Oscar Cahén

Oscar Cahén
Life & Work by Jaleen Grove
In a number of illustrations, Cahén depicts
thorny roses, and in his personal work he paints
them in ink or in oil. In his illustrations he also
frequently portrays a grasping hand that stands
in for disease, for authorities stealing children,
for fate, and other ominous concepts. In
drawings he analyzes plants, hands, and heads
for essential Cubist forms, as in Untitled (405),
c. 1952, which shows a man’s upturned, openmouthed
head emerging from neck and torso,
arms raised. These mouths and hands become
sharp, curved talons, beaks, and spurs in
Cahén’s multiple renditions of crowing and
fighting cocks. Reduced to their most pure
expressions, at times these subjects appear as
simply a stick with a crescent at its end. In a
work he captioned “Child Father and Mother,” c. 1952–54, Cahén identified the stickcrescent
as the “father.”
Growing Form—from its provenance of forms jabbing, seizing, fighting, and crying
out—is more than a tree or flower or simple stick and crescent. Rendered in intense
reds with complementary teal and defiant black strokes, its florid, virile “growth” surges
up like a fist, conveying a sense of challenge, a call to battle, and a recognition that
transformation and flourishing growth accompany pain and suffering—that there is no
rose without thorns.
Graham Sutherland, Thorn Trees, 1945, oil on
cardboard, 108.6 x 101 cm, Albright Knox Gallery,
Buffalo, New York
Oscar Cahén, Untitled (405), c. 1952, monoprint
and pastel, 58.4 x 61 cm, The Cahén Archives,
Toronto
Small Combo c. 1954
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