I like to live under the philosophy that books don’t need words to be read. In fact, I sometimes prefer to skip the words and go straight to the illustrations which is why I was delighted to find that this hand-drawn and painted mock-up of The Chandler Motor Car publication is missing its text.
These illustrations were done by noted American artist and screen printer Max Arthur Cohn. Cohn was a commercial illustrator, as exemplified by the designs for this brochure, as well as a successful artist who pioneered the silk-screened print as an art medium, rather than as a technique used just for commercial purposes. His daughter, Jane Cohn Waldbaum, a UWM professor emerita of Art History, along with her husband Steve Morse, donated an entire set of materials from the collection of Max Cohn, which included this hand-made design for a Chandler Car advertising brochure.
Best known as a pioneer in screenprints, Max Arthur Cohn was born to Russian immigrants in London, in 1903, and moved with his family to New York City in 1905. He got his first art-related job creating commercial silkscreens when he was seventeen. Cohn began to experiment with silkscreening on his own and later exhibited his prints in New York City and Washington, D.C., in the 1930s and '40s. During the Great Depression, he also 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. -Smithsonian American Art Museum