Oscar Cahén (b. February 8, 1916 Copenhagen, Denmark - d. November 26, 1956 Oakville, Ontario) was a Canadian painter and illustrator. Cahén is best known as a member of Painters Eleven a group of abstract artists active in Toronto from 1954-1960.
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Cahén was trained in Europe and taught in Prague before escaping the Nazi occupation in 1938. A German citizen, he was interned in England in 1939 and sent to Canada in 1940 as an enemy alien. His artistic contacts in Canada secured his release in 1942, and he worked in Montréal before moving to Toronto in 1944. Cahén worked as an illustrator for magazines such as Maclean's, Chatelaine and New Liberty. In the late 1940s he met Walter Yarwood, Harold Town and others involved in avant-garde art in Toronto and Cahén was included in the Abstracts at Home exhibition held in 1953 at the Robert Simpson Company, Toronto. He joined Painters Eleven when the group was formed later that year. In Canada's conservative art world their early exhibitions were met with disdain.[1][2] Nevertheless, Painters Eleven attracted U.S. exposure with a successful exhibition, Twentieth Annual Exhibition of American Abstract Artists with "Painters Eleven of Canada in 1956, with the American Abstract Artists at the Riverside Gallery in New York[3], and were praised by the influential critic Clement Greenberg on a visit he paid to Toronto in 1957.[4] In the Canadian press, the group's most ardent supporter was art critic Robert Fulford. Cahén was killed in a car accident in 1956 and the group formally disbanded in 1960.[5]