Max Arthur Cohn, painter, printmaker, and author, was born to Russian immigrants in London in 1903, and the family immigrated to New York in 1905. Cohn studied at the Art Students League in New York with Boardman Robinson, Fisk Boyd and John Sloan between the years 1925 and 1927. He then went to Paris where he studied at the Academy Colarossi. During the Great Depression, Cohn worked as an easel painter for the WPA and served as an executive board member of the New York WPA Artists Association.

Cohn was the dean of American screenprinting and it is thought that he created the first artistic screenprint while studying at the Art Students League. He later championed the printmaking process and co-founded the National Serigraph Society and exhibited in their New York gallery until it closed about 1950. His book, Silk Screen Stenciling as a Fine Art (1942), has gone through a series of reprints. In the 1950s, Cohn operated Graphic Arts Studio in New York and one of his clients was a young artist by the name of Andy Warhol.

Cohn was a member of the Art Students League, the Delaware Valley Art Association, the Artists League of America, and the National Serigraph Society and his work is represented in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Boston Public Library; British Museum; Denver Art Museum; Metropolitan Museum of Art; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Max Arthur Cohn died on March 25, 1998, in New York City.