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

Cohen's new technique approached semi-abstraction. He is interested in how the reduced colour range in a particular landscape creates its own sense of composition and harmony. Here, the earth colours, the green, and the grey of the buildings and the overcast sky are rendered not photographically, but in stripes of colour. Looking more closely, there is a surprising profusion of brighter colours - especially intense oranges and blues - intermingled and overlayered. The abstracting imagination at work here shows Cohen engaging with the abstract expressionism or Tachisme, in the manner of painters like De Staël, Rothko or even Jackson Pollock (always 'Jack the Dripper' to Cohen), and anticipating the palette and manner of Frank Auerbach's Primrose Hill (1971, Daniel Katz Gallery).