Screening of a film about Marcelle Cahn
The tribute to Marcelle Cahn continues…
An evening event was held on March 17, 2007, at the Auditorium of the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Strasbourg.
The evening began with a screening of the film “Marcelle Cahn: The Keys to Seeing,” directed in 1976 by Pierre Gisling for Swiss Romande Television. This unique film about Marcelle Cahn takes place with the artist in her studio-bedroom at the Galignani retirement home in Neuilly-sur-Seine.
Michel Seuphor, who invited Marcelle Cahn to participate in the “Cercle et Carré” group in the 1930s, speaks in this film. Gottfried Honegger, Marcelle Cahn’s neighbor in the 1960s on rue Daguerre in Paris, and a friend of the artist, spoke at length.*
After a moment of almost reverent silence from the audience, a roundtable discussion, bringing together Germain Roesz, Freddy Raphaël, and Stéphane Mroczkowski, opened a dialogue with an audience of about forty people, surprised and captivated by this woman whose philosophy of life was marked by rigor and humor, probably one of the keys to her work after 1945.
Elsie Bohr
“It was in 1963, I knocked on your studio door for the first time. Rue Daguerre was our shared street. This allowed me to see you and talk to you quite often. Your studio was a kind of assemblage, a place that presented itself like a three-dimensional collage. You were capable of laughter. I can still see you, fragile and transparent—dressed in your work jacket. You were battling against techniques, against the resistance of materials. You were searching for a White above all whites. You wanted to discover the mother and the father—the circle and the square. But for the rest, nothing escaped your gaze. Everything around you was destined to be transformed into a work of art. An envelope, a medicine box, or a subway ticket was enough for you to escape into your dreams, to open our eyes, to the poetry of our world.
This text dates from 1993 and was published in: Gottfried Honegger, Homo Scriptor, Les Presses du Réel, 2004.