Out Spotlight CII

Today's Out Spotlight is photographer, photo collagist, surrealist, artist, writer, and translator Claude Cahun is known today primarily for creating images, including self-portraits, that play with concepts of gender.

Born Lucy Renée Mathilde Schwob on October 25, 1894 in Nantes, France, into a prominent French Jewish literary family. She studied at Oxford and the Sorbonne.

Always into literature and writing, Cahun wrote about Oscar Wilde and in 1929 translated into French the writing of sexologist Havelock Ellis. Ellis entertained the theory of homosexuals as a third sex, neither masculine nor feminine, but uniting characteristics of both. This theory has been thought by some to have influenced Cahun's photographic image making.

When Cahun was 12, her divorced father married a woman whose daughter, Suzanne Malherbe, would becomes Cahun's stepsister, and later became her lover, co-creator, and lifelong companion. They lived in Paris during the 1920s and most of the 1930s.

Cahun wrote for a number of publications including L'Amitié, a homosexual review magazine. Her feminism can be seen in a 1925 manuscript which was not published until 1999, entitled "Heroines" in which she writes of Sappho, of Ulysses as a cuckold, and of Cinderella's prince as a foot fetishist.

Independently wealthy and she never had to seek employment and was able to pursue her photography independent of economic considerations.

Cahun photographed, among others, Sylvia Beach, prominent lesbian expatriate and owner of the English-language Paris bookstore Shakespeare and Company. She began producing self-portraits from 1912 until her death in 1954. Many portraits playing with, bending, or distorting gender and sometimes race. Her images were printed scrapbook size and circulated among friends. Most were never exhibited in her lifetime.

In some of her self-portraits she appears as a man, in others as an androgyne, as Buddha, as a figure with shaved head, and sometimes in a dress and wig. In one she sleeps on a shelf in a cupboard. Cahun was active in avant-garde theater and some of those self-portraits show her in roles she played. Later, she recycled her self-portraits into collages.

Collaborating with her partner Malherbe, who used the pseudonym Marcel Moore, Cahun created Aveux non avenus (sometimes translated as Canceled Confessions): meditations, aphorisms, personal philosophical ideas, and collaged images published as a book under the imprint of Editions du Carrefour in Paris in 1930.

In the late 1930s, Cahun was active in the Surrealist movement, published in Surrealist journals, and contributed sculptural-objects to Surrealist exhibitions. Her photographs also illustrated Lise Deharme's poems for children in Le Coeur de pic (The Pick-Axe Heart).

Cahun and Malherbe moved to the British Isle of Jersey in 1937. The Germans occupied the island in 1940, and the couple, who had worked with anti-fascist political groups in the period between the world wars, practiced covert forms of resistance.they became active as resistance workers and propagandists. Fervently against war, the two worked extensively in producing anti-German fliers. Many were snippets from English-to-German translations of BBC reports on the Nazi's 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, strategically placing them in soldier's pockets, on their chairs, etc. Also, fliers were inconspicuously crumpled up and thrown into cars and windows. Cahun and Malherbe's resistance efforts were not only political but artistic actions, using their creative talents to manipulate and undermine the authority which they despised.

Cahun's life's work was focused on undermining a certain authority, however her specific resistance fighting targeted a physically dangerous threat. In 1944 they were arrested and sentenced to death, but the sentences were never carried out. However, Cahun's health never recovered from her treatment in jail, and she died in 1954. She is buried in St Brelade's Church with her partner Suzanne Malherbe/Marcel Moore).

Cahun's public identity became a commentary upon not only her own, but the public's notions of sexuality, gender, beauty, and logic. Her adoption of a sexually ambiguous name, and her androgynous self-portraits display a revolutionary way of thinking and creating, experimenting with her audience's understanding of photography as a documentation of reality. Her poetry challenged gender roles and attacked the increasingly modern world's social and economic boundaries. Also Cahun's participation in the Parisian Surrealist movement diversified the group's artwork and ushered in new representations. Where most Surrealist artists were men, and their primary images were of women as isolated symbols of eroticism, Cahun epitomized the chameleonic and multiple possibilities of the female identity. Her photographs, writings, and general life as an artistic and political revolutionary continue to influence countless artists, namely Cindy Sherman and Nan Goldin.

Claude Cahun - pictures