Beginning with a realistic style influenced by her studies under Lovis Corinth in Berlin, Marcelle Cahn’s painting quickly shifted toward a Purist style, geometricizing reality.

Around 1925, she attended classes taught by Amédée Ozenfant and Fernand Léger, turning her attention toward abstraction. Invited by Michel Seuphor to join the avant-garde group “Cercle et Carré,” her painting became linear, highly structured, and rigorous.

From 1952 onward, Marcelle Cahn explored drawing and collage with a completely poetic freedom. She cleverly repurposed everyday objects such as envelopes, labels, photographs, postcards, and simple adhesive dots…

In the early 1960s, she created her first “spatiaux” (spatial works)—sculptures made of interlocking geometric planes in space, occasionally monochrome. In her paintings from this era, she focused heavily on the line, its structural power, and its formal demands. Until her final years, she worked tirelessly, constantly experimenting.

— Stéphane Mroczkowski