Cohen, Arthur A. (Arthur Allen), 1928-1986

American theologian, art critic, writer and bookseller.

From the description of Papers relating to Herbert Bayer, ca. 1979-1984. (Getty Research Institute). WorldCat record id: 83781012

From the description of Papers relating to Sonia and Robert Delaunay, ca. 1960-1981. (Getty Research Institute). WorldCat record id: 145996063

From the description of Arthur Cohen interview with Robert Motherwell, 1969. (Getty Research Institute). WorldCat record id: 77719338

Arthur Allen Cohen, theologian, author, editor, and publisher, was born on June 25, 1928 in New York to Isidore Meyer and Bess Junger Cohen. Cohen graduated from the University of Chicago with a Bachelor of Arts (1946) and a Masters of Arts (1949). He returned to New York where he enrolled at the Union Theological Seminary and the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (graduating in 1953).

While Cohen was a student at the Jewish Theological Seminary he founded the Noonday Press with Cecil Hemley. Cohen sold the press in 1955 and founded Meridian Books. When the World Publishing Company bought Meridian Books in 1960, Cohen stayed on with the company, working as vice president until taking a position as director of the religious book department and then editor-in-chief at Holt, Rinehart, & Winston (1962-64). Cohen worked as managing editor of the Documents of Twentieth Century Art series for Viking Press from 1968 to 1975.

Cohen also sustained a writing career in tandem with his publishing career. He authored several novels, including The Carpenter Years (1967), In the Days of Simon Stern (1973), A Hero in His Time (1976), Acts of Theft (1980), An Admirable Woman (1983), and Artists and Enemies (1987). His non-fiction works include Martin Buber (1957), The Natural and the Supernatural Jew (1962), The Myth of the Judeo-Christian Tradition (1970), Osip Emilievich Mandelstam: An Essay in Antiphon (1974), and The Tremendum: A Theological Interpretation of the Holocaust (1981). Cohen also published a number of articles in Harper's, New York Times Book Review, Partisan Review, and other journals.

In 1956 Cohen married Elaine Firstenberg Lustig (b. 1927), a graphic designer, painter, and photographer, with whom he opened Ex Libris (1974-1986), a gallery and bookstore specializing in rare, out-of-print materials on twentieth-century art (particularly European avant-garde). Arthur and Elaine Cohen had one daughter, Tamar Judith, an artist based in New York.

Cohen died of cancer at the age of 58 in 1986.

From the guide to the Arthur A. Cohen papers, 1941-1988, (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)