Magisterial travelling retrospective for Marcelle Cahn
About the exhibition "Marcelle Cahn, in search of space", which runs until 5 March at the MAMC+ Saint-Etienne Métropole, and which will move to the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rennes from 1 April to 27 August 2023.
Moving over time from German expressionism to geometric and lyrical abstraction, the artist Marcelle Cahn (1895-1981) left behind a body of work so rich and unique that a travelling exhibition changing format in each city was needed to bring her out of the shadows! In addition to being an opportunity to pay tribute to a woman who devoted her life to artistic creation, despite the obstacles and difficulties of her time, the exhibition "Marcelle Cahn, in search of space" is a wonderful invitation to rediscover this little-known artist, whose work bears witness to an exceptional sensitivity and creativity.
Bringing together more than 400 works of art - paintings, graphic arts, sculptures, photographs and collages - from cultural institutions and private collections in France and abroad, covering all the techniques used by the artist, the exhibition can be seen until 5 March at the Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain de Saint-Etienne Métropole, after having been held in Strasbourg in 2022, the artist's birthplace, and before moving to the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rennes from 1 April to 27 August 2023.
Despite the fact that she was an outstanding artist, loved and supported by her peers and the great art critics of her time, a pioneer of abstraction, having worked with Fernand Léger, Amédée Ozenfant, Arp, Mondrian, Van Doesburg, Kandinsky, Le Corbusier, Zadkine, Suzanne Valadon, Natalia Goncharova, etc., Marcelle Cahn is still strangely unknown to the general public. Known for her relief paintings and her famous spatiaux, which represent the culmination of her work, Marcelle Cahn has given life, through her works, to a poetic and lyrical abstract language. Her works of art for sale are now much sought after by collectors and art galleries, even though at the age of 86 and almost blind, the painter had died alone and destitute, still working on a few collages. "On postcards sent or brought to her by her friends, the artist glued dots and carnations to create images where poetry flirts with humour, proof of the artist's ability to renew herself with a great economy of means," writes Fabien Simode in his Port-Folio for the magazine L'Oeil dated January-February 2023. A moving image in support.
It has to be said that, discreet and animated by an intense inner life, solely focused on her experiments in the plastic arts after discovering the work of Cézanne at the age of 19, the artist never considered it useful to maintain her own image. "Expressionism, cubism, purism, Dada, surrealism, concrete art, lyrical and geometric abstraction: Marcelle Cahn went through the most important trends of the 20th century without belonging to any school," says the exhibition's curator, Cécile Godefroy. What's more, she adds, "she expressed herself very little and did not enter into the theoretical debates in which the pioneers and great defenders of abstraction engaged. Add to this a secretive and solitary life, affected by financial difficulties and chronic health problems, and art history will have forgotten the woman who preferred to take care of her mother rather than run after art galleries and honours.
The young girl, who was very sensitive to music and who had also considered acting for a time while still living in Strasbourg, had been very impressed not only by Cézanne's paintings but also by the expressionist artists of the Sturm whom she had met while living in Berlin from 1914 to 1918. Marcelle Cahn had attended the Lewin-Funke-Kunstschule in Charlottenburg, where Eugène Spiro taught portraiture and Lovis Corinth taught nudes. In the first room of the Saint-Etienne exhibition, one is left amazed by the Berlin Nude of 1916. Referring to the constant influence of Cézanne in Marcelle Cahn's creative career, the journalist from L'Oeil notes that this oil on canvas of a confounding expressionist realism "takes up everything from the master's lesson: the sphere, the cone and the cylinder that shape nature, right down to the use of muted colours and the impasto brushstroke.
In the end, Marcelle Cahn devoted her entire life to art, and this exhibition makes it possible to identify the artistic milieus and schools to which she belonged, by illustrating them with well-selected documents. First the purism of Le Corbusier and Ozenfant, then Cercle et Carré in 1930, then the Salon des Réalités nouvelles from 1949 to 1967, and finally the groups Espace, Structures and Mesure. Marcelle Cahn thus experimented with cubism, futurism, surrealism, abstraction, figuration, engraving, oil painting, watercolour, Indian ink... all techniques that nourished her creativity. Or maybe it is his creativity that has put them at his service.
This diversity is perfectly reflected in the exhibition "Marcelle Cahn, in search of space", which offers a selection of works representative of the artist's entire career. The exhibition includes drawings and engravings from the 1920s, which reflect her political and social commitment, as well as paintings from the 1930s, which reveal her interest in geometry and abstraction. There are also works from the 1940s, which reflect her commitment to the resistance during the Second World War. It was when she joined the Salon des Réalités nouvelles after the war "that she entered the realm of abstract art, without ever renouncing figuration," notes Fabien Simode. "A linear geometrical abstraction which, as time went by, took on more and more relief to end up with a constructivism that was once again personal. Cézanne seems far away. Yet his lesson has been assimilated: the sphere, the cylinder and even the impasto touch - the white backgrounds are worked in thickness - are still part of Marcelle Cahn's vocabulary.
The title of the exhibition, "Marcelle Cahn, in search of space", refers to one of the recurring themes in the artist's work: the search for space. Marcelle Cahn has always been fascinated by questions of perspective, volume, depth and spacing, which are at the heart of modern art. This fascination can be seen in her drawings and engravings, which play on the effects of perspective to create an illusion of depth and volume. But it is also found in her paintings, where she experiments with effects of superposition, transparency and light, which create an impression of movement and fluidity. In short, this beautiful exhibition allows us to discover the richness and diversity of Marcelle Cahn's work, and to better understand the importance of her contribution to the history of art.