Opening of the Alfred Cohen Museum

A New Museum of a Life in Art. An intriguing new art museum in North Norfolk launches from 6th July 2023. It records the radical evolutions in the powerful and distinctive work of American-born artist Alfred Cohen.

Cohen (1920-2001) won a travelling fellowship in 1949 on graduation from the Art Institute of Chicago. He came to Europe for a year, but never left, studying and living in Paris and Germany before moving to London in 1960. After 15 years in Kent, he and his English wife Diana settled in Norfolk in 1978.

The Alfred Cohen Museum occupies his two studios at the School House, Wighton, near Wells-next-the-Sea – his home for his last twenty-two years. His painting studio and print workshop remain much as they were when he worked in them. Over 60 works are on display from a career covering five decades, from the collection of the Alfred Cohen Art Foundation, the Artist's Estate, and private Collections.

Cohen had already had success in Europe. With the ambitious, shimmering canvases of his Aspects of the Thames exhibition in 1961 he won critical acclaim in Britain too. The Museum includes six large, spectacular scenes from this period, and many major examples of the haunting, often grotesque Commedia dell'Arte figures he turned to in the mid-1960s. Later he specialised in painting the British landscape and the Channel coasts, interiors, people, and flowers. His attraction to Britain never waned; ‘I don't want to leave it. America is no longer my home. I feel more of a foreigner there than I do anywhere in Europe.'

Cohen's work was well received in his adopted home. Arts Review wrote of ‘a fine wildness about Cohen's pictures that instantly commands attention' and Apollo said: ‘He reacts with a fierce passion to direct experience. His emotional power and exuberantly vigorous response infuses his paintings with an intensity that makes much contemporary expressionism look feeble'.

The opening of the Museum follows the staging of four exhibitions to mark Cohen's centenary in 2020 (all extended into 2021). The largest was the retrospective ‘Alfred Cohen: An American Artist in Europe' at Bush House in London, mounted as a collaboration between King's College London and the Ben Uri Gallery and Museum. The other three were at the Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery, the Sainsbury Centre, and the School House Gallery at Wighton, which Diana Cohen opened in 1983 and continues to run.

Alfred Cohen's work is represented in over 50 public collections in Britain, including the Arts Council, the British Council, the Government Art Collection, the Sainsbury Centre, Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery, Pallant House, the Barber Institute, and the Fitzwilliam Museum.

Price: FREE

Location: The School House, High Street, Wighton, Near Wells-next-the-Sea, Norfolk, NR23 1AL

More information

Modern Art, Museum, Exhibition, Paintings, Drawings, Prints, Studio

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