Imperial

Name: Ragnar Digital, LLC
Price range: $

Harold Cohen

1964

Painting

Oil on canvas
36" x 45"
Signed, titled, and dated.

NotAComputer

Description

Painted four years before the artist started developing the computer program AARON, Harold Cohen’s Imperial is notable for its visual similarities with this later work.

At the time, Cohen was well-established in the UK as an abstract painter. He taught painting at the prestigious Slade School of Fine Art and regularly showed his work in galleries in London and New York. Imperial, an acrylic, was among the works included in a solo exhibition of Cohen’s paintings at the Whitechapel Gallery in London in May–June 1965.

The amorphous blobs of color and calligraphic black outlines—alternately ringing and intersecting the planes of red, green, purple and orange—that appear in this canvas recur in many of Cohen’s paintings from the period. The critic Andrew Forge described these works as “painting about the meaning of painting.” Cohen referred to them as “paradoxes,” made up of elements held in tension or even contradiction.

What is perhaps most significant when looking at the work today is the evident throughline from *Imperial* to Cohen’s early experiments with AARON: computer-generated line drawings of abstract shapes that were hand-colored by Cohen in vivid shades. He wanted AARON to be an autonomous art-making entity, but his own creative influence is difficult to ignore.