Bernard Kohn

1905-1989

Bernard A. Kohn was born in Philadelphia USA 21st November 1905, where he went to school and to University. 

He worked from 1929-1970 as a director and co-owner of Elkan-Vogel music publishers and was very active in the Music Publishers Association. In the early 1940s he developed an interest in painting and attended the Cheltenham Art Center where he studied printmaking and painting and worked mainly in wood engraving, silk-screen printing, gouache and watercolour.

His work was abstract expressionist in style and reflects his strong roots in his music publishing background and also his love of poetry, rhythm, dance, travel and handmade paper - which was specially supplied for him or which he bought in the Far East.  He was influenced by E. E. Cummings, Wallace Stevens and the Bible. 

He combined his work with his art and created covers for his published music. He illustrated a number of poems by Garcia Lorca and St John Perse as well as illustrating other literary works, and musical compositions by Vincent Persichetti. 

In 1978 he wrote: “I have always been deeply involved with the interrelationship of the Arts.  The starting point of a print or painting - the so-called inspiration if you will - often stems from a poem, a dance, a musical work, or the poetic translation of nature into graphic forms.”

In the 1930s he lived in Paris and London and in the 1940s travelled in America and Mexico. In the 1950s he returned to Europe as a tourist and artist and continued to travel widely thereafter.  He died in the city where he was born in 1989.