Oscar Cahén

Oscar Cahén
Life & Work by Jaleen Grove
LEFT: Oscar Cahén, Requiem, c. 1953, oil on canvas, current location unknown RIGHT: Oscar Cahén, Untitled (616), 1956, oil on Masonite, 58.4 x 84.2 cm, Art Gallery of
Ontario, Toronto. Untitled (616), 1956, is likely unfinished. It was on his easel at his time of death in November 1956
Oscar Cahén included mainly abstract works in his first solo art show (Hart
House, Toronto, October 16, 1954). Yet he continued to value representational
approaches: in 1956 he used a sun motif in a mural commissioned by Imperial Oil, and
he completed the large canvas Warrior, 1956. Stark contrasts power the abstract work
Untitled of the same year: its forceful brushwork is both optimistically energetic and
tersely violent.
One late-autumn day in 1956, driving home in his new Studebaker Hawk, Oscar
Cahén died in a collision with an oncoming dump truck. He was forty years old. There is
a photograph of Oscar Cahén taken in 1951 and later inscribed on the back by his
mother, Eugenie: “My beloved son Oscar Cahén shortly before his death 1956,
26 November.” The photo shows a much different Oscar than the grinning boy seen in
Dresden circa 1930. This Oscar, filled with memories of disenfranchisement, flight,
internment, and rebirth in a strange country, does not smile: he stands erect with fists on
hips before his easel and numerous drawings, staring boldly, defiantly, into the lens,
serious about his work.
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In the aftermath of Cahén’s death, Harold Town and Walter Yarwood arranged a
memorial exhibition held at the Art Gallery of Toronto in March 1959, and other
retrospectives have followed over the years. Nevertheless, Cahén’s legacy was
diminished by the lingering after-effects of wartime trauma: Eugenie left to rejoin Fritz
Max, who had returned to Germany in 1954; and Mimi, suffering from depression, could
not manage the estate well alone. As a result, most of Cahén’s drawings and paintings
lay unknown in storage for over forty years. Happily, when his son, Michael Cahén,
inherited the collection, he began making it and related papers accessible, and scholars
are re-evaluating Oscar Cahén’s contribution to Canadian art.
Portrait of Oscar Cahén in his studio in 1951.
Photograph by Page Toles
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