Oscar Cahén

Oscar Cahén (February 8, 1916 in Copenhagen, Denmark – November 26, 1956 in Oakville, Ontario) was a Canadian painter and illustrator. Cahén is best known as a member of Painters Eleven, a group of abstract artists active in Toronto from 1953-1960, and for his fifteen years' work as an illustrator of Canadian magazines.

In Oscar Cahén: Life & Work Jaleen Grove describes Cahén as well suited to express the zeitgeist of his time. Born during the First World War, he came of age in the Nazi era and lived during a period of enormous social and technological change. He was an editorial illustrator of war and daily life, a painter of themes of trauma and rebirth, and a producer of abstract works that were described at the time as "expressive of modern life."

Cahén was the son of Eugenie Caroline Auguste Stamm and Fritz Max Cahén, a well known anti-Nazi activist. He was trained in Europe at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts from March 1932 to August 1933 in the academy studio of Max Frey. In 1938 he taught in Prague at the Rotter-Schule für Werbegrafik before escaping the Nazi occupation by traveling to England in 1939. Considered "German" by the English, he was interned in and sent to Canada in 1940 as an enemy alien with other Germans of Jewish descent. His artistic contacts in Canada secured his release in October, 1942, and he worked in Montréal at advertising firm Rapid, Grip and Batten before moving to Toronto in late 1944 to become art editor for Magazine Digest. Cahén subsequently worked as a freelance illustrator for magazines such as Maclean's, Chatelaine and New Liberty. As an illustrator, Cahén won five medals and six awards of merit from the Toronto Art Directors Club, 1949 - 1957.

In the late 1940s he met Walter Yarwood, Harold Town and others involved in avant-garde art in Toronto, and Cahén was included in the Abstracts at Home display held in 1953 at the Robert Simpson Company, Toronto. He formed Painters Eleven with ten other abstract painters (most of whom had also been in the Abstracts At Home event) soon after. In Canada's conservative art world their early exhibitions were met with disdain. Nevertheless, Painters Eleven attracted U.S. exposure with a successful exhibition, Twentieth Annual Exhibition of American Abstract Artists with "Painters Eleven of Canada in 1956, with the American Abstract Artists at the Riverside Gallery in New York, and were praised by the influential critic Clement Greenberg on a visit he paid to Toronto in 1957. In the Canadian press, the group's most ardent supporter was art critic Robert Fulford. Cahén was killed in a car accident in 1956 and the group formally disbanded in 1960.

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