarkable daubs and facets of vibrant colour in the manner of Cézanne, merging together in a patchwork, differs markedly from the earlier saturation found in the Docklands paintings. Hence, as both an early and a late work it also provides a fitting finale to this short survey of his Aspects of the Thames series.

© Sarah MacDougall 2020 Printed: in entirety Published in Max Saunders and Sarah MacDougall, eds., Alfred Cohen: An American Artist in Europe – Between Figuration and Abstraction (London: The Alfred Cohen Art Foundation & Ben Uri Gallery and Museum, 2020), pp. 80–89. See: https://benuri.org/exhibitions/alfredcohen/

Run by an impressive trio of assistants, all of Jewish émigré heritage – Marxist Ewan Phillips, German émigrée Annely Juda, and the charismatic John Kasmin, later known as ‘Kas’, crediting with ‘launching’ the career of David Hockney, all of whom all went on to establish their own galleries. 2 As indicated by a handwritten entry in the artist’s own copy of the original catalogue (Alfred Cohen Archive). 3 The Pool of London is divided into two parts, the Upper Pool between London Bridge and the Cherry Garden Pier in Bermondsey, and Lower Pool, from the Cherry Garden Pier to Limekiln Creek. 4 Philip Oakes, ‘Cohen GB’, Sunday Times (29 December 1968), Alfred Cohen Archive. 5 Hoffmann mistakenly identifies this as London Bridge (Great Thames View), Edith Hoffmann, Kokoschka: Life and Work, with two essays by Oskar Kokoschka and a foreword by Herbeter Read (London: Faber and Faber, 1947), 185. 1

11

David Piper, Artists’ London (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982), 120. Canaletto arrived in England from Venice in May 1746. ‘Apart from a few months back in Venice in 1750-51 and again in 1755, he remained in England, mainly in London, until […] probably […] about 1756’, but ‘his impact on art in England was out of all proportion to the length of his stay. […]’ He ‘established a new vision of English topography, and especially of London townscape, to which later painters were to refer back until well into the twentieth century’. David Piper, op. cit., p. 49. See The Thames and the City of London from Richmond House, c. 1947. 8 Ibid. 120. 9 Alfred Sisley was born in Paris to wealthy British parents in 1839 and retained British citizenship despite spending most of his life in France. At the age of 18, he was sent to London to study for a career in business, which he abandoned four years later, returning to Paris in 1861. He did not come to Britain during the FrancoPrussian War, but did return in 1874, painting his sole Thames view and the area around Hampton Court; he made further brief trips to Britain in 1881, and again in 1897, when he painted the coast near Cardiff. 10 These include Monet, The Port of London (1871, Private Collection); Monet, The Thames Below Westminster (1871, National Gallery). Camille Pissarro’s Thames scenes were painted on later trips to England in 1890 and 1892: Charing Cross Bridge (1890, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC),, St. Paul’s Cathedral (1890, Private Collection), Old Chelsea Bridge, London (1890, Smith College Museum of Art); Alfred Sisley, View of the Thames, Charing Cross Bridge, 1874 (National Gallery). Works by Turner include The Scarlet Sunset, c. 1830-40 (Tate). 11 Piper, op. cit., 121. 12 Hoffmann, op. cit. 13 Oskar Kokoschka, My Life, p. 123. 14 Hoffmann, op. cit., 185. 15 Richard Calvocoressi, Oskar Kokoschka, Dictionary of National Biography, accessed online www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093 04.12.19. 16 Cited Hoffmann, op. cit., 179. 17 Peter Stone, ‘Alfred Cohen – Atmospheric Expressionist’, Jewish Quarterly, 9:35 (Autumn 1962), 28-30. 18 First London Exhibition of Paintings, Drawings and Lithographs by Alfred Cohen (USA), 4-25 November 1958, Ben Uri Art Gallery, 14 Portman Street, London, comprising 23 oil paintings, six wash drawings, three lithographs and two gouaches, mainly French landscapes with some interiors and still life and one head study. In 1957 Cohen presented Ben Uri with a pen, ink and wash drawing, Harbour Scene, atypical in its size, monochrome colour schemes and delicate handling, in contrast to the robustness and vibrancy of his later work, it nonetheless indicates the waterside subject matter as an enduring and important motif within his oeuvre. Although the circumstances of the gift are unknown, this almost certainly initiated his solo exhibition at Ben Uri the following year. Cohen was also included in the Ben Uri’s Annual Exhibition of Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture (15 December 1958-11 January 1959), represented by one French work (cat. no. 5) Rue Mouffetard, and again, in Ben Uri’s Fiftieth Anniversary Special Exhibition (1-29 March 1966), 21 Dean Street, London. 19 Philip Vann, Face to Face: British Self-portraits in the Twentieth-Century (Bristol: Sansom & Company, 2004), 45. See Jerome Boyd Maunsell in Max Saunders and Sarah MacDougall, eds., Alfred Cohen: An American Artist in Europe – Between Figuration and Abstraction (London: The Alfred Cohen Art Foundation & Ben Uri Gallery and Museum, 2020), 34-35. 20 See Natalie Adamson, Sam Francis: In Focus, July 2019, Tate online: accessed 5.11.19. Another English abstract expressionist Peter Lanyon also created works that have been seen as ‘effectively airscapes or syntheses of his visual experiences in the air after he took up gliding in 1959’ (Margaret Garlake, Peter Lanyon, St Ives Artists (London: Tate, 2002), 47. 21 Alfred Cohen, obituary, Independent (26 April 2001), The Thursday Review, 6. 22 See for example, Jean Hélion, Blue Roofs, Paris, 1958 (The Met) and Roofs, Paris, 1958 (The Met). 23 www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/Maria-Helena-Viera-da-Silva, accessed 04.11.19 24 Ibid. 25 John Berger, ‘J.M.W Turner (1775-1851)’, in Tom Overton, ed., Portraits: John Berger on Artists (London & New York: Verso, 2015), 203-208. 26 Philip Oakes, ‘Alfred Cohen: American seduced by Britain’, In Britain (November 1978), 22-25. 27 Jan Tomeš (introduction), Oskar Kokoschka London Views – British Landscapes (London: Thames and Hudson, 1972), p. 83-85. 28 Peter Stone, ‘Alfred Cohen – Atmospheric Expressionist’, op. cit. 29 Cohen, cited Philip Oakes, op. cit. 30 H. G. Wells, ‘Introduction’, in Alvin Langdon Coburn, New York (London: Duckworth & Co., 1910), 9.10, cited Anna Gruetzner Robins, “The Company of Strangers: Max Weber and the first Grafton Group Exhibition”, in ed., S. MacDougall Max Weber: An American Cubist in Paris and London, 1905-15 (London: Ben Uri Gallery, 2014), p. 59. 6 7

12

31

Anna Gruetzner Robins, ibid., p. 59. Cited Jan Tomeš, op. cit., p. 60. Quotations taken from Oskar Kokoschka, My Life (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973). 33 Anita Brookner, ‘Current and Forthcoming Exhibitions’, Burlington Magazine, 103 (November 1961), 476477. 34 Robert Wraight, ‘Galleries’, Tatler (18 October 1961), 476-477. 35 Edward Lucie-Smith, ‘Alfred Cohen’, Arts Review (7-21 October 1961). 36 Peter Stone, op. cit. 32

13