Tribute
When I met her in 1976 she was already 81 years old. At that time she seemed so young and full of enthusiasm that I was barely surprised by the fact that she was still working. Today I find it unbelievable. It was Gottfried Honegger, a Swiss artist living in Paris, who took me to her place because she needed help.
She was then living at the Fondation Galignani in Neuilly, a retirement home for artists, in room number 10.
The artists who moved into this Fondation could bring their own furniture if they wanted to do so. Marcelle Cahn didn’t have much furniture when she arrived there. Indeed, after the war she had had to sell the furniture that she still had which had belonged to her mother. And she didn’t like what she always referred to as ‘bourgeois gadgets’. To illustrate her ideas about this, she once told me the following story : a friend had brought her some flowers. After having put them in a vase she put them out in front of her door saying : a person should make it clear, either he likes decoration or he prefers to live in a simple and sober place.
In fact, all the things that surrounded her were useful or usable for her work. She was not settled in a lovely or comfortable living room, she always lived in an artist’s studio. There were three tables, four chairs, a bed, two chests and a refrigerator. All of these were covered with materials for her work : all types and colors of paper, all different sorts of cardboard boxes, labels, stickers, scissors, knives, pieces of chalk, pencils and glue. Big and small boxes everywhere filled with everything imaginable for creating collages. She was no longer painting or drawing but she still wanted to make something with these very modest means which were available to her.
I visited her once or twice a week during four years and each time I bought what she had asked for : toast, ham, medecine, chocolates but especially cardboard and colored labels.
I prepared the backings and she placed the paper cut-outs or the unfolded medecine
boxes on them, moving them around here and there. I glued them and then she finished the composition by adding some small circles or colored dots.
I drew up lists and took these new miniatures to the Galerie Denise René for her. From time to time she spoke to me about her artist friends: Sonia Delaunay, Nadja Léger, and Sophie Taeuber-Arp. Occasionally she told me about her life, speaking without rancour and without illusions.
Marie Luise Syring
