HAROLD COHEN (1928–2016)

William Grimes reports in the New York Times_ that the painter Harold Cohen, who developed one of the first computer software programs for making art, died on April 27 at his home in California.

Cohen was born in 1928 in London and enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Art, where he graduated in 1951, and then spent a year in Rome on a fellowship. Cohen taught himself how to program in the 1960s and eventually invented a computer-programmed drawing machine. Works he made with the machine were exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art for a 1972 exhibition called “Three Behaviors for the Partitioning of Space.” He then spent two years at Stanford University’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the invitation of Edward Feigenbaum, one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence. The program he created while at the lab was called Aaron and utilized algorithms that allowed a computer to draw lines similar to how a human would in freehand drawing. The program would go on to be exhibited at such museums as the Tate Gallery, the Stedelijk Museum, and the San Francisco Museum of Art.

He taught at the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts in London and the University of Nottingham. Cohen represented Britain at Documenta in 1964 and at the Venice Biennale in 1966. In 1968 the University of California, San Diego, invited him to spend a year as a visiting lecturer and he soon joined the art department’s faculty, eventually becoming chairman and the director of the school’s Center for Research in Computing and the Arts before retiring in 1994.