The Bay

Max Arthur Cohn

Max Arthur 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. 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.

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.