Oscar Cahén

Oscar Cahén
Life & Work by Jaleen Grove
Oscar Cahén, Illustration for “The Californian’s Tale,” by Mark Twain,
published in New Liberty, January 24, 1947
60.6 x 44.8 cm
Private collection
Oscar Cahén believed that illustration could and should stretch the public’s aesthetic
sophistication and that it was capable of embodying “those fundamental emotions which
are expressed in good [fine] art work.” German Expressionism, to which Cahén would
have been well exposed in Europe, and Gothic art, of which he collected reproductions,
inform his distortions of figures for Mark Twain’s tale about a heartbroken, mentally
unsound old miner. Rendered in heavily outlined impasto gouache, the men enact a
scene reminiscent of Gothic iconography in which a hollow-eyed, cadaver-like Jesus
descends from the cross. The emaciated limbs and angular hands and feet of the Twain
characters recall lost paintings by Cahén of a Belsen concentration camp victim and a
drowned woman as well as his paintings of Christ and Praying Man of 1947.
New Liberty—which had just been acquired by Canadian publishers and made
independent from the originating American publisher of Liberty—commissioned many
such illustrations that were decidedly more outré than other periodicals would risk,
probably because it helped them secure a distinct identity. The appearance of The
Californian’s Tale and others provoked complaints from readers: “Do you keep your
illustrator Oscar in a padded cell? No one in their right mind could think up such
repulsive and hideous things to represent human beings,” jeered one. But among
Cahén’s peers, the illustration for “The Californian’s Tale” was well received. It was
chosen for the 1949 exhibition of the Art Directors Club of Toronto by popular vote of its
membership.
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The unnerving images Cahén drew for New Liberty marked an important turn in
Canadian illustration where Canadians began to break with prettified American
standards. These, and related Expressionist works such as Praying Man, 1947, led his
friend James Imlach, who had moved to the United States, to say in 1948, “You [Cahén,
Harold Town, and Walter Yarwood] can start a new and lively school of art in Canada
devoid of the stiff realistic rendering of the British influence on the colonies.”
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Oscar Cahén, Praying Man (170), 1947, oil on
canvas board, 59.7 x 49.3 cm, private collection
The Adoration 1949
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