Marcelle Cahn
Composition Abstraite
Date 1925
Medium Oil on canvas
Dimensions 72.5 x 54 x 2.3 cm
Inventory ID UID 102-84
84.jpg
This work is from the Académie de la Grande Chaumière period, during which the artist worked with Fernand Léger and, later, with Amédée Ozenfant. Marcelle Cahn abandoned cubism in favour of abstract forms, a post-cubist style referred to at the time as purism. This new pictorial method, which concentrated on the representation of objects from daily life, had been developed by Léger, Le Corbusier and Ozenfant at the beginning of the 1920s. These artists set out their theories of sobriety and rigour in painting in L’Esprit nouveau, a magazine published between 1920 and 1925. In this work, synthetic forms with precise contours slot together in a predominantly frontal composition. Uniform and neutral layers of colour cover the flat surface, free from any visible sign of brushwork. A grey border gives the illusion of a false frame and marks the transition with what lies beyond the canvas. AC
Otto Hahn Collection; Galerie Lahumière, Paris; acquired in 1997.