Objective
The Comité Marcelle Cahn is pleased to be leading the development of the catalogue raisonné of Marcelle Cahn’s work, covering all aspects of her graphic, pictoral and plastic production, from her early works to the collages of recent years. With the main aim of gathering and sharing knowledge, this catalogue raisonné is primarily conceived of as an online database whose Open Interface is accessible to all researchers and whose Expert Interface can be consulted free of charge via registration, intended for more in-depth and targeted enquiries. A priority for this digital catalogue raisonné is to collect or commission high-resolution colour images of Marcelle Cahn’s works. In the long-term, the publication of this digital catalogue raisonné is planned.
Sources
Conceived of as an on-going project, this digital catalogue raisonné is based on Mireille Cordonnier-Kraft’s doctoral thesis, defended in 1995 under the supervision of Albert Chatelet at the Université Marc Bloch in Strasbourg. The second volume of this thesis presents the first major step in the construction of a survey. The work inventories 1,283 works by Marcelle Cahn, each accompanied by a descriptive caption, exhibition history and bibliography. Some of the works are illustrated with a black and white vignette. Largely based on lists of works consulted in the artist’s archives at Strasbourg’s Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, this first catalogue raisonné proves to be a valuable basis for further research.
The recent retrospective Marcelle Cahn. En quête d’espace, held in 2022 and 2023 at the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain de Strasbourg and the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rennes, additionally supplemented the list of known works.
In 2021 art historian Jana Wierzykowski was commissioned by Galerie Jocelyn Wolff to transfer this first extensive inventory to a digital database, initially completing and registering 300 new entries. The digital inventory now comprises 1,500 works, several hundred of which have not yet been located or illustrated. This catalogue raisonné project therefore involves monitoring, updating and filling in the gaps in order to provide better information on known works, as well as identifying, locating and authenticating works that have been lost or still remain unknown.
Consultation
The catalogue raisonné is still in progress, soon to be available on the Comité Marcelle Cahn website. A first overview of Marcelle Cahn’s work is now available through her ‘family of works’.
