Michael Sgan Cohen

Life

Michael Sgan-Cohen was born in Jerusalem in 1944. His father, Dr. Meir Sgan-Cohen, was a well-known figure in Jerusalem and president Yitzhak Ben-Zvi's personal physician. Sgan-Cohen graduated in Art History and Philosophy from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1969. In the late sixties, while still a student, Sgan-Cohen began writing short articles on art for the literary and cultural supplement of the daily newspaper Haaretz (edited by Benjamin Tammuz).

Between 1969 and 1978 Sgan-Cohen lived in Los Angeles and New York state. In 1973 he earned his M.A degree in art history from the University of California (UCLA) in Los Angeles. Sgan-Cohen moved to New York in late 1973 to study with the art historian and critic Leo Steinberg. During this period, he was associated with the "New York Group" of Israeli artists including Pinchas Cohen-Gan, Benny Efrat, Michael Gitlin and Buky Swchartz. In 1976 he began to work as an artist. In 1978 Sgan-Cohen had his first solo exhibition at the Kibbutz Gallery in Tel Aviv. During his years in New York, Sgan-Cohen taught art history at the Brooklyn College and at the School of Visual Arts. He wrote for a number of art journals, such as Art in America, Art Forum and Art press, as well as for hebrew journals like Mussag, Proza, Kav, Studio and Monitin. He wrote the catalogue articles for Motti Mizrahi (1988) and Ya'akov Dorchin (1990) for The Venice Biennale curated by Adam Baruch. In 1989 Sgan-Cohen earned his PhD from the City University of New-York (CUNY). His dissertation dealt with the artist and architect Frederick Kiessler, who designed the Shrine of the Book in the Israel Museum.

Between 1977 and 1978 Sgan-Cohen returned to Israel and taught at Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem as well as at the University of Haifa. In 1987 he permanently settled in Jerusalem and since 1990 served as a lecturer in several Art Institutes in Israel including Oranim Academic College in Kiryat Tivon (1990–98), Kalisher Art Academy in Tel Aviv (1990–98), The School of Visual Theatre in Jerusalem (1991–94) and Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem (1992–98)

In 1993 Sgan-Cohen had a solo exhibition at the library of foyer of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. In 1994 he had an extensive solo exhibition at the Ramat Gan Museum of Israeli Art. The following years he had two joint exhibitions – in 1995 with Haim Maor at the Museum of Jewish Art in Bar'am and in 1996 with Tsibi Geva at Julie M. Gallery in Tel Aviv.

Michael Sgan-Cohen curated two major retrospective exhibitions of the painter Lea Nickel (1995) and the sculptor Yehiel Shemi (1997) at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.

In 1997 Sgan-Cohen was the recipient of the America-Israel Cultural Foundation Prize for Excellence in Plastic Arts and in 1998 he won the Minister of Education and Culture Prize.

He died of an illness in 1999.

During his life and posthumously, Sgan-Cohen's works participated in many prominent exhibitions in Israel, Europe and the U.S. Between 2004 and 2005 an extensive retrospective exhibition of his work was held at the The Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

In August 2014 a street was named after Michael Sgan-Cohen and his father in The German Colony neighborhood in Jerusalem.

Work

Life in America sharpened Sgan-Cohen's preoccupation with Hebrew language, Jewish thought (particularly the Bible) and Mysticism and gradually led him from the theoretical articulation of ideas to visual expression. Michael Sgan-Cohen was primarily concerned with ideas. His approach to the visual arts may, accordingly, be considered as "conceptual", but not in the standard art-historical kind of sense. The art object was for him a medium of reflection on the fundamental problems of Jewish identity, particularly of the emerging Israeli culture. Sgan-Cohen's long stay in New York City served to sharpen his awareness of the uniqueness of the Israeli perspective in the role of Jewish culture in the life of modern Jews. His recurrent treatment of the theme of Nevo, the observation of the Land of Israel from the outside in the position of Moses before he died, attests for this deep concern, and to his attempt to form an Israeli style in art without becoming provincial or parochial and without falling into the trap of nostalgia.

A major role in Michael Sgan-Cohen's conception of art is given to the word and especially the hebrew word. This does not only reflect the artist's preoccupation with ideas and intellectual reflection, but also his recognition of the text as the fundamental medium and subject characterizing Jewish culture. Sgan-Cohen was one of the pioneers in the sophisticated use of the Hebrew language as a means of expression in contemporary visual art. Hebrew served in his view as the bridge between Jewish heritage, particularly the Bible, and the contemporary search for Israeli cultural identity. His works are replete with the complex deployment of culturally charged Hebrew phrases and with the Hebrew Alphabet as a visual theme. The drawn or painted hebrew word served him as the way in which a generally non-visual, verbal tradition can be approached in the visual medium. The Hinneni (1978) theme is just one example of this use of words as visual images, the word becoming a powerful effect on the eye. In other paintings he portrayed the body in its basic "alphabetic" gestures, placed his self portrait in a text, copied whole chapters fro the bible and made writing itself into a painted image. In those actions Sgan-Cohen's developed a unique poetic and artistic view of the visual aspects of the Hebrew word and the Hebrew alphabet. Naturally, the Bible became a major source in his art: Moses, The Akedah, Jonah and the Leviathan, Psalms, etc. In a very ambitious and project, Sgan-Cohen made twelve large panels in which the whole text of the Twelve Minor Prophets (Trei Assar) were copied, a homage to the long tradition of the meticulous reproduction of the word of the prophet and at token of respect to the sanctity of the word. In his works he thus brought together in a highly original way the sensibilities of the critical, self reflexive post-modern artist who understands the late and the repetitive with those of a modernist one who appreciated the archaic and the primary.

Michael Sgan-Cohen's work shifts between painting and icon, reality and myth, nostalgia and critical distance. His conceptual images capture and invigorate a whole cultural alphabet, combining iconic qualities with virtues of simplicity, depth and humour. An image of Israel's map, for example, combines the political, mythical, visual and textual languages and thereby figures the intricate and tension ridden Israeli place as both a direct experience and an emblem branded in Zionists and Israeli minds. In another exemplary work Sgan-Cohen portrayed himself as a Kabbalist who holds in his hand the tree of spheres assembled from parts of a child's old wooden toy. Rather than dissolving into mystical trance, he foregrounds the very language game and play of the artistic-cultural act.

Education

Teaching

Solo exhibitions

Two-artist exhibitions

Awards and prizes

Selected art critic and writings

Selected Hebrew writings