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Marcelle Cahn has remained until today in the shadow of the great names of modern art. Yet she fully participates in the birth and development of abstraction, stubbornly seeking her own path. This monograph reveals a demanding and personal work and the journey of a “discreet woman” in the bustle of the avant-gardes. Marcelle Cahn is a painter and sculptor of Strasbourg origin, born at the junction of two centuries and two cultures, French and German, Jewish by her father, Catholic reconverted by her mother, driven by music and theater before electing painting as a field of expression. Expressionism, cubism, purism, dada, surrealism, concrete art, lyrical and geometric abstraction, Marcelle Cahn crossed the most important artistic currents of the 20th century without belonging to any school. A student of Lovis Corinth and then of Fernand Léger, she regularly took part in the exhibitions of the Cercle et Carré group, then Abstraction et Création and Concrete Art, as well as the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles. Esteemed by her peers, recognized by critics, exhibited since 1925, she remains in the shadow of the great names of modern art. The catalog of the exhibition presented at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Strasbourg and then at the Museum of Modern Art in Saint-Etienne aims to bring together and analyze for the first time the most emblematic works of Marcelle Cahn by covering all the periods and supports of creation and by restoring the different artistic contexts within which the artist evolved, from the German expressionism of the beginning of the 20th century to the main currents of geometric and lyrical abstraction. It is a question of discovering a work that is both rigorous and demanding, poetic and free, but also a singular personality, cultured, generous, discreet and full of fantasy. With contributions, among others, from Serge Lemoine and Bernard Ceysson.
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