(b Philadelphia, PA, 12 June 1910; d Los Angeles, CA, 21 May 1975). American sculptor. He studied in New York at Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art (1929) and at the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design (1930-34), subsequently designing for Paramount Pictures, Los Angeles (1935-42). From 1942 to 1945 he was a camouflage designer in the Army Air Corps. After demobilization he went to Paris in 1946 to study under Ossip Zadkine, with whom he worked intermittently until his return to the USA in 1952. His sculpture of this period, executed in terracotta, plaster and bronze, was exhibited in one-man shows at the Atelier Mannucci (1948) and the Galleria Zodiaco (1950), both in Rome. In 1952-3 Kohn taught at Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI, and in 1953 won the American Prize in the Unknown Political Prisoner Sculpture Competition at the Tate Gallery, London. His architectonic sculptures of the 1950s and 1960s show the sculptural clarity of Constructivism and evidence of the working methods of Abstract Expressionism. From 1954 he worked exclusively in wood, employing the joinery processes of sanding, dowelling, gluing and laminating. He created diagonals and U-shapes to set up a dramatic dialogue between the elements in his massive abstract forms, which were made more forceful by the polished surfaces, colour and wood grain, and by the positive command of space, as in Square Root (wood, 1958; New York, Whitney). He had one-man shows in New York, at the Tanager Gallery (1958) and the Leo Castelli Gallery (1959), and was associated with the artists of the New York School. In 1961 he moved to Sarasota, FL, and in 1965 to Los Angeles. Retrospectives of his work were held at Newport Harbor Art Museum, Newport Beach, CA (1972), and posthumously at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (1977).

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