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An examination of artworks that illuminate the critical role of community among artists active in Philadelphia, Chicago, Massachusetts, San Francisco, and New York
All artists enrich their creative lives through engagement with others, especially fellow artists. Peers provide inspiration, share mutual interests, provide points of rivalry, commiserate in setbacks, and celebrate successes. Understanding the relationships between artists, especially those active in specific communities, tells a compelling story about the values and character of a place. It is a way to center people rather than style and brings empathy to bear on what artists depict.
Bodies & Souls tells overlapping stories about circles of artists through works of art in the Robert and Frances Colbourn Kohler Collection. This collection of nearly 500 artworks from the 1940s to the present, given and promised to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Woodmere Art Museum in Philadelphia, focuses on artists who made figuration relevant to their inner and social lives. In turns irreverent, hilarious, sensual, vulnerable, and expressive, the work reflects the full range of human experience. The collection illuminates the critical role of figuration and the relevance of community among artists active in Philadelphia, Chicago, Massachusetts, San Francisco, and New York, including Luis Cruz Azaceta, Joan Brown, Gregory Gillespie, Sidney Goodman, Gladys Nilsson, and others. These stories, of an earlier generation, some now passed, can speak powerfully to artists today, especially younger emerging artists in search of circles and contexts that help them thrive.
"Art is big, encompassing more than the narrow margins defined by sanctioned art history and stale critical edicts. This volume surveys the depth and purpose of the Robert and Frances Colbourn Kohler Collection, highlighting its fresh collection of quirky and compelling American figurative art. Robert Cozzolino’s important essay powerfully contextualizes the collection, shining a light on art that reveals the inner workings of the human psyche with impeccable craft, empathy, and poetic clout."
"Frances and Robert Kohler built an extraordinary collection shaped by shared values and a willingness to follow their own convictions, bringing together works by widely recognized artists alongside others whose significance has too often been overlooked. Their deep trust in artists of exceptional force and originality is matched by a sustained collaboration with curator Robert Cozzolino, whose exhibitions and writing have been central to shaping, interpreting, and sharing the collection. This book offers a rare and intimate view of the Kohlers’ path as collectors, affirming collecting as a creative practice grounded in care, curiosity, and enduring partnership."
"Bodies & Souls explores the ideal synergy between artists, collectors, and museum curators. Looking at the generosity of Philadelphia-based collectors Frances and Robert Kohler, curator Robert Cozzolino convincingly argues for the significance of figuration for artists and the communities in which they live. This book is critical reading for any serious consideration of the vitality of contemporary representational painting and drawing inside and outside of New York in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries."
Robert Cozzolino (Author)
Robert Cozzolino is a Minneapolis-based independent curator, art historian, and critic who approaches curation collaboratively, in partnership with artists, colleagues, and broad communities. “Starting where you are” is critical to his practice—knowing the immediate context and deeper history of the place in which he works. Dr. Cozzolino is drawn to artists who express the full range of human experience, especially those who aspire to visually express the intangible. Although he has worked on topics from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, he often collaborates with contemporary artists in examining history. He considers himself a curator of fluid time, not bound by the labels and bins imposed on the field. Among his more than forty exhibitions are Supernatural America: The Paranormal in American Art (2021–22), World War I and American Art (2016–17), Peter Blume: Nature and Metamorphosis (2014–15), David Lynch: The Unified Field (2014), and With Friends: Six Magic Realists, 1940–1965 (2005).
William R. Valerio (Author)
William R. Valerio is the Patricia Van Burgh Allison Director and CEO of Woodmere in Philadelphia. Over the last fifteen years, he has led a transformative revitalization of the institution’s community engagement, collections, financial health, and cultural relevance. As the lead visionary behind the museum’s exhibitions, he has deepened the scholarship and celebration of the art and artists of Philadelphia, through such major exhibitions as A Grand Vision: Violet Oakley and the American Renaissance (2017), We Speak: Black Artists in Philadelphia, 1920s-1970s (2015), and Schofield: International Impressionist (2014). Valerio holds a PhD in art history from Yale, an MBA from Wharton, an MA in art history from the University of Pennsylvania, and a BA cum laude from Williams College.
Robert E. Kohler (Author)
Robert E. Kohler trained as a chemist but has long been informally devoted to books and creative literature. A happy accident in midlife led him to unite these separate threads in history of science and environmental history, fields he pursued as a scholar and teacher at the University of Pennsylvania from 1973 to his retirement in 2006. His passion for collecting contemporary art, which he shared with his wife, Frances, began as a secondary pursuit but developed into a mid- to late-life vocation and primary life’s work. Frances was another creative shapeshifter: educated in classics and comparative literature, she discovered a gift and calling in history of science, as managing editor of the premier journal in the couple’s shared field.