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A friend of Harold Town and Jack Bush, he should
have been as famous. After being buried for 60 years,
his works are seeing the light of day.BA C k=?=-oaees
@ TASTE: Will donairs take over the U.S.?
BOOKS: How Canada taught America to love guns;
ashort, sharp Danish crime novel; dressing badly styled men
HELP: Demystifying myths about cancer
By Ken macqueen - The production ofa magazine on deadline, rather
like the creation of a fine sausage, is a process best left behind closed
doors. Better to savour the finished product than to witness the
work in progress. Still, deadlines can be where the magic happens.
‘Take the case of the late Pierre Berton, who, as managing editor of
Maclean’sin the 1950s, stared at the horror of a raft of empty pages
Vv206
Art
anda ticking clock. Morley Callaghan’s novel The Man with the Coat
had just won a $5,000 Maclean's book prize. “I took the plunge and
decided to run the entire novel in a single issue, complete with a
special cover and nine pages of four colour illustrations,” Berton
recounted in his autobiography.
‘The greater challenge were the illustrations. He knew of only one
artist “who was fast enough and competent enough” to do the job.
The call went out to master freelancer Oscar Cahén, familiar both
as illustrator of many fine and whimsical Maclean's covers of the
era, and fora growing reputation as akey member ofPainters Eleven,
then leaders of Canada’s emerging school of abstract artists. “We
locked up Oscar in a hotel and, in one astonishing painting frenzy,
he produced a brilliant series of illustrations,” he wrote. Problem
solved. Deadline met.
IfCahén’s name is little known outside a select circle of art aficio-
nados, that’s an over-sight the Art Institute of Canada intends to
correct with the release, on Sept. 25, of Oscar Cahén: Life and Work,
by Hamilton art historian Jaleen Grove. It’s the 13th ina series of
free, lavishly illustrated online books on significant Canadian art-
ists produced by the non-profit institute.
Quite apart from his art, Cahén’s backstory alone is worthy of a
magazine article, or, as institute founder and executive director
Sara Angel says, ofa Hollywood movie. It might open in Germany
in 1932, when a precocious 16-year-old Cahén enrolled in Dres-
den’s State Academy for Applied Arts in the tumultuous months
before Adolf Hitler, as chancellor, launched his brutal Nazification
of the country. It would touch on the espionage and anti-Nazi
activities of his father, the journalist Fritz Max Cahén, before and
after the family fled Germany in August 1933, when their citizen-
ships were revoked because of Fritz’s Jewish heritage. They even-
tually settled in Prague in the years before the war. “Oscar not only
becamea member of his father’s [resistance] group, but also assisted
by illegally crossing the border into Germany ...and helped com-
plete an arms deal his father brokered,” Grove writes. In 1937,
Czech police searched the Cahéns’ apartment and interrogated
them (for broadcasting anti-Nazi propaganda) about illegal short-
wave radio equipment they'd found in Oscar's possession.
Fritz left for the U.S.; Oscar and his mother, Eugenie, fled to
England in 1939, where Oscar was rounded up in a British sweep
of male refugees, feared to be German spies. He arrived in Mon-
treal in July 1940 on a prison ship stuffed with 2,000 predomi-306
Art
nantly German Jews who were classed as prisoners of war and
enemy aliens. For two years, he was interned behind barbed wire
at Camp N, near Sherbrooke, Que., a brutalizing and demoraliz-
ing experience. Still, fellow internees recalled him trying to lighten
the experience with good cheer and wry jokes. “These two faces—
one dark and tragic, the other playful and optimistic—character-
ize not just Cahén’s personality, but his later artwork, as well,”
Grove notes.
His talent as an artist shone even behind the wire. He submitted
trial illustrations to Montreal’s nationally distributed The Standard
magazine. They were enthusiastically accepted and, with the pros-
pect of gainful employment, he won his release from internment.
“Watch for his name, because he is our ‘find’ in the world of com-
mercial art,” The Standard crowed. Their prediction proved true:
He reached the top ranks as an illustrator, and as an abstract painter.
Warrior, 1956
Photo gallery
« 10s >Maclean’s magazine interior art, Nov. , 1953, & 208 >
Christus (322), ¢ 1949-50Mlustration for The Californian’s Tale, New Liberty, 1947 & sgt >
Mlustration for short story, Mail, by John Norman Harris, 1950Untitled (084), 1939 « sofs >‘We locked up Oscar in a hotel and,
in one painting frenzy, he produced
a brilliant series of illustrations’
Abstract artist: Calici in his studio in 1951, five years before his acciden-
Vv tal death at age 40sore
Art
‘Cahén loyally maintained his relationship with The Standard through-
out his tragically shortened life.
Cahén moved to Toronto in 1944—he’d met and married Martha
(Mimi) Levinsky by then—when he was hired as art director for Mag-
azine Digest. Michael, his only son, was born the following year.
Michael remembers a home filled with music. “When he was doing,
his illustrations for Maclean's, including 38 covers, the usual music
was the Hot Club of France, Stéphane Grappelli and Django Rein-
hardt,” says Michael, now79, in a interview from his home on B.C’s
Galiano Island. “It was a foot-tapping kind of mood,” found in his
more playful illustrations.
But not all of Cahen’s illustrations were of the feel-good Norman.
Rockwell variety. “He did some pretty grimpieces, too,” saysMichael.
His experience as a refugee led to such commissions as illustrating
The Standard’s recounting in 1946 of the nuclear devastation of
Hiroshima, Japan. He had greater freedom to stretch boundaries
while drawing for the edgier Toronto-based New Liberty magazine.
There, some of its darker fiction stories were peopled by Cahén’s
renderings of figures so grotesque, one reader asked: “Do you keep
your illustrator Oscar in a padded cell?”
His fearful experiences in Nazi Europe and asa refugee seemed
to leak into his fine art. “We're not seeing exuberant, joyful paint-
ings when he’s painting for himself in the middle and late ’40s,”
Grove says in an interview. “It’s all bleak and depressing. I think he
always had both sides, both dark and light to him.”
Oscar, writing in Canadian Art magazine, called it regrettable that
“the trade of illustrator is often looked down upon by ‘fine artists.”
By the 1950s, his income as an illustrator allowed him to burnish.
his own fine art credentials through abstraction, working with such
Painters Eleven contemporaries as Jack Bush and Harold Town.
Grove believes he would have been equally famous, had his life
not been cut short at age 40, when his sporty Studebaker Hawk col-
lided with a dump truck on Nov. 26, 1956. The memoryis seared in
Michael’s memory. Mimi was so devastated “that she never actually
recovered,” so it fell to him to fill the void, he says. “Since that day,
I’'vealwayshad a deep, 100 per cent commitment to try to dosome-
thing positive from my father’s death.”
His mother retreated to Florida, showing little aptitude or appe-
tite for the business side of art. The bulk of Oscar’s voluminous
paintings, tearsheets and correspondence was locked away in stor-
age until her death 25 years ago. “If it weren’t for the fact that hisBack
tetop
Art
wife pretty much kept most of the work out of circulation, I think
he would be much better known,” says Angel. It was left to Michael
to catalogue his works and papers, research his history and build
on his legacy, with the assistance of Grove, scholar-in-residence at
the Cahén archives in Toronto. “We've done all the prep,” he says.
“Td like an institution to take it on. Going back to Nov. 26, 1956,
that would complete the circle for me.” *