Cahun is little known to the general public, even to those with enthusiasm for art, yet art critics agree that her photographic experiments are astonishingly modern considering they were made in the 1920s-1930s. These photographs produced with the assistance of Marcel Moore were rediscovered in the late 1980s and 1990s.
Cross Sex Stepsisters
Born Lucy Schwob, she adopted the pseudonym Claude Cahun in 1919. Choosing a sexually ambiguous name was an intentional act reflecting her interest in role reversal which she would project into her photographic self–portraits by adopting many different identities.
Growing up in a wealthy and well educated family in Nantes, Lucy was exposed to intellectual sources from early childhood. This environment provided a positive stimulation, but she also had to cope with the absence of her mother who was taken into an asylum for the insane in Paris, and with anti-Semitic incidents at school.
It was at school in Nantes that she befriended Suzanne Malherbe, a girl from a bourgeois family who moved in the same literary circles. Suzanne would later become Cahun’s artistic collaborator known as Marcel Moore. The connection with Moore was potentially scandalous as in 1917 they became step-sisters when Lucy’s father married Suzanne’s mother while the two girls shared more than a passion for art and literature and became lovers.
Mistress of Metamorphosis
In 1912 Cahun began making photographic self–portraits that would develop into highly–staged photographic compositions featuring the artist as the main subject. Subversion of gender constructs through polymorphy is the issue that Cahun explored in her work.
Shaved head, cross-dressing, strong make-up or disturbing lack of make-up, assimilation of attitudes of different characters within poses and intense facial expressions bring out many paradoxical aspects of Cahun’s personality. Her firmly fixed gaze serves as a link between the individual characters she plays (suited gentleman, sailor, acrobat, mannequin, semi-human creature with a conical skull, aviator wearing large goggles, bald two-headed albino). A costume is not meant to serve as a disguise, but it is rather a proud re-presentation of dissolving boundaries between male and female identity.
Surreal Revolutionary
In 1932, as political developments in Europe intensified, she became involved in left-wing politics and joined the Association of Revolutionary Writers and Artists and in 1935 she participated in the forming of an insurrectionist group Counter-Attack. She also belonged to the International Federation of Independent Revolutionary Art formed in 1938. Her writing at this time had a strong revolutionary tone and was concerned with artistic freedom.
In 1938 Cahun and Moore settled at La Roquaise, a house on the Isle of Jersey where they created a great body of work. When the island was occupied by Germans, they continuously attempted to undermine military authorities through direct artistic action. They were arrested in July 1944 by Gestapo after nearly four years of subversive activity and sentenced to death. However, luck was on their side and the couple was released from the prison in May 1945 as the German troops were retreating across Europe.
Legacy
Eighty years after their production Cahun’s hermaphroditic images retain a timeless quality. Through androgynous re-presentations of herself, her art challenges sexual and social stereotypes and precedes the work of modern female photographers by several decades.
Sources:
- Terry Castle: ‘‘Husbands and Wives’’, London Review of Books 29/24
- Louise Downie: Don’t Kiss Me: The Art of Claude Cahun And Marcel Moore
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