Alfred Cohen: An American Artist in Europe - Between Figuration and Abstraction

This painting of a Paris studio was exhibited in Cohen's first London exhibition at Ben Uri Art Gallery in November 1958. The group of easels and chairs pushed together at the centre suggests an art school; perhaps the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, where Cohen had enrolled when he arrived in Paris in 1949. There is a suggestion of an enigmatic figure framed in the shadowy doorway beneath the stairs. One reviewer, perhaps with this painting in mind, observed 'this American artist now living in Paris is completely master of his craft, one who is particularly successful with effects of space or light, and who deploys an individual range of colour'.