Claude Cahun was actually born under the name Lucy Renee Mathilde Schwob. Schwob adopted the pseudonym Claude Cahun in 1914,she also said that her actual gender was fluid. Cahun is best known as a writer and self-portraitist, who assumed a variety of performative personae. Cahun is considered to be a ground-breaking artist who fully embraced her gender fluidity long before the term came into use. For example, in Disavowals, Cahun writes: “Masculine? Feminine? It depends on the situation. Neuter is the only gender that always suits me, hiowever In her writing she consistently referred to herself as “elle” (she). Cahun is most well known for her androgynous appearance, which challenged the strict gender roles of her time. During the early 1920s, she settled in Paris with lifelong partner Suzanne Malherbe, who adopted the pseudonym Marcel Moore. The two became step-sisters in 1917 after Cahun’s divorced father and Moore’s widowed mother married, eight years after Cahun and Moore’s artistic and romantic partnership began. For the rest of their lives together, Cahun and Moore collaborated on various written works, sculptures, photomontages and collages. Some of Cahun’s portraits feature the artist looking directly at the viewer, head shaven, often revealing only head and shoulders (eliminating body from the view), and a blurring of gender indicators and behaviors which serve to undermine the patriarchal gaze.
In 1937 Cahun and Moore settled in Jersey. Following the fall of France and the German occupation of Jersey and the other Channel Islands, they became active as resistance workers and propagandists. strongly against war, the two worked extensively in producing anti-German fliers. Many were snippets from English-to-German translations of BBC reports on the Nazis’ crimes and insolence, which were pasted together to create rhythmic poems and harsh criticism. The couple then dressed up and attended many German military events in Jersey, placing their pamphlets in soldier’s pockets, on their chairs, and in cigarette boxes for soldiers to find. Additionally, they inconspicuously crumpled up and threw their fliers into cars and windows. On one occasion, they hung a banner in a local church which read “Jesus is great, but Hitler is greater – because Jesus died for people, but people die for Hitler.” As with much of Cahun and Moore’s artistic work in Paris, many of their notes also used this same style of dark humor. In many ways, Cahun and Moore’s resistance efforts were not only political but artistic actions, using their creative talents to manipulate and undermine the authority which they despised. In 1944, Cahun and Moore were arrested and sentenced to death, but the sentence was never carried out, as the island was liberated from German occupation in 1945.
Claude Cahun was a Surrealist photographer whose work explored gender identity and the subconscious mind. The artist’s self-portrait from 1928 epitomizes her attitude and style, as she stares defiantly at the camera in an outfit that looks neither conventionally masculine nor feminine. “Under this mask, another mask,” the artist famously said. “I will never be finished removing all these faces.”
Most Surrealist artists were men, whose primary images of women depicted them as isolated symbols of eroticism rather than as the chameleonic, gender non-conforming figure that Cahun presented. Cahun’s photographs, writings, and general life as an artistic and political revolutionary continues to influence artists.
In 2007, David Bowie created a multi-media exhibition of Cahun’s work in the gardens of the General Theological Seminary in New York. It was part of a venue called the Highline Festival, which also included offerings by Air, Laurie Anderson, and Mike Garson. Bowie said of Cahun:
“You could call her transgressive or you could call her a cross-dressing Man Ray with surrealist tendencies. I find this work really quite mad, in the nicest way. Outside of France and now the UK she has not had the kind of recognition that, as a founding follower, friend and worker of the original Surrealist movement, she surely deserves.”
