‘Oscar Cahén’ edited by Rosemary Shipton and Marianne Gerlinger

The story of Oscar Cahén (born Copenhagen 1916, died Toronto 1956) can feel all too familiar to readers steeped in the myths that often underscore artists’ biographies: yet another painter of real potential coming into their prime, dying too young. At the time of his death in a car accident at the age of 40, Cahén was already a bit of a celebrity in the Toronto art community, with successes in both the field of illustration (under the name “Oscar,” most noted for his memorable Maclean’s magazine covers) and, perhaps more significantly from the point of view of history, as a member of the emergent Painters Eleven group of artists. Less historically notable but far more poignant in terms of human loss, he also had a wife and an 11-year-old son. In the dedication to this extraordinary and visually stunning 311-page volume on the artist’s life and work, co-published by the Beaverbrook Gallery and the Cahén Archives, son Michael Cahén speaks to the very human heart of the matter when, in the dedication, he describes, shortly after his coming home from school on November 26, 1956, and being unceremoniously informed by a policeman that his father has been killed in a car accident, hearing the phone ring in the kitchen. On the other end is a local newspaper reporter asking for a background story on his father for the paper. He writes: “In that single instant what might have become a moment of pure grief transcended to my first experience of pure purpose—to see that my father’s interrupted story would be told.” This is the result. It is a book of solid scholarship, insightful commentary and solid biography. But you sense, in turning the pages and reading the essays, that this volume is more than that. Like many such undertakings, years in the making and against a backdrop of sometimes palpable hostility in certain critical circles towards that thing we call “mid-century abstraction,” it is meant as a statement.

The critical reputation of Oscar Cahén (like that of just about any artist who has made a meaningful contribution to the art and culture of their age) has seen its ebb and flow over the course of the last half-century, moving from interest to wilful neglect and now to re-evaluation, as fashions change and scholars find new uses for the material. At times, this predictable swing of the critical pendulum has had its share of flippant commentary. Take, for instance, Blake Gopnik’s review of Cahén’s work in 2000 in the Globe and Mail, where he bemoaned the artist’s inability to choose either abstraction or figuration because he “hadn’t got the balls to choose between them.” As Roald Nasgaard points out in his foreword to the volume, this less-than-kind reading of the work has critically pigeonholed the artist’s career as “expansive” but inevitably confused and unfocused … because it is expansive! This volume takes dead aim at such stultified thinking and instead revels in the expanse, exploring everything from Cahén’s illustrations and drawings to religious commissions and non-objective-ish colour field work. Further, all this “stuff”—the sheer making and creative energy— has to be understood within a career that spanned a very short 20 years, ending at a time when most artists are just finding their mature voice. As a result, one of the great strengths of this book is its willingness to advocate for, and indeed celebrate, a way of making and thinking that continues to run counter to a lot of historical writing about the period: not so much that artists change and evolve, but, more precisely and accurately, that artists are often interested in (and successful at) a whole bunch of things and inevitably find a variety of conventional languages in which to manifest them.

Oscar Cahén’s is in some ways the typical mid-20th-century artist-immigrant story, and in some ways most certainly not: born in Denmark; largely self-taught in Germany, Czechoslovakia and Britain; possessed of great technical facility despite an on-again, off-again education. He had a father who was a spy of somewhat confused sympathies and often on the move. The artist was rounded up as a potentially suspicious German ex-national in England and subsequently shipped off to an internment camp in Canada during the war. He landed in conventional employment as an illustrator, while all the while pursuing a painting practice that would lead him directly into the orbit of some of the most advanced art of the time. Then, tragically, his life ends abruptly in an automobile accident. So it isn’t much surprising that his work often embodies many of the resultant contradictions of such experiences: academic in approach at times, but then seemingly unafraid of pure innovation; conventional in attitude when required, yet also willing to defy convention; conservative and yet at times thoroughly radical in demeanour.

I can’t think of a volume that has been released in recent years (at least about a Canadian artist) that is so intelligently assembled to make the case for the continued relevancy of the artist. The cast of writers is a veritable who’s who of serious thinkers about modern and contemporary painting: Roald Nasgaard, Karen Wilkin, Jeffrey Spalding, Adam Welch, Richard Rhodes and Gary Michael Dault. It also includes (and, to my mind, crucially) a variety of other critical voices, such as illustration scholars Jaleen Grove and Cy Strom, and conservators Cheryle Harrison and Rebecca Pavitt. The result is a constellation of fascinating insights into the man, his art and his historical position within the Toronto avant-garde of the early and middle 1950s. The book is also, from front to back, a fine repository of images, impeccably reproduced and, by sheer number alone, making a compelling case for an artist of incredible industry and creative drive. But perhaps most significantly of all, it successfully argues that Oscar Cahén still matters, and should matter in any future understanding of the Painters Eleven and its legacy. ❚

Oscar Cahén, edited by Rosemary Shipton and Marianne Gerlinger, with essays by Roald Nasgaard, Jaleen Grove, Jeffrey Spalding, Gary Michael Dault, Karen Wilkin, Cy Strom, Adam Welch, Richard Rhodes, Cheryle Harrison and Rebecca Pavitt, Beaverbrook Art Gallery and the Cahén Archives, 2017, 311 pages, $85.00.

John Kissick is a painter and writer.