Untitled 

Marcelle Cahn made this Untitled artwork, a collage of geometric forms, around 1960. Cahn was a Jewish artist who fled Nazi-occupied France and dedicated herself to abstraction from the 1920s onwards, in defiance of the figurative art preferred by the Nazis and other authoritarian regimes. Abstraction provided a visual language that resisted co-option by political institutions. The floating rectangles and circles, arranged in no immediately obvious order, undermine any sense of hierarchy or fixed meaning. This lack of obvious structure can be understood as a gesture of artistic resistance to the rigid social structures of the mid-20th century, whether fascist or capitalist. Art historians might research Cahn’s biography, along with the history of abstract art in France, to explore the political and cultural context that informs her seemingly simple, but quietly radical, compositions. Understanding the history of art and the institutions that support it helps us understand the various meanings art can embody.