Pastoral, 1965

Pastoral, 1965, was one of the works Cohen showed at the 33rd Venice Biennale in 1966 where he represented Great Britain with Bernard Cohen, Robyn Denny, Richard Smith and Anthony Caro. The painting was reproduced that June in David Thompson’s account of the British selection in Studio International, which found Cohen’s new canvases “more, as it were, impressionistic in technique than before.”

Across a flat expanse of brown, a field of teal spreads with an edge as irregular as a coastline, and clusters of colour and small looping lines gather over it. The title points to landscape, and the painting reads from above, as a map might. It is however not one of Cohen’s Territorial Maps: those were computer-generated drawings of around 1970, in which a programme partitioned the surface into interlocking closed forms. Pastoral was painted entirely by hand, before Cohen had written a line of code. Cohen later described the Territorial Maps as systems in which “no single form dominates the whole”.