Oscar Cahén

Oscar Cahén
Life & Work by Jaleen Grove
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artist. A review noted that Cahén “works by many methods, in many styles, and with
many subjects . . . there are good designs . . . neat caricatures and remarkably good and
suggestive sketches of heads and figures.” Earlier the same year Cahén had joined
the Montreal office of Rapid, Grip and Batten, where he was the highest paid artist, at
$90 a week.
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In 1943 American officials told Oscar that Fritz Max was mentally ill and required
“chemical therapy,” and could be deported back to Nazi-controlled Europe. His mother,
meanwhile, was stuck in England, where she now worked for the BBC. Despite these
traumas, Oscar’s personal life improved.
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Stability in Toronto
Although he retained his love for Beatrice, in
1943 Oscar met and married Martha (Mimi)
Levinsky, daughter of a Polish rabbi, who had
spent her childhood in the Netherlands. Sadly
for Mimi, her Orthodox parents disowned her for
marrying Oscar. Their only child, Michael, was
born May 8, 1945; Michael—affectionately
nicknamed The Noodnik and The Monster—
appeared in several cover designs for Maclean’s
and other magazines.
In late 1944 Oscar Cahén moved to
Toronto to become art director for Magazine
Digest. He introduced cheerful covers and
interior cartoons and, in utter contrast, two gutwrenching
visual essays concerning
impoverished Native Americans and orphaned children in Europe.
Cahén began to put down roots, building a rustic house and studio himself on
Fogwood Farm near King City (just north of Toronto) in 1946. The families of
illustrator Frank Fog (1915–unknown) and art director Bill Kettlewell (1914–1988)
already had houses there. That same year he was granted Canadian citizenship; in
June 1947 his mother arrived from England. With the stability of steady freelance
income and a home of his own at last, Cahén gave up Magazine Digest and began
painting for himself. It was finally safe to process the years of exile and war, and he
“began to release fine frenzies in paint [that] if left pent-up torment him to the point of
nervous breakdown,” as one news feature put it.
Fritz Max, still not well, was at first not permitted and was then unwilling to join his
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wife and son in Canada. Perhaps these painful facts informed Oscar’s images of
suffering families and grief, their bodies marked with savage, heavy strokes. Paintings
from this time, known only from inscribed photographs, depict an emaciated Holocaust
victim and a drowned woman. During the late 1940s Cahén also produced a series of
paintings and mixed-media works on Christian themes, including the largest canvas he
had completed to date, the highly Cubist The Adoration, 1949.
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Michael, Oscar, and Mimi at their home in King
Township, 1951
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Oscar Cahén, Magazine Digest cover design,
c. 1946, printer’s proof, The Cahén Archives,
Toronto
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