British Council − UK at the Venice Biennale

In a piece published two years after his death in 2007, the critic Norbert Lynton called the impact Bernard Cohen's White Plant (1965) made in the British Pavilion's central room in 1966 'unforgettable' – not idle language, when used four decades later. In that year's catalogue essay, David Thompson had called Cohen's work 'narrative', 'a word which', he admitted, is normally

used to describe those anecdotal nineteenth-century paintings which 'told a story'. Bernard Cohen uses it in exactly the same sense about non-figurative painting, except that the story is told by the painter about the painting itself.

Especially across the decades commemorated in Lynton's essay, it's more difficult to perceive a narrative between, rather than within, Cohen's works. Even by 1972, the diversity of work in his Arts Council Retrospective was foxing some commentators, but Cohen has since stressed that he 'did not think in terms of style and I did not think my paintings had a style'.

Thompson's catalogue essay put the relative coherence of the works shown at Venice down to a shared motif of the 'continuing line'. White Plant, 'a black surface made radiant with raised dots in white paint and by a large calligraphic motif in the form of an elaborate scroll', however, made Lynton disagree; though the 'motif' seems to be constructed from a line, this is not a 'linear painting' in the same sense.

According to Cohen himself, however, this painting marks a new chapter in a career that  has been unified by a consistency of approach rather than outcome – how the paintings are thought through, rather than how they end up looking.

Shortly after he finished White Plant, he'd read Albert Camus' essay 'The Myth of Sisyphus' (1942; English 1955). This was to become 'the key to understanding why and how I have painted', Cohen later reflected, and the future plot basis of his 'stories'. For Camus, the myth of a man condemned to roll a stone to the top of a mountain, only to watch it roll down again, was a way of answering the only question that mattered: whether or not the absurdity of human life made suicide the only reasonable option. His answer rested on a specific moment of the story.

It is during that return, that pause that Sisyphus interests me […] At each of these moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks towards the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock.

For Cohen, this was also a metaphor for the struggle and temporary satisfaction of creativity:

The process of making a painting was my private progress up a mountain, pushing a rock. It was the task that upon its completion would allow me to be superior to my fate. That is why I must always experience a moment of completion with every painting.

Red One (1965), the painting that emerged next, is the tale of a plucky line's journey to fill a vast canvas. A surface of apparently endless squiggles of painted red lines, the accumulation of red paint over blue creates illusion of unfathomable depth. Spying the two white dots in the bottom-left corner makes a sudden sense of the boiling surface: the title seems to refer to there being only one line, with these two little eyes – or maybe shoe-lace ends – to mark its start and finish.
 
Next was Glow (1965) - 'one of my best paintings', he thought, but not shown at the Biennale - and then In That Moment (1965), which referred in its title to the above section of Camus:

after toiling with the line, pushing it and pushing it again, for weeks on end […] as the line fell out of the bottom of the canvas, I became stronger than I had ever been when carrying out my task.

The myriad coloured lines across the canvas have a kind of whirring, neon tension, looking forward to his paintings of the early twenty-first century, and recalling the 'whiplash line' of S. W. Hayter's prints. Cohen remembers first meeting the self-titled 'midwife' of modern engraving at 'the first professional, dedicated working environment I had experienced', engraving at the Paris Atelier 17 in 1955. The 'research' environment helped shape Cohen's view of printing and painting as both 'dramas of transition. Chance is at the heart of the drama.' Hayter had originally set up the Atelier in Paris 1927, but war in Europe had forced it to New York between 1940 and 50, where, Herbert Read thought, it played a role in the foundation of Action Painting, a branch of Abstract Expressionism.

This was the 'overwhelming challenge of the United States' that 1966's Five Young British Artists were responding to, according to Thompson's catalogue essay. Cohen's particular response, Adrian Lewis suggests, was a combination of

the Abstract Expressionism of Jackson Pollock and the sense of ritual characteristic of Cohen's Orthodox Jewish upbringing[.]

Red Multiple (1965), the painting that, with Alonging (1965), followed In That Moment, relates, at least, superficially, to Red One, in its construction from red lines, with their ends picked out in raised white dots. At least in overall effect - a 183 x 244 cm canvas, covered in red - the latter has an interesting relationship to the other branch of Abstract Expressionism, the 'colour fields' of Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko. Scale was certainly a question this generation of British artists felt obliged to face, and, knowing he had a Biennale to prepare for in the summer of 1965, William Coldstream gave Cohen space to work in the studios of the Slade, his old college, and future employer.

Red Multiple's four separate panels give the impression its painted lines are somehow looping back into the wall, only to resurface on the next canvas along. Though always in the same configuration of two small canvases – one small canvas – one large canvas, left to right, its constituent parts can be hung at different intervals to fill different galleries. Even with his mythically-inspired work-ethic, 'these multiple paintings represent awesome investments of time and skilled effort' for Cohen, Lynton pointed out.

1965 became a Sisyphean year for Cohen in the purest sense when David Thompson commissioned him to make his largest painting, an enormous canvas over the asbestos safety curtain at the Theatre Royal in Stratford East. When Thompson's lease expired, the director and writer Joan Littlewood had it painted over. In time for the Biennale, the year was balanced with the 'moments of completion' of the rest of his Biennale pieces, and, in July, a daughter, Sophie.

At an event such as the Biennale, a certain scepticism might have been expected from a man who once responded to a question about the art world 'I did not live in a world of 'art' […] 'I lived with my young family and painted at home.' Remembering how his contribution 'confirmed for me the outstanding quality and unique vigour of his developing work', however, his friend Lynton reported

Bernard and Jean Cohen made their first visit to Venice for this important event; the city has become almost a second home to them since, a place of refreshment and mystery as well as ever-rewarding delights and insights.

Tom Overton, 2010

Works Displayed – from 1966 catalogue listings:

Floris (1964)
oil and tempera on canvas, 183 x 183 cm
John Kasmin, London

In That Moment (1965)
oil and tempera on canvas 244 x 244cm
Tate Gallery, London

Fable (1965)
Acrylic on canvas 244 x 244cm
Peter Stuyvesant Foundation, London

Alonging (1965)
Oil and egg tempera on cryla ground on canvas 198 x 198cm
Kasmin Gallery, London

Red One (1965)
Oil and egg tempera on tempera ground on canvas 183 x 244cm
Kasmin Gallery, London

White Plant (1965)
Acrylic on canvas 274.5 x 312.5 cm
Kasmin Gallery, London

Red Spot (1966)
Oil and egg tempera on cryla ground on canvas
Kasmin Gallery, London

Limitation (1964)
Acrylic on canvas 91.5 x 91.5 cm
Kasmin Gallery, London

Red Multiple (1965)
Acrylic on canvas
4 panels – one 168 x 137 cm, three 102 x 77 cm
Kasmin Gallery, London

Sources
Albert Camus, tr. E. J. O’Brien, The Myth of Sisyphus & Other Essays (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1955).

Adrian Lewis, ‘Cohen, Bernard’, Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online, <http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T018477>, accessed 15th January, 2010.

Norbert Lynton & Ian McKay, Bernard Cohen: Work of Six Decades (London: Flowers East, 2009).

Richard Morphet, ‘Introduction’, Bernard Cohen [exh. cat.] (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1972).

David Thompson, ‘Introduction’, Five Young British Artists [Venice exh. cat.] (London: British Council, 1966).