Contrapuntal Objectivity
Extract from a lecture given by Marie Luise Syring on Tuesday September 26th 2006 at Marc Bloch University in Strasbourg.
In 1925 gallery owner Léonce Rosenberg put Marcelle Cahn in touch with Fernand Léger. She then worked under the direction of Fernand Léger but also with Amédée Ozenfant.
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During those years Léger takes a stand against total abstraction and prefers to take inspiration from the world of machines and industry, advocating beauty which would be built on measurement and logic. Every mechanical and industrial creation depends on geometrical constraints. The more logical the shape of the object built, the more beautiful it is and the more identical it is to itself. He paints airplanes, ships, locomotives and all sorts of construction machines. All this is part of the technical inventory of the 20s. Léger's paintings are a reflection of this period and when his students strayed too far from this reality he told them : you don't know where you are going. He was so fascinated by the city, the urban environment, the factories and the ports that man became an object among others. The harmony between man and objects was meant to point out that technology did not serve only to devastate and destroy, as during the war, but its inventions could help enter into a better and more democratic world, liberated from the tragedy of a life subject to arbitrariness and contingency.
Léger and, like him, the purists search, therefore, for correspondences between nature, technology and life, subjecting everything to the rules of geometry. Thus, the shape of a tennis racket evokes a face, airplanes sometimes resemble birds, cranes and electricity pylons resemble trees. It's the image of technology and nature organized and well-ordered by man.
Marcelle Cahn, Léger's student, paints streets, houses, boats and ports. But while she remains a purist from a formal point of view, she doesn't manage to rid her painting of her own subjectivity. And it is for this reason that I say that everything changes with these paintings.
When she draws abstract compositions and when she paints objects, there is no trace of psychology or expressiveness. But when she paints town scenes there is something uncontrollable, unbalanced, subconscious which blends in. The town becomes a metaphor for expressing solitude and isolation. There reigns an atmosphere of repulsion, a sensation of crisis, a menacing silence. These images are dominated by coldness and tension which are not found in the works of Léger or her other contemporaries such as Metzinger and Survage. Even the first sketches show nothing of the tumultuous life of a large town. They show deserted streets, walls without windows and enclosed spaces. The places are anonymous, unrecognizable and timeless. In one of her first pencil drawings there is a suggestion of void which attracts our attention. A completely empty street fades into the distance while the viewer turns his attention to two tall houses and a wall. Very soon Marcelle Cahn abandons perspective. She prefers plane surface and frontal view. The town transcribed in circles, squares, diagonals and rectangles is an artificial and economic construction, the result of a desire for order and simplicity. But at the same time there is a complete absence of humans, their destiny, joys, festivities, ugliness, misfortune, crowds and accidents.
In the paintings "The Street", "The Roofs", "The Dirigible", the painter represents blocks of houses which are placed more or less in the center of the composition. In place of openings, of doors and windows, she uses large colored surfaces which appear to be shut. These houses are hostile and prisonlike. The windows are blind; the doors are black holes. There's no room for human life. Despite the soft colors that Marcelle Cahn uses, these places are not welcoming; in fact they are unapproachable like fortresses.
In the painting "House, Bridge and Sailboat", three large pale yellow houses block the sky. The boat's sail is enclosed by the two ends of the bridge. The dirty green sky is impenetrable and sad. Very dark shadows dominate the picture. The sailboat is completely anchored in the architectural frame.
It seems to me quite significant that Marcelle Cahn often chose subjects which symbolize travel and movement and express a desire for escape and openness that she reverses and contradicts. As if the dream mustn't come true. The dirigible is immobile, the bridges don't join anything, the airplane in "Airplane-aviation shape" can't fly because it's encircled. The same is true for "The Oar"; the boats with part of a house on top seem more like fortified castles than means of transport. The oar rises from the middle of the scene like an obstacle, as if to keep the boats from leaving. This impression is emphasized by the pyramid construction of the composition, which is both rigid and bitter. The fact that the French word for large houses and large boats is the same : "bâtiment" is perhaps significant. Marcelle Cahn's world is a large uninhabited house/boat. Mankind is always on the way and at the same time has never left. We are not at home and we never arrive anywhere.
In her work there is neither the melancholy of towns that is seen in the Italian "pittura metafisica", nor the pathetic gestures of futurists, nor the cutting sarcasm of the critical German realists but rather a rational idealism with a backdrop of psychological content. There's something existential, experienced which makes Marcelle Cahn's paintings so distinctive. It's counterpoint objectivity. And because of this , a comparison of her works to those of the "Progressive Artists" of Cologne does not seem absurd; this tendency has its source in expressionism and constructivism; it points out mankind's alienation in the modern world; it denounces the uniformity and monotony of daily life and reveals the negative consequences of mechanization: the loss of individuality.
In 1926 the architect Hugo Häring compared towns to large hotels, which we only pass through. Ernst Bloch said that life is like a stay in a train station. Hotel or train stations, both are places of encounters and of anonymity, places of hope and suspended animation. The "Progressives", who were connected to the journal "The New Spirit" severely, criticized its idealism. But Léger and the purists remained faithful to their optimistic conceptions.
And what about Marcelle Cahn ?...She also was not willing to analyze the political or social scene. But her vision of things is disturbing. She describes spaces which are inhuman and without history. She describes human beings outside and with no attachments; I would say she paints metaphysics of the solitary human being.
If "Woman and Sailboat" is seen from this angle it could be seen as a self-portrait. You see the bust of a woman, a figure without a body and without volume in front of a triangle pointed upwards. In the background there is a large ship, slightly inclined as if wobbling. The ship remains in an uncertain position. The representation of the woman can be interpreted as a negation of flesh and desire; the triangle pointing upwards is a sign of creativity, but is completely empty. Constructive realism, so important for the art of the 20s. in France, is transgressed by an interior reality.
Lecture by Marie Luise Syring
