Peter Cochrane; influential art dealer
Hyfler/Rosner
An influential art dealer, he championed a new generation of
artists in the 1960s
Nicholas Serota
Saturday December 18, 2004
The Guardian
The modest charm and diffident manner of Peter Cochrane, who
has died aged 91, masked a mischievous and inquiring mind,
which had made him an influential and respected art dealer
for more than 30 years.
In the 1950s, at Arthur Tooth & Sons in Bruton Street,
Mayfair, he was active in bringing new European and American
art to London, and in the 1960s he promoted a younger
generation of emerging British artists.
Following the closure of Tooth's in the late 1970s he
pursued his personal interests as a collector and deployed
his great knowledge in diverse fields, including
20th-century European painting, decorative arts and
especially late 19th and early 20th-century ceramics, for
Christie's auction house. He was careful to retain his
independence, refusing a salary in latter years so that he
could declare "they can't fire me because they don't pay me
anything".
Cochrane was born in Ash, Surrey into an army family and
educated at Wellington and later Sandhurst. However, in his
early 20s an interest in art brought him into the London art
world .
By 1938, he was working at the Redfern Gallery, then one of
Cork Street's most progressive and adventurous galleries
and, later, a centre for the promotion of work by younger
British artists. In his first year he worked on a
retrospective exhibition for the painter, Christopher Wood.
After wartime service in Italy, Cochrane returned to the
Redfern. He was involved in presenting significant first
exhibitions for a postwar generation, including Alan
Reynolds, Victor Pasmore and Patrick Heron.
In 1950 he joined Tooth's. The family firm had strong links
with Paris and every year presented a major show of
impressionist, post-impressionist and early 20th-century
French painting. Cochrane was a frequent visitor to Paris,
and throughout the 1950s and 1960s was at the forefront in
promoting new European and American artists to British
audiences.
Cochrane took a special interest in the abstract painting
being developed by Jean-Paul Riopelle and Nicholas de Stael
in France, in the work of Jean Dubuffet and the Cobra
painters including Asger Jorn, as well as some of the young
Americans then active in Paris, such as Sam Francis and
Ellsworth Kelly.
Cochrane became a particular friend and confidante of EJ
Power, the English collector and radio and radar pioneer. By
the early 1960s, Power had - through his acquisition of work
by Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Dubuffet
and others -one of the most important new art collections
anywhere.
Power and Cochrane visited Paris frequently, with Power
buying work through Tooth's to avoid the constraints of the
British postwar exchange controls. Power had a fine eye,
acquiring, for instance, a whole group of paintings by
Ellsworth Kelly, one of which he later gave to the Tate.
However, Cochrane was a vital ingredient in the process of
building the collection and introduced Power to the work of
several artists, most notably the Spanish painter Antoni
Tapies, for whom Power formed a special regard.
In the mid-1950s Tooth's began the Critics Choice series of
annual exhibitions. Most of the important critics -
including Laurence Alloway and David Sylvester - took it in
turn to make their own selection.
In the 1960s, Cochrane promoted a new generation of British
artists, including first one-person shows for Allen Jones,
Peter Kinley and Howard Hodgkin, all of whom continued to
show with him into the 1970s when Tooth's merged for a
number of years with Waddington Galleries before finally
closing at the end of the decade.
Although he was a successful dealer Cochrane was always
sceptical about the role of the artist's agent. "No one is
more moody, emotional and untrustworthy than a dealer," he
confessed to an artist. For Cochrane, it was his passion for
individual works of art which propelled him into the art
world rather than the showmanship or the pleasure in making
a sale that motivates many dealers.
Cochrane had always been a collector by instinct, not just
of painting and sculpture but distinctive objects of almost
any kind, provided that they were of aesthetic interest.
After his divorce from Patricia, whom he had married in the
late 1930s, Cochrane lived in a Clarence Gate mansion flat.
The walls were covered with small works by great
mid-20th-century artists, including Dubuffet, Jorn, Yves
Klein and Cy Twombly, all bought very early in their
careers, as well as younger contemporaries.
The floors gradually filled with cardboard boxes containing
collections of egg cups, tie presses as well as his beloved
Carltonware. Most of this material had been picked up on
market stalls and shops in Portobello Road and elsewhere.
These boxes built up in deep piles, to the point at which a
visit could only be achieved by navigation of a tortuous
obstacle course.
Cochrane was always deprecating about his depth of knowledge
and the quality of his eye. He was totally without
affectation, while dressing with a style that would allow
him to wear a gold Ashanti weight on a chain around his neck
in contrast to a conventional English business suit. Hugely
respected and admired by collectors and artists for his
discernment and for an ability to see beauty in unusual
objects, Cochrane was an art dealer with a passion for the
aesthetic rather than the financial value of a work of art.
He is survived by his son Gavin; a daughter, Cara,
predeceased him.
· John Peter Warren Cochrane, art dealer and collector, born
October 15 1913; died November 13 2004