SHIRLEY COHEN: COLOR, HOPE, AND IDEALISM

IN NEW YORK CITY, IN A SIMPLE HOUSE IN A RESIDENTIAL NEIGHBORHOOD, AN UNKNOWN ARTIST’S UNUSUAL CREATIONS HAVE BEEN DISCOVERED

by Edward M. Gómez

NEW YORK — There is a plain, red-brick house in a quiet, middle-class neighborhood in one of what New Yorkers refer to as “the outer boroughs” that is the repository of one of the best-kept secrets of modern art’s mid-20th-century heyday.

Earlier this year, the current keepers of this nondescript dwelling revealed it to me.

Time stands still in the now uninhabited house in which the late Shirley Cohen (1922-2019), a self-taught artist, lived with her family and created an unusual body of spiritual-feeling, semi-abstract paintings. Photo by Edward M. Gómez

They invited me to step inside and examine the unusual art trove it now shelters and preserves — the stylistically wide-ranging, thematically ambitious, unexpectedly visionary and often bizarre paintings of the American artist Shirley Cohen, who died in 2019 at the age of 97.

Self-taught and intensely private, and always wary of attracting any kind of notoriety, during her lifetime, Cohen never showed her art publicly, nor did she make any effort to explain its motivations, meanings, or purposes to anyone, including the members of her own family.