A retrospective of Adele Cohen’s (1922-2002) work is now showing at the Burchfield-Penney Art Center. This is the second major exhibition of her work at the Burchfield-Penney; the first show was in 1981. This show launches a book on her life, titled Adele Cohen—A Life in Art, published by the Burchfield-Penney and the Poetry Collection at the University at Buffalo.

The show is elegantly displayed by the Burchfield staff and is heavily weighted toward her work after 1980. In so doing, it does omit some of the many changes she went through as an artist. One of her great strengths was her ability to “grow” her imagery and forge new statements that still retain the essence of her being. Compare these creative and varied images to the more staid work of most of the well known painters of her day. The show is also missing a few examples of her best work that are in a few museums and personal collections. Still, it is a highlight of the Burchfield’s season. It runs to August 2 and should not be missed.

Adele worked at her art in Buffalo most of her life, and was among the most versatile, prolific and interesting artists ever to work here. She had a disciplined work ethic and the amazing ability to abstract both personal and greater emotional responses to the events of the day. She loved music and responded to it in her art. You can see her reaction to war in her sculpture and her painting, but she was also attracted to the Southwest, visiting there many times, and she loved mystical Native American lore and legend. The mysteries and tales of her religion also had their place in her art. She was able to slide seamlessly in and out of the personal imagery of her art to create totally new expressions and images that best expressed her needs.

Adele tended to be a dark artist and that darkness worked against her in the art world. The galleries wanted upbeat messages and her art was a hard sell in the land of Andy Warhol and friends. Also working against her was her gender and her style. Women had a much harder time in the art world, partially because of discrimination and partially because it was harder to be a character with an interesting tale. Her lifestyle wasn’t something she flaunted or used to promote herself; she was and wanted to be a private person and have her art judged on its merits. Like her dark work, Adele’s personality wasn’t colorful enough for the art world.

Her work was dark in an era of color, flash and bigness. Yet it was a display of the intensity of her individuality that she was ahead of influences and was deeply probing her own consciousness. She was able to use this dark energy, extrapolating it from her mysterious and Zen-like psychic landscape. It emerges again later in her sculptural “burnt effigies,” mystic echoes of the war. She was a great draftsman, too, always sketching, developing images out of the simplest forms. Adele saw clearly beyond the drawing and into the painting. She really worked at some of her drawings, rubbing the graphite into the paper with her arthritic fingers. I remember when she called me into her studio to see the drawing on canvas of what was to be called Lacrymosa. It was an amazing drawing and could have stood alone as a work of art. It turned into probably her most outstanding painting in the next few days as she completed, without hesitation, the image that must have been clearly formed in her mind.

Cohen at Artpark in 1978 with one of her sculptures, "Gorge Legend Arbor."

In a later period she started the Lament series that was initiated by her father’s death. These works defy influence. They could only be born from deep within an amazing and complex psyche. I don’t know if “creativity” describes it. It seems too easy an explanation for her art. I don’t know the sources of Adele’s darkness. It wasn’t expressed in any other way in her daily life. It was a special reserve, like some aged bourbon that she was able to swim in when she painted. It was a real but unappreciated gift, like having “seen” God. She went into that reserve and exhausted it as much as she could.

When you look at Adele’s life prior to the 1960s, it seems rather a normal existence. She had traveled some when her husband Paul was in the army. She lived in San Francisco and New York City as a student. Family life, raising children, friends and relatives, and even her art life was “normal.” Normal meant some discrimination as a Jew, woman and artist. I think that life in the 1960s, when a strange cast of characters came on the scene, was a welcome relief. She knew that Beckett was real, so having Joe Krisiak living in her driveway or dealing with other local characters like Joe McCann, Jack Drummer, David Sharpe, Wes Olmsted or “Indian Jim” was second act comedy.

Abstract Expressionism had opened the door to artistic expression. It freed us from the dance steps so we could invent our own. That was the feeling of the time. A kind of ecstasy of mind and body. When I met Adele in the 1960s, I was living and painting in Allentown. Adele and I collaborated in the running of the Zuni Gallery in the early 1960s and later we did a set for Arrabal’s Fondo and Lis at the Albright-Knox. The Zuni Gallery opened with a show for Lawrence Calcagno, a friend and artist who was working in New York. The gallery showed many varied and fine artists in group and individual shows, including Jim Dine, Arakawa, Robert Morris, Motherwell and Onosato, plus local artists, and although it was the first gallery in Buffalo to show Pop and Op art (including the Albright-Knox), the community support was poor and discouraging. An example of that was that we could not get the Albright-Knox people to come to any shows. Their elitism and attitude that only colorful, upbeat paintings would grace their walls was an eye-opening and dampening forecast for future success for Adele and other local artists. Even with her great painting and many successes winning prizes in Western New York and national shows, she still couldn’t get picked up by a good New York gallery.

The 1970s brought Vietnam and Nixon. Immolation protests. Adele did some great sculpture during that time. One of her best pieces was the Seven Pillars, a grouping of burnt offerings, a sacrificial monument to the war. It was one of her best periods, perhaps the last great one that she did. Adele and other great artists had the ability or gift within their work to “reveal and conceal.” It has to do with mystery. To be creative is to transverse the known to get to the unknown. It’s a mysterious yet never complete journey for the artist and for the viewer. There is this unrevealed mystery or mystique, the remnants of which are partially hidden in the work. Like wet autumn leaves that tell a story of a past summer and the coming of decay, the best paintings are those that have this mystery, continually drawing the viewer into the painting yet never quite revealing all.

But Adele wasn’t much when it came to talking about her art. She may have felt that there was not much to be gained, or that she wasn’t that clear about it, or it may have been something she felt was too personal to talk about. I never saw her dejected and I think that’s because she knew that her art had value. She knew that in her heart and she never questioned it. It was a source of strength and gave her the power to be courageous in a land of Philistines.

Adele’s last two paintings were forecasts of her death. Finding remnants of two dead birds could have been an omen, but she made art out of death, incorporating them into her work. This had always been one of her themes, her essence as an artist. She was so powerful she could turn death back into life through art. She faced her own death with calmness and a sense of humor that never left her. She may have seen herself as that bird rising from ash.