Museum Collections

Best known as a pioneer in screenprints, Max Arthur Cohn was born in 1903 to Russian immigrants in London and moved with his family to New York City in 1905. After his first art-related job creating commercial silkscreens at age seventeen, Cohn began to experiment with silkscreening on his own and later, in the 1930s and 1940s, exhibited his prints in New York City and Washington, D.C. Unfortunately, none of his early works from the 1920’s or early 1930’s are known to have survived. Cohn developed a new concept of screenprinting with the use of transparent washes, which gave the finished product the quality of transparent watercolor. He also studied at the Art Students League in New York City with Boardman Robinson and John Sloan. 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. In the 1950s, Cohn owned a graphic arts business in Manhattan, and is credited with teaching silkscreen techniques to a young Andy Warhol. Cohn coauthored several books on silkscreening, including the influential 1958 book Silk Screen Techniques, written with J. I. Bielgeleisen, that is still in print. Barely a century old, silk screen printing or serigraphy has been adopted as a commercial and an artistic process by thousands of enthusiastic professional and amateur artists throughout the world. Cohn produced his last artistic screenprint images in 1945, but maintained a commercial art studio in New York into the 1950’s.

The watercolor is a study for a silk screen print that is signed and dated 1944. Like many of the artist’s works, it has a simplified generic appearance and bears a simple title, which has been reported variously as “Toy Boats” or “Sailing Toy Boats in Central Park.” The inscription on the verso cinches its location as the Conservatory Water in Central Park, located near 72nd Street in New York City. Model boats are sailed and/or raced there every weekend. Residents of the City may apply for permits to store their boats in the Kerbs Boathouse.