Quotes*

“Had he lived, Oscar Cahén might be remembered as the greatest of all Canadian artists. A gifted illustrator, he also produced some of the group’s most profound works, remarkable for their freedom of movement and striking colours. He remained the artistic center of gravity in Painters Eleven even after his death in a car accident in 1956”.

“… Those with no chance to know him are to be pitied. In the galleries we knew him as a gifted abstractionist with something worth saying and sense of color and form to express it. Then would come the day at a fairly run-of-the-mill commercial exhibition where among magazine illustrations, we would see one piece that had distinction even though it was popular boy-and-girl realism – and find the artist was Oscar Cahén. He could dignify anything by doing it well…”

“… I think the artists of B.C. would share my sentiments by saying we have all benefited tremendously by his contribution to Canadian art.

Some did not always agree on his departure in painting, but he taught us to re-examine ourselves - and thinking, find a minds-eye - and through this his boundless imagination and resourcefulness has rubbed off on us young painters.”

“There are many here tonight to honour Oscar Cahén who never knew him. That’s unfortunate, because to some degree we all owe him a debt of gratitude.

I would like to make a few personal observations of what it was like to be an adolescent with only hope of becoming an illustrator when Oscar arrived on the scene from Europe in the early 1940’s.

You have to realize first that the frugal budgets of Canadian magazines, for the most part, prohibited the use of full-colour, except perhaps on the cover.

The result was a rather grey look that permeated the pages of our periodicals. Grey. Except of course when horrible screened overlays of process yellow, blue or red were sometimes arbitrarily zapped across an illustration. I don’t want to knock the many fine illustrators who preceded us, but, so many others either relied on the boy-girl clichés of the time or tried to be so conservatively realistic that the visual results represented what was inherently condescending in the descriptive words – “Commercial Art”.

I think most young, aspiring Canadian illustrators’ perceptions of what illustration could be in the 1940’s had been formed, predominately, by the opulent, full-color and highly developed painterly tradition in the American periodicals of the time. The Saturday Evening Post, Colliers, McCall’s and Esquire, to name a few.

But when I saw Oscar’s illustrations in the Canadian magazines for the first time, you knew a new age had just dawned on the horizon. And it looked neither Canadian or American.

It was as if one had never seen a crocus before and a flower with strength and vigour; but extraordinary delicacy thrust through the snow and winter debris of what much of Canadian magazine publishing had been. Spring arrived in Canadian illustration with Oscar Cahén – and we rejoiced.

Oscar broke new ground and showed us wit, humour and lightheartedness. But it didn’t stop there. There was a graphic quality that transcended mere charm. When Oscar did a one or two color job, it seemed that that was the only way it should be done. It was not an illustration that wanted to be full color and somehow fell a little short because of reproduction limitations.

Because I was so imbued with the pervasive American influence, my early education or observations did not include the rich European tradition of storytelling and decorative art. It was totally unknown to me. And it was only as an adult that artists and illustrators such as Edmund Dulac, Gustav Klimpt, Charles Rennie Mackintosh and others who enlightened the early twentieth century came within my visual grasp. It was that tradition that may have supplied the nutrients to the taproots of Oscar’s early growth and emergence as a fully developed and unique artist on the Canadian scene.

I was always amazed as a youth how Oscar could move from whimsy to mystery to romantic fiction and then to documentary or serious subject matter without really changing his style. And yet each expressed the integrity of the manuscript.

What that versatility suggested was what every aspiring artist hoped would emerge in their own work; their own unique vision and the articulation of that vision with a personal and rich expression. Oscar had that in abundance. It is also the difference between illustration and commercial art. Oscar’s work could be realistic. But never boringly literal. He never let literal realism stand in the way of making a good picture.

When assessing Oscar’s contribution you must keep in context with the times; and remember, too, that they were all drawn out of his head. When I try to tell my illustration students at O.C.A. that once upon a time illustrators not only conceived the idea without starting with a batch of photographs, but could actually draw people, places and things without photographic reference, they think I am either lying or that such an idea is so bizarre that it is dismissed as the ravings of a lunatic. And they think it was only a silly, if not tragic oversight on God’s part that a lucigraph was not made an extension of the human anatomy.

I remember furtively studying Oscar’s originals in the various magazine art departments, or Toronto and Montreal Art Director’s Club annual shows. I say furtively, because on the one hand, I was beginning to receive recognition for my own work as it was developing in the early fifties, but on the other, I knew there was much to learn from Oscar. But it was so hard to resist being directly influenced by his work. As a young impressionable illustrator, you had to approach his work with caution, lest it grab you by the scruff of young innocence and inexperience and lead you in directions your inner light was guiding along other paths. You had to be nimble to avoid being constantly in the shadow of Oscar’s talent.

If mentally, you could disassociate human subject matter from within the drawing, that drawing which was like a surgical incision. Definite, confident, but oh so sensitive, you could understand Oscar’s attraction to pure abstraction. Concurrent with his illustrative career, his was emerging with Harold Town, another dominant force in Canadian abstract art.

I won’t expand on Oscar’s achievements in the fine art field. But only because we are here as illustrators and photographers to celebrate the achievements of a fellow illustrator.

He cleared the way with dash and panache to allow sophistication and sunshine to fall upon a dreary landscape of publishing.

To accept on behalf of Oscar’s family, the award designed by Tom McNeely, I would like to welcome and old friend of mine and Oscar’s who was the associate art director at Maclean’s during the time we speak of. Desmond English.”

I WISH I’d known Oscar Cahén.

I remember seeing a small brown and black abstraction of his at the Jerrold Morris International Gallery when it was upstairs in the Holt-Renfrew building on Bloor Street in Toronto. I used to come over from Hamilton on Saturdays to look at art. This was in the early 1960s.

I didn’t know what I wanted from painting, but I loved the feeling I got, standing with what was perhaps absurd reverence before certain abstract paintings like this tiny Cahén, of some indefinable permission coming from the painting itself that it was alright to be ecstatic, that some unknowable, inchoate mix of colour, form and texture could galvanize the visceral imagination. I was a high school teacher then, just out of university. I didn’t know anything about painting, but I knew from the clutching in my stomach and the tightening in my chest that this little brown-black picture was the real thing – even though I had no idea what that actually meant.

I was young and I was endlessly capable of euphoria.

Looking back on Cahén’s work now, I can see it was perhaps too reliant on that insidious vocabulary of painted hooks and points, those little decorative pricks which seemed to emerge, like thorns on a rose stem, from the picture’s structural elements – and that everywhere dogged abstract paintings of the 1950s It was an international phenomenon. In Canadian painting, you could see it in Jack Shadbolt, Dennis Burton, Graham Coughtry, Otto Rogers, early Michael Snow, Tony Urquhart and many others, and there was a lot of it in work by the Painters Eleven artists – in Harold Town, William Ronald, Walter Yarwood and Tom Hodgson in particular. It was a mannerism, part of an arsenal of painterly ploys. Unfortunately, it located a painting in the terrain of a particular style (or, more accurately, the style of a style) and locked it there.

I never knew what this calligraphic hooking was really about. I finally decided it was some more or less subliminal desire, on the painter’s part, to snag the eye and slow it down. It always reminded me of Margaret Atwood’s silly little poem in Power Politics about lovers who fit together like a hook and eye – a fishhook and an eyeball. Haha.

Still, I loved this somber little Cahén with a passion. An admittedly irrational passion. You wonder what he would have made, and in what manner, if he’d lived longer.