Claude Cahun, poet, essayist, literary critic, novelist, surrealist, symbolist, translator, comedienne, "constructor and explorer of objects", photographer, revolutionary activist. She exhibited with the Surrealists in Paris and London, had many essays and critiques published in the Paris revues, and created a formidable body of excellent work in photography and photo-montage. Who is this mysterious person, donning myriad constumes and attitudes before her own camera, eluding categorization by her versatility with media and disguise? Cahun plays with a vast repertoire of camouflage which rather than hiding the chameleon in its environment brings her out to the fringes and the forefront by its rebellious breaking of assigned roles. And yet this artist was so ahead of her time that her work has only resurfaced in the last few years. Society has only just begun to catch up with Claude Cahun.
Using our 'gaydar' most queers will sense an immediate recognition of fellow queer freak when they see some of these self-portraits. When I first saw Cahun's photos, which rival the work of her contemporaries like Man Ray, I was angry that these had been neglected by the art world for so many decades. Why have we seen little or nothing of her work in the arts journals? Why has her existence been forgotten until recently? Did her work have to wait for the latest wave of feminism and an exhibition at The National Museum of Women in the Arts in order to break out of obscurity and be taken seriously? Has the art world been so male-dominated and sexually repressed that it couldn't handle Cahun's brazen transvestitism and upheaval of traditional gender roles? If the trappings assigned us by gender are reversed so easily, as they are in her many self-portraits, the difference between genders is effectively minimized, reduced to mere surface costume, and men stand to lose their status and positions of power in this patriarchal puddle we wade from birth.
Claude Cahun's theatrical transvestitism must have made her circle of surrealists at least a little uneasy. According to François Lepelier, she would make ravaging entrances on the arms of her life-long companion Suzanne Malherbe, "in extravagant dress or in the suit of a man, monocle over one eye." So she cross-dressed both as the subject of her own photographs and as the object of public gaze, turning gender constructs on their heads by assuming the masquerade of either gender at will, flaunting the interchangability of myriad roles, and thereby exposing them as roles as opposed to inherent truths. "Sous ce masque un visage. Je n'en finirai pas de soulever tous ces visages", wrote Cahun in Aveux non Avenus.
Born in Nantes, Oct. 25, 1894, Lucy Schwob would adopt the pseudonym Claude Cahun, and continue through her life to adopt many identities in her photographic self-portraits. Daughter of a newspaper owner, niece of a writer and a library conservator, Cahun benefited from a rich intellectual environment, and from the dramatic stories her grandmother who would tell her when Lucy took refuge in her house.
In 1922, Cahun moved into 70 Notre-Dame-des Champs road, in the Montparnasse quarter of Paris, with her lover, Suzanne Malherbe, "the other me," whom she'd known since childhood and who intimately shared her life. Lucy and Suzanne, step-sisters and collaborators in art, formed, like Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas or Marguerite Yourcenar and Grace Frick, one of the grand female couples of the époque. Very attentive to the intellectual and artistic life of Paris, they frequented the milieus of journalism and theater, associated with The Union of Friends of the Esoteric Arts and the Esoteric Theater, she frequented Georgette Leblanc, Jeanne Heap (animator of The Little Review ) and the dancer Beatrice Wanger. Cahun participated in the Theater of Dramatic Research. She hung out with Adrienne Monnier in her Maison des amis des livres on rue de l'Odeon, with Sylvia Beach (of whom Cahun made a photographic portrait), with the sculptors Chana Orloff and Jacques Lipchitz, and with Salvador Dali of whom Cahun wrote, ". . .I experience for Dali a particular sympathy. I sensually love his paintings." Cahun worked with the surrealist group lead by Andre Breton, who would write to her ". . . you dispose of a very extensive magic ability. I find also - and don't repeat it - that you must write and publish. You know well that I think you are one of the most curious spirits of these times". For 15 years, 70 Notre-Dame-des-champs was a place of remarkable encounters.
In the milieu of the year 1932, concerned with writing from a resolutely revolutionary perspective, she joined the Association of Revolutionary Writers and Artists (AEAR), which formed under the protection of the communist party and the leftist opposition (trotskyist). The surrealists (principally Andre Breton and Paul Eluard) were in solidarity with the AEAR, and with the Congress of 1935 for the Defense of Culture. Claude Cahun initiated a tentative draft of a manifest, The defense of culture, last halting place of imperialism. 
In May 1934, Claude Cahun published a short polemic essay: Les Paris sont ouverts (The Parises are open), examining the conditions of an effectiveness of the symbolic, poetic act in the development of critical and revolutionary conscience and the power of indirect action. She also participated, in Sept. 1935, in the foundation of the insurrectionist contre-attaque (Counter-Attack), along with Andre Breton and Georges Bataille. Cahun exhibited one of her series of 'photographic paintings', Coeur de Pic (Heart of Woodpecker), at the International Surrealist Exposition in London.
In May of 1936, on the occasion of the Surrealist Exposition of Objects, Cahun published a beautiful article - "Beware the domestic objects!" - in the special edition of Cahiers d'Art (Art Notebooks). She wrote, "But, among other symptoms, the overproduction of objects which are increasingly more unusual (like the microscopic tweezers, useful only under the microscope) guarantees that, in every way, our reality cracks: the chain of forced, brutalizing work, the golden bit of passions broken and rebroken, before perhaps the fading photograph of perishable objects spread out under my eyes." "Beware the domestic objects",Cahiers d'art 1936.
In 1938 Cahun and Malherbe left Paris and moved to the Isle of Jersey where they lived at La Rocquaise or "la ferme sans nom" (the farm without name). From there contact was maintained through correspondence with the Surrealists in Paris. She adhered, to the core, to the International Federation of Independent Revolutionary Art of 1938. Through this group Cahun and Suzanne utilized all their resources and the means of diversion and counter-propaganda meditated in the époque of Contre-Attaque.
Claude and Moore (Lucy and Suzanne) worked together in the resistance movement during WWII, using art to inspire mutiny among the German troops. One of their methods was to type hundreds of insurrectionist tracts, calls to rebellion against the German leaders, on delicate pieces of tissue paper, then crumpling them up and tossing them into the cars of the occupying forces or stuffing them into the pockets of German soldiers. They were arrested in 1944 by the Gestapo and condemned to death. During their imprisonment (July 25 1944 - May 8 1945), their home, la ferme sans nom, was several times searched and looted. An essential part of Cahun's photographic works and archives was irretrievably lost. Claude and Suzanne barely escaped execution. After the liberation, Cahun planned to return to Paris and her work with the surrealists there but illness prevented this move. Cahun lived at "La ferme sans nom" until her death in 1954.
In her self-portraits Cahun flaunted a deliberate narcissism, an unreserved and lucid individualism. To the disgust inspired in her by the masses - "the animal horror of all contact with my fellow creatures is as constant with me as with a cat," she added her scorn of public opinion. Hers was an irrepressible, paradoxical character, or rather, fluid series of characters. She recognized herself possessing of "the mania of the exception."
In May 1930, she published, in the editions of Carrefour, Aveux non avenus, a set of subversive photo-montages exploring many metaphors: dialectic of mask and mirror, androgyny and ambivalence of identity, metaphysical illusionism and historical pessimism. Cahun said of her sailing narcissism and the violence of imposed limits: "I do not want to stitch, stab, puncture, but with the most extreme point. The rest of the body, the following, what a waste of time! I want to travel only at the prow of myself."
Cahun's work explores the interior and plays with the metamorphosis of self. Her androgynous polymorphy, her adoption of various theatrical disguises (vampire, gymnast, swami, masked gypsy, braided girl, mannequin, angel) and of the trappings of either gender, sometimes of both within one image, melts the boundaries drawn by the construct of two polar oppositional genders. During much of her life, Claude Cahun cut her hair very short and dyed it rose, gold, or silver, when she didn't shave it off completely. In her mimicry of all codes of social representation, she eludes any claim of one "true" identity, calling into question the concept of there being any one true identity. For Cahun it seems not so much a desire to BE the other gender but to dissolve the borders. In blending polar opposites she renders them non-oppositional, and thus inoperative, as in her blending of these two ideas: "poetryguardsitsecretsurrendersitsecretguardsitsecretsurrendersitsecret. . . ." Les Paris sont ouverts
The temporality of her installations, the use of materials such as sand, hair, cigarette butts, feathers, insects, husks, shells, and a recent newspaper, contributes in her work to a pervading melancholic sense of the ephemerality of life, that all will collapse, disintegrate, and be effaced by the hand of time like words written in damp sand. Just as the masks we wear can easily be discarded and replaced by others, just as the roles assigned us can be deliberately shifted and reversed, so also the shifting sands of time move under the feet that will one day contribute to the earth their carbon.
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