Background
Cohen is in his early 70s and looks every bit the successful artist - grey hair pulled back into a short ponytail, sweatshirt and chinos. Only the voice is a surprise - halfway between cockney and Cal
Cohen is in his early 70s and looks every bit the successful artist - grey hair pulled back into a short ponytail, sweatshirt and chinos. Only the voice is a surprise - halfway between cockney and Californian, with the mobile cadences of a Jewish raconteur.
He was born in London in 1928, the second of three brothers. His mother was originally from Russia, his father from Poland - and they had settled in the East End of London. My father was originally a market trader - hardware, pots and pans and stuff. Over time, the family business prospered and they bought a shop just before the war. I spent a lot of my teens helping out at weekends.
At school, he describes himself as being a good all-rounder. I was never top of the class. Right through school I was always like second or third... but I was always top of the class in art, for sure. Then when I got through matriculation and went on to sixth-form work, some instinct told me that I should probably do something apart from Art, and I surprised everybody in the school by doing Physics, Pure and Applied Maths and Art... which in a sense is a sort of precedent for what happened to me subsequently.
After school came national service in the RAF. When he was de-mobbed in 1948, he headed straight for the Slade School of Fine Art, which was part of the University of London. It wasnt a popular move with his family: They had no interest in art and a fair amount of not very well concealed annoyance at the fact that I clearly wasnt going into the family business. Was he clear that this was where his future lay? Yes, I think so. In fact, I think its the only thing I thought I wanted to do.
Even so, Slade was a slightly odd choice. Most of the rising stars of that generation were heading for the more adventurous Royal College of Art, while Slade was very much a traditional fine-art school geared towards formal methods and painting from life. It was very thorough brainwashing about what you were supposed to be doing. And yet Cohen thrived there. He won the prestigious annual Slade Prize not once, but twice. I was really quite surprised because it didnt seem to me that what I was doing was Slade art at all.
After Slade, that momentum continued. He married, took various teaching jobs in south London - often teaching maths, not art - to make ends meet, and set up a workshop where he designed and made furniture. He also painted and was offered solo shows at several well-known galleries. He describes his style at the time as more or less abstract-ish compositions. That is to say, he didnt paint representational works that were intended to look like something, but neither was he a believer in that pure abstraction that simply values a design. In this choice lay the seeds of a question that would later propel him into AI - the question of how it is that some marks on a surface signify something, become a meaning generator, while others dont.
The British art scene was booming in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Artists such as Eduardo Paolozzi, Peter Blake, Anthony Caro and Richard Hamilton, were driving Londons international reputation. One of the most sought-after names in this world was Harold Cohen, who was soon being offered exhibitions everywhere from Tokyo to Paris. By 1965, his stature was such that the Whitechapel Gallery in London ran a retrospective of his work. The following year, he was one of the five artists chosen to represent Britain at the Venice Bienalle. That same year, the Tate Gallery organised a special exhibit of works by Cohen alongside those of Henri Matisse.
And yet, something wasnt right. I was getting very fed up with the London art scene. I was starting to have fights with people and big arguments about this and that. He felt disillusioned with his fellow artists: all of the people that Id grown up with who started off as sort-of rebels... were now safely ensconced inside London art schools pulling in money for jobs they didnt really need and were using the schools as sort-of social clubs. More importantly, he was becoming very unsettled about his own work. Everyone was saying it was beautiful, the best work Id ever done, but I had this growing feeling that it could have been done by anybody, it didnt have to have been done by me. And, yes, it was beautiful - I still think its beautiful - but theres got to be more to art than making beautiful objects. So, when a letter arrived in 1968 from the University of California in San Diego (UCSD) inviting him to go out there for a year, he didnt think twice.
This article appeared in the April, 2000 issue of PC Authority.
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