‘Bodies and Souls’ and the art of ‘passionate figuration’
“This collection shows a real personal view of what art since the 1970s has been in the United States,” said Robert Cozzolino, curator of “Bodies and Souls.”.
In the mid-1970s, Robert E. Kohler and his wife, Frances Coulborn, visited an art gallery in Boston and saw Jane Lund’s “Party for Myself,” which features four women seated around a table. All of them resemble the artist and depict particular aspects of herself.
One woman is naked, one wears a party hat, one wears a floral dress with flowers in her hair and the fourth has a grotesquely distorted face. The scene is cast in a blueish haze. One figure is turned to face the viewer with an unsettling grin.
“We saw this — I can still see it over a doorway — and we said, ‘Ugh!’” Robert told WHYY News. “We just hated it. We both agreed this is terrible stuff. Why would anybody want to put this on the wall?”
But on the way back home to Philadelphia, they could not shake the image.
“We got in the car and drove down and Frances said, ‘You know?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I do,’” he said. “It turns out that what we were feeling was not with strong hatred, but strong love.”
“Party for Myself” was the couple’s first foray into art collecting. Fifty years later, the Kohler collection of hundreds of works and is now the basis of “Bodies and Souls”