Max Arthur Cohn "Night Scene" Oil, ca. 1935
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GUEST:
This is a painting by Max Arthur Cohn from the 1930s. And I got it in the early '90s. I was visiting my cousin. This painting had been there forever, and she said, "Do you want it? It belonged to your father." And I said, "Well, yes." Um, I never knew my father. He died before I was two years old, and I had very little that belonged to him. And my mother also died when I was quite young. So we took it home, and the, um, signature is very clear. And my husband thought, "Why don't we go to a gallery that specializes in 20th-century art and see what they know about the artist?" So we did. The man in the gallery pulled out "Who's Who in American Art" and showed me Max Arthur Cohn, born 1903 and no date of death. And I said, "Ah, I wonder if he's still alive. "So maybe he lives in New York. Do you have a phone book?" (chuckles) Because of course, this was before the internet. And he got out the Manhattan phone book and there was Max. And I called him from the gallery, and I said who I was, and he recognized my name. And it turns out he and my father were good friends, but Max lost touch with us when my father died and my mother and I moved in with her parents. And he had always wondered what happened to me. So he invited us over, and my husband and I went there the next day with the painting. And we had a wonderful visit, and he told us all sorts of things about my father, about him. And we saw them regularly for the rest of their lives. He and his wife, Sarah, lived another several years. They were in their 90s. I... I'm so happy, because it really gave me so much of my father that I never would have known if I hadn't gotten this painting.
APPRAISER:
Hmm, that's such a wonderful story. Max Arthur Cohn was always considered really a New York artist, though he was of Russian descent and was born in London. I think he came to New York at the age of two, and he really is best known for his WPA New York scenes. So it's an oil on canvas painting. Uh, we do have a signature in the lower right. It's not dated, but I would venture that this is definitely a painting from the 1930s. He, um, made a printed image, a serigraph, of this in 1938. So probably the painting was done, I would guess, within a year or two of that, or maybe in 1938, also. He's often called the pioneer of screen printing. He created the National Serigraph Society. He was one of the, the artists to start that. And he really made it kind of his mission to make screen printing, or then he coined the term "serigraph," an appreciated fine art technique. One of the things that people always note about him is that when he had his own graphic studio in the 1950s, Andy Warhol was one of his first clients. Was the painting in this condition when it was given to you?
GUEST:
No, it was in fairly bad shape. We had it cleaned and conserved.
APPRAISER:
It now presents very well, and I think with the conservation, you've really brought it back to kind of its best possible presentation. I would estimate the insurance value to be $10,000.
GUEST:
Oh, great. But, you know, the value is really secondary for me. It's, you know, what I learned about my father and knowing Max that really matters.
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