The tribute to Marcelle Cahn continues...
A Marcelle Cahn evening was held on 17 March 2007 at the Auditorium of the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Strasbourg.
The evening began with the projection of the film " Marcelle Cahn. Les clés du regard" produced in 1976 by Pierre Gisling for the Télévision Suisse Romande. This unique film about Marcelle Cahn has as its setting the artist's bedroom-studio at the Galignani retirement home in Neuilly–sur-Seine.
Michel Seuphor, who invited Marcelle Cahn to join the "Cercle et Carré " group in the 1930s, speaks in the film. Gottfried Honegger, Marcelle Cahn's neighbour on Daguerre street in Paris in the 1960s and friend of the artist, speaks at length.*
After a moment of near religious silence after the film ended, a roundtable discussion by Germain Roesz, Freddy Raphaël and Stéphane Mroczkowski opened a dialogue with the audience made up of about forty people surprised and completely won over by this lady whose philosophy of life combined rigour and humour, probably one of the keys to her work after 1945.
Elsie Bohr
* "It was in 1963 that I knocked at her studio door for the first time. We both lived on Daguerre street and this allowed me to to see her and speak to her quite often . Your studio was a sort of assemblage, a place which seemed like a three dimensional collage.You could laugh. I can still see you fragile and transparent – dressed in your painter’s smock.You were always fighting against techniques, against the stiffness of materials. You were searching for the whitest of whites . You wanted to discover the mother and father – the circle and the square .And in everything else there was nothing that escaped your scrutiny. Everything around you was condemned to become a work of art. An envelope , a box of medicine or a metro ticket was enough to become part of your dreams, to open our eyes, for the poetry of our world."
This text, which dates from 1993 was published in HONEGGER Gottfried. Homo Scriptor. Les Presses du Réel, 2004.
