Oscar Cahén

Oscar Cahén
Life & Work by Jaleen Grove
refugees, and an amputee, as in The Cripple (date unknown). In The Criminal (date
unknown) the subject’s hanging head and dangling arms make him appear more pitiable
than guilty, a position analogous to Cahén’s when Czech police had caught him with
anti-Nazi broadcasting equipment, and later when he was deemed an “enemy alien” and
interned during the Second World War.
Cahén made four related one-metre-wide,
black-ink line drawings. Each shows a soldier
brandishing a lance with one arm, the other
holding a shield. Heads take the form of
medieval helmets, and massive, angular greaves
protect calves. The block-like torsos lack detail,
although each is given a prominent round
codpiece.
Bigger than life-size, Warrior was
rendered savagely in about four swift passes:
the first, a line drawing in black paint on raw
canvas, followed by staining of the background
and colouring of the chest, head, and greaves.
Then the impasto flesh-tones of a vulnerably
bloated, naked torso were laid in, a penis-less
scrotum where the codpiece used to be. The
powerful lance-wielding arms found in the
drawings are now puny weak things—like the
arm of the figure in The Cripple—holding only a
knife in an upright ceremonial way, as the King
does on a playing card. The shield oppressively squashes the figure’s shoulder, with an
effeminate pale pink field crowding in from the left.
This castrated figure in Warrior, its head now shattered as if by an explosion, is a
testament to the victimhood of “warriors” (conscripted soldiers) forced to participate in
conflicts not of their making. With the Second World War, the Korean War, and the Cold
War so fresh, Warrior functions as an archetype as expressive of the period as any
abstract painting. Cahén’s friends Walter Yarwood (1917–1996) and Harold Town
(1924–1990) hung Warrior in pride of place on the title wall of the Oscar Cahén
Oscar Cahén, Sketch for Warrior (050), 1955–56, ink on paper, 86.2 x 106.7 cm, private collection
Memorial Exhibition at the Art Gallery of Toronto in 1959.
Multi-part Mural for Imperial Oil Executive Office Building 1956
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