Michael Sgan-Cohen

Michael Sgan-Cohen was born in 1944 in Jerusalem

Michael Sgan-Cohen was born in Jerusalem in 1944. His father, Dr. Meir Sgan-Cohen, was the personal physician of President Yitzhak Ben-Zvi. He grew up in the Rehavia neighborhood.

After serving as an officer in the Intelligence Corps, he studied art history and philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, graduating in 1969. As a student he wrote about art for the culture supplement of Haaretz. He earned an MA in art history from UCLA in 1973 and a PhD from the City University of New York in 1989, with a dissertation on Frederick Kiesler.

In New York he taught art history at Brooklyn College and the School of Visual Arts and wrote for art journals. He was linked to a group of Israeli artists there and began working as an artist in 1976. His first solo exhibition opened at the Kibbutz Gallery in Tel Aviv in 1978.

He settled in Jerusalem in 1987 and lectured at Bezalel, Oranim, Kalisher and other schools. He exhibited at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and the Ramat Gan Museum of Israeli Art, and curated retrospectives of Lea Nickel and Yehiel Shemi.

He died of an illness in 1999. The Israel Museum held a retrospective of his work in 2004 and 2005, and in 2014 a street in Jerusalem's German Colony was named after him and his father.