Max Arthur Cohn was a painter, printmaker, and author. He is known as one of the pioneers
of screen printing as an art medium and worked to have the technique recognized as a
fine-art. He was born in London in 1903 to Russian immigrants and the family immigrated to
New York in 1905. As a teenager, Cohn worked for a commercial screen printer and later began
experimenting with the technique as an artistic medium. Cohn studied at the Art Students
League in New York between the years 1925 and 1927 and then studied in Paris at the Academy
Colarossi in 1927. During the Great Depression, he worked as an easel painter for the Works
Progress Administration (WPA), a New Deal program that supported artists by providing them
with a small stipend. He served as an executive board member of the New York WPA Artists
Association. Cohn was a founding member of the National Serigraph Society in 1940. In the
1950s, Cohn operated the Graphic Arts Studio in New York. Cohn is credited with teaching
silkscreen techniques to Andy Warhol.
Max Arthur Cohn co-authored two books with Jacob Israel Biegeleisen: Silk Screen Stenciling
as A Fine Art (1942) and Silk Screen Techniques (1958). Throughout his career, Cohn had
numerous one-man shows; his first was in 1929 at the New York Civic Club and his last was
held in 1989 at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Art History Gallery. Max Arthur Cohn
died on March 25, 1998, in New York City. Other institutions which hold collections of
Cohn's work include: Smithsonian American Art Museum; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Boston
Public Library; British Museum; Denver Art Museum; Metropolitan Museum of Art; and the
Philadelphia Museum of Art.
