Claude Cahun (born October 25, 1894, Nantes, France—died December 8, 1954, St. Helier, Jersey) was a French writer, photographer, Surrealist, and performance artist who was largely written out of art history until the late 1980s, when her photographs were included in an exhibition of Surrealist photography in 1986. She is known for her self-portraits that portray her as ambiguously gendered.
Lucy Schwob was born into an affluent family with deep literary roots in France. Her father, Maurice, owned and published Le Phare de la Loire, a regional newspaper that had been in the family since 1876. Her uncle was well-known Symbolist writer Marcel Schwob, and her great-uncle, David Léon Cahun, was a scholar of ancient Asian societies and prolific writer. When Schwob’s mother, who suffered from mental illness, was permanently institutionalized in 1898, Cahun, who was still Lucy at the time, was sent to live with her grandmother, Mathilde Cahun, for several years. Though her mother was not Jewish, Cahun was Jewish on her paternal side. From an early age she was exposed to anti-Semitism, and, in an effort to protect her, her father sent her to Surrey, England, for two years of her schooling. In 1909 she returned to Nantes and met Suzanne Malherbe, who would eventually become not only her stepsister but also her lifelong companion and collaborator.
It is thought that Cahun took her first self-portrait about 1913, launching a lifelong obsession with examining gender, using herself as subject. A year later she published her first collaboration with Malherbe. Under the pseudonyms Claude Corlis and Marcel Moore (the name Malherbe assumed permanently), they contributed a piece titled “Vues et visions” (“Views and Visions”) to the literary journal Mercure de France, the writing by Cahun and the illustration by Moore. Although she had tried out other names, by 1917 Schwob had adopted the pen name Claude Cahun. Moore’s mother and Cahun’s father married in 1917, and the two young women moved in together. Cahun began to write and contribute widely to French publications, including the family-owned newspaper. She also wrote literary reviews in Mercure de France on writers such as André Gide, Pierre Benoit, and Adrienne Monnier. She had met Monnier and Sylvia Beach (later the proprietor of the storied Shakespeare and Company) in 1918 at Monnier’s famous bookshop, La Maison des Amis des Livres, a center of Parisian cultural and literary activity that had opened three years earlier.
In taking the gender-neutral forename Claude and by shaving her head, as she did often in the late 1910s, Cahun actively and outwardly rejected social constructions of gender and sexual identity. To Cahun, identity was mutable, or unstable. In her self-portraits, she presented herself sometimes as a man, sometimes as a woman, sometimes thoroughly androgynous, and sometimes so heavily made-up and costumed that it was impossible to determine her persona’s gender. As an active participant and viewer in the avant-garde theater of Paris in the 1920s, assuming new identities came naturally to Cahun. A notable series of self-portraits (1927–29) show her masquerading as a feminized male wearing lipstick, painted heart shapes on her cheeks, and a shirt with painted-on black nipples that reads, “I am in training, don’t kiss me.” In some photographs from the series, she holds barbells. By fusing several gender stereotypes into a single character, she obfuscated her identity. It is not entirely clear whether Moore was the photographer of Cahun’s “self-portraits” or had some other role in their production. Moore did, in fact, photograph Cahun later on, and those pictures are attributed to her.
In her Héroïnes (1925; “Heroines” [a complete English translation appears in the exhibition catalog Inverted Odysseys: Claude Cahun, Maya Deren, Cindy Sherman]), Cahun reconceived the lives of a number of fictional, biblical, and mythological female characters, among them Delilah, Judith, Salome, Helen of Troy, Cinderella, and Sappho. Many of those stories were first published individually in Mercure de France. In 1928 Cahun translated into French The Task of Social Hygiene (1912) by renowned British psychologist of human sexuality Havelock Ellis, giving it the title L’Hygiène sociale: la femme dans la société (1929; “Social Hygiene: The Woman in Society”). Ellis’s studies on homosexuality and sexual identity undoubtedly influenced Cahun’s efforts to define herself. Arguably her most significant publication, and the first to be translated and published in English (2007), was Aveux non avenus (1930; Disavowals; or, Cancelled Confessions), a type of autobiography that Cahun referred to as an “anti-memoir.” The volume, a collaboration between Cahun and Moore, included text and photomontages. In the text, which departs radically from a linear or chronological telling of her life, she talks the reader through her attempts to discover who she is. The book is full of self-doubt and contradictions but offers in its incoherence a clear picture of Cahun’s struggle to know and understand herself and her relationship to the world.
In 1932 Cahun joined the Association des Écrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires (AEAR; Association of Revolutionary Writers and Artists). That spring she also met the founder of the Surrealists, André Breton (who called her “one of the most curious spirits of our time”), and she began to align herself more closely with that movement. She actively participated in drafting Surrealist texts and exhibited with the group. In 1934 Cahun published Les Paris sont ouverts (literally “The Parises are Open” but translated figuratively as “Bets Are On” or “Place Your Bets”), which criticized the use of propagandistic or more-traditional forms of art and writing in favor of the avant-garde and Surrealist approach of letting the unconscious guide artistic practice. Becoming increasingly radical in her politics, the following year Cahun cofounded—with French writer and philosopher Georges Bataille—the short-lived radical cultural and political group Contre-Attaque. In 1939 she joined the antifascist, anti-Stalinist Fédération Internationale de l’Artistes Révolutionnaires Indépendents (FIARI), which had been founded by Breton, Diego Rivera, and Leon Trotsky. Cahun also continued to make art, though less so during that period. She exhibited objects or assemblages—not her photographs—in the “Exhibition of Surrealist Objects” at the Charles Ratton Gallery in Paris in 1936, which may have been the only time she exhibited her work.
In response to Contre-Attaque’s dissolution and the Nazi Party’s rise to power, Cahun and Moore fled Paris permanently in 1938 for Jersey, a British crown dependency and island in the English Channel, where since 1922 they had spent summers. In 1940, however, the Nazis invaded Jersey. Cahun and Moore employed a subversive avant-garde art practice as a form of resistance. For example, they created antinationalist leaflets that mocked Nazi ideology and distributed them throughout Jersey, leaving them in strategic places. They signed the leaflets der Soldat ohne Namen (“The Soldier with No Name”). Their activities were discovered in 1944, and—though they were not leaders of a large-scale resistance movement, as the Nazis believed—the two women were imprisoned and sentenced to death for undermining Nazi authority. Much of their property, including their art, was confiscated. They were saved when the island was liberated in 1945. A photo of Cahun taken after their liberation shows her defiantly clenching a Nazi military badge in her teeth. Cahun and Moore remained in Jersey, continuing to collaborate until Cahun died at age 60. Moore inherited her possessions and art, but Cahun’s legacy was nearly lost when Moore committed suicide in 1972 and all of Cahun’s work was auctioned off.
When Cahun and Moore had decamped for Jersey, Cahun and her work fell into obscurity. (She and Moore apparently also returned to using their birth names, Lucy and Suzanne, at that point.) Cahun had associated with, but was never a true member of, the Surrealists, a male-dominated group of artists (whose women, regardless of their artistic contributions, were relegated to the role of muse in most of its histories). In fact, in the artist biographies section of the 1985 exhibition catalog for “L’Amour Fou: Photography and Surrealism,” there is virtually no information on Cahun, and she is said to have died in a concentration camp. The publication of François Leperlier’s biography of Cahun in 1992 was the key to her reentry into art history (often categorized as a Surrealist photographer) and especially into feminist art theory. Art historians and critics have called her a precursor to 20th-century American photographers Nan Goldin and Cindy Sherman, who also tested the bounds of socially constructed identity. Though few of Cahun’s writings have been translated from the French, and nearly her entire archive of work is held at the Jersey Heritage Trust on Jersey, Leperlier’s biography drew the attention of many scholars and critics, who found Cahun’s revolutionary examinations of gender and sexuality well ahead of her time.