Miriam Cahn shows everything

About the exhibition "Ma pensée sérielle" by Miriam Cahn at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris until 14 May 2023.

When the interview with Miriam Cahn by Catherine Millet appeared in March in Artpress, the contemporary art magazine, the controversy had not yet erupted around Fuck Abstraction, a painting accused of depicting a paedocriminal scene. The journalist and art critic talking to the Swiss painter was delighted with this performance exhibition: "Something to shake up the current namby-pamby atmosphere," she wrote. She didn't mean it that way! "Few works today match his penetration of human nature and his audacity in revealing it in its entirety. None of them puts such perfect technique at the service of the purest spontaneity and simplicity. The proof: Miriam Cahn represents violence so crudely in order to denounce it better since the conflict in ex-Yugoslavia in the 1990s, that she is now accused of aping it...

Her large painting, which has been so shocking since the opening of the "Ma pensée sérielle" exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo, amidst some 200 works of art (paintings and drawings of all formats, photographs, videos and texts) that she herself has put in space, does indeed depict a frail figure on her knees with her hands tied, forced to perform fellatio on a man. But it is a reference to the abuses committed in the town of Boutcha, in Ukraine, by Russian soldiers since the beginning of the conflict. For the moment, the six associations that demanded its removal from the Paris art centre have been rejected by the courts. They argued that access to the room, where it is displayed among other potentially shocking works, was perfectly marked out with the usual recommendations. Nevertheless, Miriam Cahn herself had to explain that "this painting deals with the way sexuality is used as a weapon of war, as a crime against humanity. The contrast between the two bodies represents the bodily power of the oppressor and the fragility of the oppressed, kneeling and emaciated by war. In a society where the flames are quick to ignite, cultural mediation has clearly a bright future ahead of it.

Miriam Cahn lives alone in a narrow valley in the Swiss Alps, in a luminous parallelepiped workshop-home, we learn from Catherine Millet. "Her antennae carry her very close to the sufferings of the world; she also has the beautiful, bright laugh of a free woman. Born in 1949 in Basel and trained from 1968 to 1975 at the Gewerbeschule Basel, the painter and draughtswoman has established herself as one of the most interesting female figures in Swiss contemporary art. Her work is based on the image of the body, and more precisely on the conditions of appearance of this image: its emergence, its disappearance. Already at the end of the 1970s, her first charcoal drawings, which she executed directly on city walls in the middle of the night, or on large sheets of paper placed on the ground, manifest a vehement, violent expression. However, the Artpress journalist pointed out that in 1974 she had painted a self-portrait which seemed to be of a fine academic style.

"It's really a self-portrait," says Miriam Cahn, "but in Switzerland, training like I received is not academic at all. On the contrary, it is the most basic training you can get. But you learn everything. At one point, I wanted to do photorealism, that was the time. I looked in the mirror and painted. I did a lot of paintings like that, convinced that I should forget what I had learned and just paint what I saw. During my training, we did photography, typography, printing, but not oil painting because it was considered old-fashioned. So there was a desire on my part to contradict. I wondered why oil painting was considered old school. After all, it was only a technique. And as I am technically very good, it worked. And then I gave up colour altogether after my sister's suicide (...) For more than twenty years I only did drawings, and I only started with oil paint and colour again because I couldn't work on the floor anymore."

Miriam Cahn grew up surrounded by works of art for sale. And with good reason: her father was an art dealer. She can therefore only confirm to Catherine Millet that the works of art she saw as a child did indeed have an impact on her. "My father was a dealer in Greek, Roman and Egyptian antiquities, and at the same time he was a scientist, an archaeologist and a numismatist. He worked a lot with the Louvre. You could say that everything had an impact on me. I was lucky enough to live as a child with thousands of objects around me, my father and also my mother telling stories about them. What was also important was that he made money from it. It was not embarrassing, whereas I have known artists who condemned making money from art. The house was open. We went to see exhibitions of what was then contemporary art, especially at the Kunsthalle in Basel, which had a very good programme.

At the Stampa art gallery in Basel, Miriam Cahn will also see the new performance artists, many of them women, such as Valie Export or Ulrike Rosenbach. "I was lucky that at that time many young artists came to Basel, invited by Stampa, such as Vito Acconci. They would do their performance, and afterwards we would go and eat and drink. And although she loves Pollock, she would never consider her way of drawing on the floor using her body to be action painting. In her opinion, her painting is not abstract. Her landscapes remind Catherine Millet of the work of Ferdinand Hodler or Cuno Amiet. The school of Swiss landscape painters of the early 20th century is not without displeasure for the artist who was awakened at such a young age to all that is art.

Nevertheless, her parents would have preferred to see her at university. "When I was four years old I was already drawing, and later on I never heard that I couldn't be an artist. But in a family of intellectuals like mine, it was hard to accept that I was bad at school, that I wanted to train as a graphic designer in advertising. There was no training for artists in Switzerland like there was in Germany. The suicide of her sister, a junkie six years younger than her, was like a shock to Miriam Cahn: "I told myself that I had to make up my mind, that I couldn't be satisfied with jobs here and there like her. Since her family could support her for a while longer, she gave herself five years. For her, "it was clear that after five years, if I wasn't an artist - and being an artist didn't mean doing exhibitions, it meant being capable of daily work that no one expected, that I alone would decide - I would have continued in design.