Marcelle Cahn

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Marcelle Cahn (born March 1, 1895 in Strasbourg , † September 20, 1981 in Neuilly-sur-Seine ) was a French painter whose works are assigned to purism and geometric abstraction .

Life

Marcelle Cahn was born in Strasbourg in 1895. She spent the period between 1915 and 1919 with her mother in Berlin , where she studied painting with Eugen Spiro and Lovis Corinth . After a period of wandering between Strasbourg, Paris and Zurich , she returned to Paris in 1925 and stayed until 1930. She first attended the Académie de la Grand Chaumière and then switched to the Académie de L'Art Moderne as a student of Fernand Léger and Amédée Ozenfant .

From 1925 she was looked after by gallery owner Léonce Rosenberg, who regularly exhibited some of her pictures in his gallery. In 1926 she was able to take part in the large exhibition L'Art d'Aujourd'hui with her pictures . In 1926 she also joined the Société Anonyme Inc. in New York, a modern art institution headed by Katherine Dreier and Marcel Duchamp . In 1929 Michel Seuphor founded the group Cercle et Carré , which Marcelle Cahn joined with several other painters. In the group's most famous photograph, Franziska Clausen, Florence Henri , Vera Idelson and Sophie Taeuber-Arp can be seen alongside Cahn .

Marcelle Cahn met Herwarth Walden in 1930 , whose gallery Der Sturm she already knew from her stay in Berlin. Walden offered her an exhibition in his gallery, which she refused. However, it left Walden a cliché of the picture house, bridge and sailor , which Walden reprinted in a special issue of stamp songs of the magazine Der Sturm (year 20, no. 9) in December 1930.

Marcelle Cahn withdrew from the international art scene in the 1930s. She lived and painted in Strasbourg. During the Second World War 1939–1945, she fled the German occupation of France first to Blois , then to Toulouse .

Only in 1947 did she finally return to Paris. She joined the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles initiated by Sonia Delaunay-Terk , which was dedicated to promoting concrete art. For Marcelle Cahn, the works that arose in the 50s and 60s meant a new artistic boom and international recognition. Marcelle Cahn died in 1981 in Neuilly-sur-Seine near Paris.

plant

Until 1925 Marcelle Cahn was looking for her own style and experimenting with the new art movements that were common at the time. So are z. B. some pictures in the Impressionist style after Paul Cézanne , also portraits and nude drawings, but also the first geometric-abstract works.

During Marcelle Cahn's time as a student in Paris, initially cubist-influenced works were created. Due to the influence of Amédée Ozenfant, her painting develops in the direction of purism , her abstract compositions are reduced to the bare essentials, with large, strict, room-filling areas of color with restrained colors. The motifs are geometric elements combined with urban motifs, still lifes and everyday objects. Influenced by her teacher Fernand Léger , she also dealt with the relationship between man and technology; Ships, airplanes and city motifs appear as motifs.

At the end of the thirties, their previously strictly geometrical forms were loosened and color took on a decisive role. In the 50s and 60s Marcelle Cahn switched to linear, large-area forms. There were also collages, photo collages, images of spheres and sculptures, which received international recognition. From the 1950s onwards, special exhibitions on her work took place in many European cities, including Paris, London, Geneva, Hanover and Stockholm. In 2015 she was honored in the exhibition Sturm-Frauen in the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt as one of many avant-garde painters around the gallery Der Sturm .

literature

  • Karla Bilang: Women in the "storm". Modern artists . AvivA-Verlag, Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-932338-57-1 .
  • Mireille Cordonnier Kraft: Marcelle Cahn (1895–1981). Sa vie. Son œuvre. Catalog raisonné . Vol 1, 576 pages. Vol 2, 359 pages. Strasbourg, thèse de doctorat de l'Université Marc Bloch, 1995. (French dissertation, available in the art library of the University of Strasbourg)
  • Knaur's Lexicon of Modern Painting: From the Impressionists to Today . Droemer Knauer, Munich / Zurich 1982, p. 48, ISBN 3-426-26068-9 .
  • Jörg Krichbaum, Rein A. Zondergeld: Artists: From antiquity to the present . DuMont, Cologne 1979, p. 140, ISBN 3-7701-1110-9 .
  • Ingrid Pfeiffer, Max Hollein (eds.): Sturm-Frauen: Artists of the Avant-Garde in Berlin 1910-1932 . Schirn Kunsthalle / Wienand, Frankfurt 2015, ISBN 978-3-86832-277-4 , pp. 32–49
  • Marie Luise Syring: Marcelle Cahn. From purism to puristic abstraction . Ed Schlégl, Zurich 1983.
  • Frank Müller: Cahn, Marcelle . In: General Artist Lexicon . The visual artists of all times and peoples (AKL). Volume 15, Saur, Munich a. a. 1996, ISBN 3-598-22755-8 , p. 512 f.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Bilang, Frauen im Sturm , 2013, pp. 185–186
  2. ↑ Bilang, Frauen im Sturm , 2013, p. 186
  3. ↑ Pfeiffer, Hollein, Sturm-Frauen , 2015, p. 33
  4. ↑ Pfeiffer, Hollein, Sturm-Frauen , 2015, p. 35
  5. ↑ Bilang, Frauen im Sturm , 2013, pp. 186, 190
  6. ↑ Pfeiffer, Hollein, Sturm-Frauen , 2015, p. 35
  7. ↑ Circle of Friends of Marcelle Cahn: Biography Marcelle Cahn . (Accessed March 25, 2016)
  8. ↑ Bilang, women in the storm , 2013, p 191
  9. ↑ Pfeiffer, Hollein, Sturm-Frauen , 2015, pp. 32–34
  10. ↑ Bilang, Frauen im Sturm , 2013, p. 186
  11. ↑ Knaur's Lexicon of Modern Painting, 1982, p. 48
  12. ↑ Bilang, Frauen im Sturm , 2013, p. 192
  13. ↑ Schirn Kunsthalle: Storm women . (Accessed March 25, 2016)
personal data
SURNAME Cahn, Marcelle
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French painter
DATE OF BIRTH March 1, 1895
PLACE OF BIRTH Strasbourg
DATE OF DEATH 20th September 1981
Place of death Neuilly-sur-Seine