My Introduction to David (and Anne) McCosh

THE ESSAY about McCosh’s Cohasset paintings, which follows this introduction (page 24), was written for Community Favorites from the McCosh Collection, an exhibition at the University of Oregon Museum of Art (UOMA, as it was known then) of paintings by David McCosh. The show was presented in the summer of 2000, a few years before the Karin Clarke Gallery exhibitions began, which are the subject of this publication. I was one of six individuals who were invited to select three of McCosh’s paintings from the Museum’s permanent collection and explain the choices in a brief statement that would be posted alongside the selections.

McCosh’s work impressed me from the start when I first saw it at the UOMA shortly after moving to Eugene in 1976. It was original, personal, and visually exciting—some of the most interesting and authentic painting I had seen in Oregon.

There wasn’t much of McCosh’s work to be seen in the other museums and galleries I visited in the Northwest. But the UOMA in those years usually had on display a rotating group of works from the Museum’s Northwest collection and different McCosh paintings would periodically appear. I looked forward to each as a new discovery. I was especially taken by Goats on a Hillside in Spain—with its animals, carefully observed and painted so they integrated into and moved seamlessly through the rough fabric of the Spanish landscape. I thought then as I do today that this is a major American painting. Why isn’t the painter who made it—David McCosh—nationally known?

In 1985, the UOMA mounted a major retrospective, planned, curated, and installed by former McCosh students who understood his work deeply. That show was a revelation, and it remains to this day one of the best and most important exhibitions of the life’s work of a painter that the Museum has presented. I visited the show many times, studied the paintings closely, poured over the essays in the show’s catalog, and read all of the reference materials that were cited to learn more. What was the source of McCosh’s art, I wondered. Who was the man who made it?

On the very last day of the show, I was sitting in the galleries on a bench, lost in front of one of my favorite works, when a bright-eyed, older woman (I later learned she was 83 years old), with well-curled hair and an old-style east coast, matter-of-fact manner sat next to me and said, “You know, I’ve seen you here a lot. You look at art like you’re a painter. Were you one of Dave’s students?” I thanked her for the compliment and told her that I’d been looking at paintings all my life, studied painting in college— really worked at it—but now I mostly just try to understand painting. And I described some of my reactions to McCosh’s work. She looked at me for a few seconds—l learned later that was a long pause in a conversation for Anne—and she asked, “What’s your name?” Anne had a way of speaking rhythmically and pronouncing her words with an almost musical clarity, which probably came from learning English as a second language, after the Czech her parents spoke. I told her, and she responded by saying, “Well, I’m Anne McCosh, and you sound like you’re serious. If you want to see more of David’s work, I have it all in the studio at our house. Give me a call and we’ll make a time for you to come over and look.”

That was the beginning of a fine friendship. I made many trips over to the studio and spent hours looking at David’s work and discussing it with Anne. I describe that experience in the essay in this publication entitled “Anne McCosh: One Remarkable Woman.” With her blessing I curated a retrospective exhibition for the Maude Kerns Art Center of McCosh’s works on paper, which I selected from her personal collection. When I was invited to participate in the Community Favorites show, it was several years after Anne’s death, but our discussions about the key points in David’s development as a painter were very much in my mind. As I wrote about my selections, I recalled the importance she placed on the work that he did at the beach in Cohasset, Washington, during his first sabbatical leave from the university in the fall of 1949.

Sun Bleached, 1949 Oil on canvas McCosh Memorial Collection; MMC.0137