THE SECOND LIFE OF OSCAR CAHEN
Trepanierbaer exhibit rediscovers abstract artist
Canadian painter and illustrator Oscar Cahen’s life could be the plot of a Hollywood movie.
Born in Denmark in 1916, his father’s career as a journalist took him across Europe in his youth. His father’s second life as an anti-nazi activist forced the family to split — Fritz Max Cahen, his father, went to the United States, and Oscar and his mother Eugenie fled to England prior to the outbreak of the Second World War. There, Cahen was considered an enemy alien, separated from his mother and shipped to live in a Canadian internment camp in Sherbrooke, Que., in 1940. His art provided an escape: Montreal magazine The Standard liked his work as an illustrator, and the job secured his release from the interment camp in 1942. He then began a career as an illustrator for major Canadian magazines of the era — Maclean’s, Chatelaine, New Liberty — while nourishing a secondary career as a painter, first figurative and then abstract. His life was tragically cut short in a car crash in 1956, and his work largely disappeared from public view.
Over the last 15 years, Cahen’s son Michael has been working to bring the artist back into the public’s imagination and secure his legacy as one of the influential artists of his era. Trepanierbaer is presenting a comprehensive look at the artist’s work from 1948 to his death in 1956, including pieces that were released posthumously.
Trepanierbaer gallery co-founder Yves Trepanier has long been a fan of Cahen’s work, dating back to his time in high school in Toronto, when he saw some of it at the Art Gallery of Ontario. The Cahen Archives approached the Calgary gallery about representing the artist. Most of Cahen’s work was in storage after his death, and it wasn’t until Michael returned to Canada after a career in London as an investment banker that he began the process of bringing them back to light.
“He went into storage, took the work out, hired the best restorers and conservators in the country,” says Trepanier. “He had them looked at, documented, cleaned, restored, framed, and then hired people like Jeffrey Spalding, who was one of the early researchers on the Cahen Archives project.”
First, Trepanierbaer took Cahen’s work to Art Toronto, an international art fair, in 2016.
“It was really like reintroducing Oscar to the art world,” says Trepanier. They spent the week answering questions about Oscar, and talking about his life and his work.
“People had forgotten that he was involved with Painters Eleven (which included Canadian luminaries like Jack Bush),” says Trepanier. “I felt like it was starting with a brand new artist, an emerging artist. Here’s a new person.”
Then came an exhibition at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, where Spalding was chief curator, in 2018. (Spalding, a former Glenbow president, sadly died earlier this week, suffering a stroke en route to Toronto from Fredericton.) But Trepanier wanted to do a major show in a commercial space.
“A proper, full on, comprehensive exhibition, where the works are really available and in a way that presents the breadth of the work and allows people to come and see it,” says Trepanier. “They can talk about it and we can place the work in collections. Our hope is to place works in good collections, both private and museums.”
The exhibition at Trepanierbaer, which opens on Saturday, is titled Discovering Oscar Cahen and it includes examples of his work from his dual life as an illustrator and a painter. It shows his progression from figurative work, in pieces like The Adoration, 1949, to abstraction in pieces like Traumoeba, 1956, one of his last paintings.
Cahen’s paintings are often dark. The contrast is subtle between dark colours; sometimes it takes a while for the full image to come into view.
“They are really seductive,” says Trepanier. “They are easy to look at and the more you look, I find the colour starts to vibrate and come to life.”
The exhibition also shows his sense of humour when it came to his place in the art world at the time. An illustration he did for the cover of Maclean’s in October 1951 shows an artist painting a traditionally rendered church while the world around him is cubist abstraction. Cahen signed it with NMOSA beneath his name: non-member of the Ontario Society of Artists.
It was a response to a mass resignation of conservative artists from the society after a 1951 exhibition that featured abstract art including Cahen’s 1951 expressionist painting Rooster. The Painters Eleven, formed in 1953, helped legitimize the abstract movement in the Canadian art world.
It was also through his relationships with the other Painters Eleven where Cahen’s influence was really felt. After his death, Bush and other Painters Eleven members, including Harold Town and Walter Yarwood, went through Cahen’s studio and inventoried his work. Many of it had never been seen before, much of it was unfinished and experimental.
“Jack (Bush) was really moved by the experience and made something like 20 or 24 small paintings on paper and they were all called Oscar’s Death,” said Trepanier. A piece from the series is included in the exhibition. “You can see, as you look around the room, the structure of that, the colour of that is informed by what he would’ve seen in the studio.”
The exhibition is contributing to a rebirth for Cahen over the last few years, as his work has come out of storage and back into galleries. It’s a more proper ending to his Hollywood story.
“He was such a great artist that was in a sense forgotten,” says Trepanier. “That’s really the prime motivation. Here’s a great Canadian artist that made a huge contribution to the visual culture of the country and we’re trying to let people know about that.”
The opening reception for Discovering Oscar Cahen runs Saturday 1:30-4 p.m. at Trepanierbaer with Michael Cahen in attendance. The exhibit runs until Nov. 9.