Harold Cohen — Venice Biennale — Cohen's pre-AARON painting career

1966

Artists: Harold Cohen · Year: 1966 · Medium: Painting — abstract, mid-century British modernist idiom · Substrate: Oil on canvas; large-scale paintings in a color-field and hard-edge tradition · Place: Venice, Italy / London, UK · Institution: Venice Biennale 1966 (British Pavilion); Bernard Jacobson Gallery Before Harold Cohen wrote AARON, he was one of the most promising abstract painters in Britain. He showed at Venice in 1966 as part of the British Pavilion's presentation, alongside his brother Bernard Cohen and two other painters; his work at the time — large-scale abstract compositions with hard-edge color blocks and field-painting sensibility — was understood as part of the mainstream of British modernism's 1960s output. His gallery representation at Bernard Jacobson in London placed him among the country's commercially viable serious painters. He had every reason to continue on that trajectory. In 1968 he took a visiting professorship at the University of California, San Diego, intended as a one-year appointment. He never returned to Britain as a practicing gallery painter. At UCSD he encountered the university's computer science department, began learning to program, and started work on what would become AARON — the program he would develop for the next forty-eight years. He stopped exhibiting his own paintings commercially. The abandonment was complete. This moment — the decision a successful mid-career painter made to leave his practice for a program he had not yet written — is one of the most consequential individual choices in computer-art history. Without Cohen's decision there is no AARON. The Venice Biennale presentation of 1966 is, in retrospect, the documentation of the career he walked away from. His archive at the Computer History Museum includes photographs of the Biennale works and the transitional drawings from 1967-68. Lore Cohen's brother Bernard continued his own painting career in London for decades; the two brothers' divergent paths were the subject of critical conversation in British art writing through the 1970s and 1980s. Cohen's decision to leave gallery practice was not publicly explained at the time — he simply stopped exhibiting — and his own later retrospective writings treat the pivot as a quiet private matter. The Computer History Museum's AARON archive includes some of the 1967-68 transitional drawings in which the algorithmic impulse is already visible. Sources • Computer History Museum — Cohen archive • McCorduck, Pamela — AARON's Code (W.H. Freeman, 1991) • Venice Biennale 1966 — British Pavilion catalog