Alfred Cohen, Offset Lithograph Modernist Print of Bold Vibrant Flowers, Plate Signed

Alfred Cohenartist, 1920-2001
Brilliant colourist famed for portraits of the stars and landscapes
Although his professed heroes were Rembrandt and Picasso, the resolutely representational work of the London-based American artist Alfred Cohen owed most to French post-Impressionist masters like Bonnard, Dufy and Rouault, to the roving expressionist Oskar Kokoschka, and to artists of the Jewish diaspora, such as Marc Chagall and Chaim Soutine. Cohen was a brilliant colorist and deft draughtsman. In London from 1960, he had sellout exhibitions with the Brook Street Gallery, and later with Roland, Browse and Delbanco. Besides reworking the subjects of the commedia dell’ arte , he offered vibrant oils of the Seine, the Thames and the Channel ports, and some telling portraits – his likeness of his friend, the actor Anthony Quinn, may be his masterpiece.
Born in Chicago, of Latvian émigré stock, Cohen’s studies at the Art Institute of Chicago were interrupted by wartime service in the US army air force, chiefly as a navigator in Pacific-based Liberator and Flying Fortress bombers.
After graduating in 1949, Cohen was awarded a scholarship to travel in Europe – and never went home again, save for brief visits. In the 1950s he shared a studio with the Californian abstract expressionist artist Sam Francis in Paris, but was as likely to be found at the wheel of a Bugatti as painting. In France and Rome, he mixed with movie stars, including Ingrid Bergman, Sophia Loren and Kirk Douglas, and his patrons included James Mason, Sam Wanamaker and Stanley Baker. Painting was combined with print-making, and his hand- coloured etchings of flowers were to prove especially popular across Europe, America and Japan.
Cohen’s strong sense of space and design was also turned to the renovation of old houses. When converting the former schoolhouse at Wighton, near Wells-next-the-sea, into a studio, print workshop and art gallery, he found an oddly familiar marble carving in the overgrown garden. Locals remembered that a Mary Moore, from Yorkshire, had been headmistress there in the 1920s, and that her art-student brother had often chipped away at stone blocks. The unfinished sculpture was duly returned to Henry Moore. He produced witty cartoons and constructions, and seemed ready to paint or draw on any surface.