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

Docklands Night shares some similarities with L'Orient from four years earlier, including the silhouetted dock structures dotted with red safety lights, although lit with a paler moonlight instead of the glare from the town. On the left, two artificially illuminated areas - presumably ships being loaded or unloaded - suggest traces of human activity, although, typically of Cohen's cityscapes, no humans are visible. But the mood created by the deep blue palette is very different: calm, instead of stormy, with the encircling docks offering a place of rest and safety; the sort of 'haven' that he often painted. He was aware of Yves Klein's 1957 exhibition of blue monochrome pictures isolating a single ultramarine shade - 'International Klein Blue'. This ironic comment on the act of painting and exhibiting that amused him. But Cohen's own practice is diametrically opposite: the challenge he sets himself is to see how many shades, tones, and gradations he can squeeze out of a single colour.