Oscar Cahén Paintings & Artwork for Sale | Oscar Cahén Art Value Price Guide

May. 29, 2017
OSCAR CAHÉN, COMPOSITION, mixed media on paper, mounted to illustration board, 27.5 ins x 18 ins; 69.9 cms x 46.4 cms
Est: $18,000 - $22,000
OSCAR CAHÉNCOMPOSITIONmixed media on paper, mounted to illustration boardsigned and dated ‘56 27.5 ins x 18 ins; 69.9 cms x 46.4 cms Provenance:Private Collection, TorontoLiterature:David Burnett, Oscar Cahén, (catalogue), Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, 1983, pages 8, 18 and 20.David Burnett writes: “From 1950, the context of (Cahén’s) art became explicitly engaged with the leading edge of contemporary art, both European and American” describing his work as “a special force.”Oscar Cahén (1916-1956) was killed in an automobile accident on November 26, 1956, the year this work was executed. Burnett laments the fact that Cahén’s accidental and premature death came at a critical juncture during which the artist was experimenting with a variety of approaches. We are left to speculate which of the various choices he made would have been developed further and which abandoned had he lived longer. It is bittersweet to consider Composition from 1956 in terms of the role it might have played in that arc.Estimate: $18,000–22,000
Waddington's
Nov. 24, 2014
OSCAR CAHÉN, UNTITLED, 1952-1954, ink and watercolour, 40 ins x 26 ins; 101.6 cms x 66 cms
Est: $30,000 - $40,000
OSCAR CAHÉNUNTITLED, 1952-1954ink and watercolour 40 ins x 26 ins; 101.6 cms x 66 cms Provenance:Private Collection, TorontoNote:Oscar Cahén is acknowledged as one of the principal contributors to the evolution of abstract art in Canada in the 1950s. A prominent, influential member of Painters Eleven, his achievements have been in the public light on near perpetual exhibition in important public art institutions for the past 60 years. Thus, we may have come to imagine that we know what a characteristic picture is by Oscar Cahén. Many continue to celebrate the artist as an unparalleled colourist. Thereby, an exemplary Cahén painting, it seems, displays his remarkable mix of chromatic pyrotechnics, astonishing clashes of magenta, reds, oranges with striking complementary colour accents of vibrant blues and green. While these commendable signature attributes define certain outstanding Cahén paintings they are also surprisingly atypical of the characteristics of the vast majority of Cahén works. His mature career as an aspiring, progressive artist was all too brief, ten years bracketed between 1947 and his death in an auto accident in 1956. Throughout this period Cahén was a restless spirit, experimenting and exploring a wide range of aesthetic options, themes, approaches, media and timbres. A good number of his works are black and white or near monochrome. Why should this surprise? Cahén was one of Canada's most respected illustrators, designing countless magazine covers for leading publications such as Maclean's, creating drawings to accompany literary texts and more. He was a key member and annual exhibitor with the Canadian Society of Painters in Water Colour and The Canadian Society of Graphic Arts. Thereby, Cahén exercised his craft daily. He was fluid and at total ease creating and composing upon paper, perhaps even more so than upon canvas. His graphic acumen may have exceeded his considerable colouristic flair.This lot is a considerable achievement, a balance of expressive abandon and restraint, blunt gestural barrage and withheld, tempered delicacy. Cahén it seems was vexed by the idea of creating a composition that juggled polar opposites. In this work the left half of the picture is fully engaged, forceful black lines atop scumbled background. The right hand side of the page is poignantly blank, pristine, untouched. It is a challenge that he will battle the rest of his career, however, perhaps never so elementarily as in this picture on paper in strident black and white.The powerful mark-making of Franz Kline may seem the evident place to start when unravelling the evolution of Cahén's black and white pictures such as this one. However, this is just not satisfactory. Cahén's central image seems bidden by some referent, we do not know precisely what: a head, a trunk, outreaching appendages? Nevertheless it is a figure against a ground. His work embraced vegetative themes, flowers, pods; it quoted clawed roosters and chess pieces. Is the dominant void circle a celestial orb or a thought bubble? Many of his illustration and art works of the period were absorbed by technology, the appearance of traffic and railroad crossing lights. How is it that it is simultaneously all of these and none of these?The abstracted surrealism of Picasso, Gonzales, David Smith, Max Ernst and the Latin tradition including Tamayo all beg for discussion within the company of this picture. Perhaps, the evident touchstone is British artist, Graham Sutherland. His works depicting abstracted processional "personages" were in exhibition, publication and major museum collections at this period, including Toronto and the Art Gallery of Toronto. Cahén has been lauded historically for his exemplary chromatic inventiveness, Untitled, demonstrates why his Painters Eleven compatriots so revered his talent. It is a terse work, that stands beside the achievements of Borduas and Les Automatistes, Soulages and the finest of second generation abstract expressionism. This work was executed circa 1952-1954. We thank Jeffrey Spalding C.M., R.C.A. for this essay.
Waddington's
May. 26, 2014
OSCAR CAHÉN, OBJECT, oil on masonite, 36 ins x 24 ins; 91.4 cms x 61 cms
Est: $70,000 - $90,000
OSCAR CAHÉNOBJECToil on masonitesigned; dated 1953, 1954 and circa 1954 on three gallery labels on the reverse 36 ins x 24 ins; 91.4 cms x 61 cms Provenance:Estate of the artistMrs. Cahén-Egglefield (1984) The Drabinsky Gallery, Toronto Private Collection, TorontoExhibited:Canadian Group of Painters, 1954 Exhibition. Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota Florida, n.d. Oscar Cahén, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto December 16-February 12, 1984, other venues, cat. no. 16. Abstract(s) at Home, The Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa, Ontario September 21, 2007-September 21, 2008.Literature:David Burnett, Oscar Cahén, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, 1983, page 32, reproduced. Iris Nowell, Painters Eleven: The Wild Ones of Canadian Art, Toronto, 2010, page 148, reproduced in colour.Note:Cahén was one of the principal innovators of Canadian abstraction in the 1950s; Object is one of his most accomplished and favoured works. Although the artist was prolific during this period of his life, he elected to choose to represent himself three times with this work at exhibitions in important venues. Following his untimely accidental death in 1956, this work was included in both retrospective exhibitions of his work and remained a staple at subsequent exhibitions.In the late 1940s the allover approach dominated progressive abstract painting. Personified by Pollock's drip paintings and in Canada by related works by Riopelle, Borduas and the Automatistes, advanced artists treated the entire surface of a painting in a unified, cohesive way, covering every surface with consistent, related impasto marks and painterly gestures, corner to corner. By the early 1950s this direction had run its course; art sought new solutions and options. Pollock returned to abstracted representation referencing Cubism and Surrealism. Cahén's training and proclivities had always headed him in the direction of narrative and figuration. As such, he never did become immersed in the allover textural treatment of the painting surface. His work of the late 1940s explored humanism through the stylistic mechanism of Expressionist tendencies. For many in this time period, including Cahén, artists yearned through their work to purge the anxieties and anguish suffered through World War II by creating dour, moody works of emotional intensity. Object turns the corner.In the work immediately prior, Cahén created a cast of stylized characters that played out a range of emotions. Object is ostensibly an abstract formal composition. Yet, upon examination it returns to more classical figure/ground construction. Is the central form simply a mass: an "object"? Or might it be an abstracted personage, with central torso and appendages within the spirit of surrealist Max Ernst? Object is cunningly crafted. It is built in two zones, a diagonal split contrasting areas of warm and cool colouration. Cahén orchestrates the transition such that the painting holds together as a unified whole, not a painting split in two parts. Object employs what will become key signature Cahén colour treatment: striking combinations of magenta, orange, red and pink in counterpoint with vibrant cyan blues and green. Object is a confident, joyous, vibrant picture that commences the march out of the doldrums of the hangover of war and depression and heralds the embrace, vibrancy and optimism of the new age.We thank Jeffrey Spalding for providing the essay for this lot.
Waddington's
May. 26, 2014
OSCAR CAHÉN, UNTITLED, watercolour and ink, 25.75 ins x 39.75 ins; 65.4 cms x 101 cms
Est: $25,000 - $35,000
OSCAR CAHÉNUNTITLED25.75 ins x 39.75 ins; 65.4 cms x 101 cmsProvenance:Estate of the artistPrivate Collection, TorontoPrivate Collection, British ColumbiaExhibited:Oscar Cahén, Ringling, Sarasota, 1968.Literature:David Burnett, Oscar Cahén, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, 1983, page 52, cat. no. 52, reproduced.Iris Nowell, Painters Eleven, The Wild Ones of Canadian Art, Douglas & Mcintyre, Vancouver, 2010, page 154, reproduced in colour.Note:The art of Oscar Cahén underwent rapid and dramatic evolution and growth in the early 1950s. His period of mature fine art production was a scant number of years spanning 1947 until his accidental death at age 40 in 1956. In 1952 Cahén created Candy Tree, one of the artist's most favoured signature works. The style of this work, like the vast majority of abstract works in English Canada, was predicated upon understandings based upon stylized analytic cubism. Essentially a form abstracted from nature, outline drawn, in fractured, faceted planes then 'coloured in' with paint, an approach popularized through the example of Vieira da Silva. Linear drawing was the basis for much of the prior abstract work of Cahén and his colleague artists of Painters Eleven. By 1953 Cahén developed a dramatically different approach. In works such as this lot, the artist has combined linear drawing with bold tonal gestural mark-making wherein the broad painterly stroke simultaneously defines mass while its outer edges of that movement determine the final shape. Rather than looking back towards Paris and Cubism, these Cahén works embrace the inspiration of Abstract Expressionism: Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, William Baziotes and second generation Abstract Expressionists such as Ray Parker. The stark painterly flair of Robert Motherwell's Spanish Elegy series is recalled by Cahén's dramatic use of striking black marks as the scaffold around which the work is structured. So too Cahén may have been inspired by Patrick Heron and the St. Ives group, their work toured to Canada and Toronto's Hart House courtesy of the British Council.By 1953 Cahén's new development had leapfrogged his colleagues of Painters Eleven, works of the sort of this lot established new directions. It is an approach that becomes ubiquitous in English Canada, however primarily in the later 1950s in the years following Cahén's death. These formal experiments would inspire fellow P11 members. The artist's exhibition fortunes also dramatically increased in 1953 both in number of inclusions as well as the consequence of venue, his work was selected for inclusion in the São Paulo Art Biennial exhibiting alongside Borduas.Works such as this lot were among the most advanced sophisticated art of its day in the nation. This work was selected for inclusion in the Art Gallery of Ontario Retrospective. It may be that it was Cahén's mastery as an illustrator that prepared him to take these new steps. Working daily with mixed media on paper, the artist has a complete ease with treating the surface of paper to forceful contrasts of dense, intense marks with whispered counterpoints of line and washes. This lot is classically composed, it pursues a recurring formal dare explored by the artist of having a lateral split left/right side of the picture and treating each side as differently as possible, yet attempting to hold it together as a unified whole.We thank Jeffrey Spalding for providing the essay for this lot.
Waddington's
May. 17, 2012
Oscar Cahén 1915 - 1956 Canadian mixed media on
Est: $30,000 - $40,000
Oscar Cahén 1915 - 1956 Canadian mixed media on paper on board Untitled 30 1/2 x 40 inches 77.5 x 101.6 centimeters signed and dated 1954 and on verso inscribed ""FAMM-020"" and certified by The Cahén Archives inventory #FAMM-020 SL Provenance:Galerie Samuel Lallouz, Montreal Private Collection, Montreal Oscar Cahén had a tumultuous past as a German wartime immigrant who was imprisoned as an enemy alien in a Quebec camp in 1940. Contacts in the Canadian art world finally released him, and he set to work as an illustrator in Montreal in 1942 before moving to Toronto in 1944. This proved to be a good move for his career, as he found full-time work as a successful commercial artist. While an illustrator in Toronto he met Harold Town, Walter Yarwood and other members of the then-stagnant art scene, which led to his joining the revolutionary Painters Eleven in 1953. He was an exceptionally talented member of this group, and this work was produced at the beginning of this important period. Cahén is remembered as a unique member of the group, and his influence - particularly for his adept abilities in colour and sensitive awareness of space - continued to radiate throughout the group after his untimely passing. This strong work with its non-representational forms and suggestions of organic growth are clear manifestations of his commitment to abstraction in Canada.
Heffel
May. 17, 2012
Oscar Cahén 1915 - 1956 Canadian mixed media on
Est: $30,000 - $40,000
Oscar Cahén 1915 - 1956 Canadian mixed media on card Untitled (Bird Series) 27 1/2 x 43 1/2 inches 69.8 x 110.5 centimeters signed and dated 1954 and on verso titled on the label, inscribed ""#14"" and ""FAG-366"" and certified by The Cahén Archives inventory #FAMM-366 SL Provenance:Galerie Samuel Lallouz, Montreal Private Collection, Montreal An important event in the career of Oscar Cahén was The Art Gallery of Toronto's 1950 exhibition, Contemporary Art: Great Britain, the United States, France, which exposed his work to international artists - most importantly, Graham Sutherland. Cahén's admiration and appreciation of the work in this exhibition led him to definitive graphic lines and abstracted imagery, as seen in this 1954 work. This piece features familiar imagery for Cahén - the jagged talons and beaks of the bird, abstracted growth and crescent shapes. It was during the early 1950s that he experimented with diverse mediums, and this work is a fine example of his proficiency in such varied materials; his skills as a professional illustrator readily shine through. He found inspiration in the natural world but abstracted the features to create an otherworldly, almost Surrealist image. Notably, the work contains strong form and tension, two qualities that are found in his most celebrated works. Such artistic strengths, among many others, made him a critical member of Painters Eleven. The importance of his leadership role - although cut short by his tragic death in 1956 - cannot be overstated.
Heffel
Nov. 28, 2011
OSCAR CAHÉN1916 - 1956
Est: $15,000 - $25,000
ABSTRACTION signed and dated '53 lower right pastel 91.5 by 61 cm. 36 by 24 in.
Sotheby's
May. 26, 2011
OSCAR CAHÉN 1916 - 1956
Est: $30,000 - $40,000
OSCAR CAHÉN 1916 - 1956 UNTITLED 1955 signed and dated lower right Oscar Cahén '55 ink, pastel and watercolour on board 75.88 by 101.6 cm. 28 7/8 by 40 in.
Sotheby's
Nov. 27, 2010
Oscar Cahén 1915 - 1956 Canadian watercolour, ink
Est: $4,000 - $5,000
Oscar Cahén 1915 - 1956 Canadian watercolour, ink and pastel on paper Semaphor 19 1/2 x 15 3/4 inches 49.5 x 40 centimeters signed Provenance:Private Collection, Ontario Exhibited:Canadian Watercolour Society, touring exhibition, date unknown The Elsie Perrin Williams Memorial Art Museum, London, Ontario
Heffel
Nov. 23, 2010
OSCAR CAHÉN 1916 - 1956
Est: $25,000 - $35,000
OSCAR CAHÉN 1916 - 1956 UNTITLED signed in pencil lower right Oscar Cahén; numbered WC 130-4 and titled on a label on the reverse black ink and watercolour on paper 66.0 by 101.6 cm 26 by 40 in.
Sotheby's
Nov. 26, 2009
"Oscar Cahén 1915 - 1956 Canadian watercolour,
Est: $40,000 - $60,000
"Oscar Cahén 1915 - 1956 Canadian watercolour, pastel and ink collage on paper board Untitled" "29 x 39 inches 73.7 x 99 centimeters on verso inscribed with The Cahén Archives #FAMM-058 Literature:Karl Nickel, Oscar Cahén: First American Retrospective Exhibition, The Ringling Museum of Art, 1968 David Burnett and Marilyn Schiff, Contemporary Canadian Art, 1983, page 49 Provenance:Private Collection, Toronto Exhibited:The Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, Florida, Oscar Cahén: First American Retrospective Exhibition, September 30 - November 10, 1968, catalogue #42 Considered one of the bright stars of Painters Eleven from its inception, Cahén's tragic death in 1956 at the age of 40 did not diminish his legacy. Having survived World War II when he was shipped from Prague to England in 1938, only to be interned in England as an enemy alien. It was by chance rather than choice that he was sent to Canada in 1940, where he worked as an illustrator in Montreal. His career as a painter, stimulat d by his friendship with Harold Town and Walter Yarwood, truly began with his arrival in Toronto in 1946. His earliest paintings from that period reflect the influence of both Abraham Rattner and British artist Graham Sutherland. This provocative work from the 1950s exhibits the strong, sharp, graphic strokes and bright palette that came to characterize his images. Cahén's training and skill as a graphic designer added to his ability to handle a broad range of media, while his life experience made him stand out as a true original among his peers in the burgeoning Toronto art scene. He was able to move between figurative and purely abstract work with ease and assurance. David Burnett and Marilyn Schiff wrote, "His work.....was not gestural in the sense of the broad, sweeping brushwork of contemporary American Abstract Expressionism, but more closely structured along the lines of contemporary European and British painting. It reflects.....a talent that was not and could not be restricted to one particular mo e of approach." This work has been assigned ID #FAMM-058 SL by The Cahén Archives. "
Heffel