Spotlight Reviews

NEW HAMPSHIRE

Lewis Cohen, Soliloquy, bronze, 19 x 14 3/4 x 15", 2006.

When surveying a full career, the retrospective format is a persuasive one. The long view reveals an artist’s stylistic variations as a continuum in narrative flow. Cohen’s clay maquettes for the bronze sculpture of the painter John Singleton Copley (in Boston’s Copley Square) display a representative expertise that could easily have been an end in itself. Yet Cohen has declined stylistic security, ideological trumpeting, or the fashionable drama of reinventing the genre. The look of his sculpture is foremost determined by how curiosity inspires and where authenticity leads.

Cohen’s youthful drawings display a mastery of description and suggestion. The precision of his airy charcoal marks in Pillow (1958) are deftly guided by light. In the acutely observed Standing Female Figure (1957), gesture and solid structure are captured in a sensitive, yet robust manner. Anatomical understanding is carried imaginatively into the shallow relief space of Heroic Figure Battling Mythical Beast (1958), where Hyman Bloom’s tutelage is evident in the automatic generation of forms.

The intense visual empathy demonstrated in Cohen’s drawings has guided his various figurative excursions into three-dimensions. Rodin and Giacometti inform Cohen’s recasting and demotion of heroic form in the plangent Crippled Man (1955), whose physical presence has the sublimity of an ancient artifact. Boccioni’s wild futurist analysis inspired Cohen’s Analytical Head and Shoulders (1968), as well as Ritual Head(s) (1998). A more essential modernist idea of form constrains the sober modeling of Portrait of Hans Von Baeyer (1989).

Lewis Cohen, Portrait of Hans Von Baeyer, cast iron, 171/4 x 9 x 9", 1989.

In Self-Portrait Mask (1966), the two sides of the face diverge; the rough half expressing the imperatives of artistic process while the other covers these tracks in realistic refinement. The piece’s appealing conflict mirrors an artistic struggle for a formal language that accommodates the rich content of experience, and for experience adequate to the complexities of high technical skill. This romantic search approaches magical thinking at times—in the textural and stylistic disjunctions in Aura (1978) that try to embody the immaterial, and in the equally improbable way Fugitive Figures (1989, 1990) capture transience. Yet even where devotion to means leads to implausible ends, results convince because their aim is so true.

The transformative intention of representational sculpture renders every figurative sculptor a thwarted Pygmalion to some degree. In Soliloquy (2006) a figure apparently willing itself into being speaks to this plight. The whimsical notion of a man pulling himself out of nothingness is contradicted by gravity of gesture. With shoulders tensed against the weight on his knuckles, the figure’s earnest but helpless torso holds the resistance of desire and obstacle, of determination and resignation. This difficult interface—subtly addressed in Descent (2005), where the downward gaze of a simplified, tilted head seems also to look inward—resonates with Cohen’s periodic revisits to the terrible, noble, and pathetic image of a legless man pulling himself along in Man on a Cart (1968–2006). Equally questioning and enduring, Cohen’s oeuvre makes a solid argument for the viability of the figurative sculptural tradition.
Margaret McCann