In 1972 Cohen’s exhibition Three Behaviours for the Partitioning of Space, opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. For the show, Cohen enlarged several of his Territorial Maps into large scale paintings, where he replicated the output by hand on canvas. Taking place just four years after arriving in the states, the exhibition consolidated Cohen’s centrality to contemporary painting on the West Coast.

Colored Map L and Colored Map E, both 1971 are examples of Cohen experimenting with this new ethos on a large scale. Colored Map L is a momentous work at nearly four and a half metres wide. With the composition computationally generated and the colour applied by hand, the flatness of the surface situates the work at an inflection point in twentieth century painting. A decade earlier, Clement Greenberg had published his pivotal 1960 essay Modernist Painting, which advocated for a ‘flatness’ of surface in order to emphasise the two-dimensional essence of a painting. The Minimalism of the 1960s concurred with this, with simplified forms offering alternate realities. In his endeavour to codify the formal nature of a painting, Greenberg is in alignment with Cohen. Whilst these two maps sit squarely within the lineage of twentieth century painting, with the flatness of the surface and colour distribution the central focus of the work, they also represent a point of departure. Not purely abstract paintings, the maps are paintings about representation and they hint at the developments to come in the following decades as Harold Cohen paves the way for autonomous art.