Claude Cahun’s boundary-pushing surrealist photography
In Andre Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto, he claimed that the artistic movement intended to “resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality”. When we think of artists from the Surrealism period, men like Breton, Salvador Dalí, Man Ray, and René Magritte spring to mind. However, one of the most groundbreaking, radical surrealists was Lucy Schwob, better known by her pseudonym Claude Cahun, born in 1894.
During Cahun’s childhood, she witnessed her mother grapple with severe mental health issues and experienced antisemitism at her school in Nantes. By the time she was 18, she was taking photographs of herself as a form of expression, highlighting a dedicated interest in exploring self-identity and perception. The young artist soon moved to Paris, immersing herself in the city’s lesbian scene. Here, she lived with her partner, Suzanne Malherbe, also known as Marcel Moore, who, in a strange turn of events, would later become her step-sister.
From the 1920s onwards, Cahun dedicated her life to art, working with mediums such as photography, writing and collage. Much of this work was made in collaboration with Moore, who often helped Cahun create self-portraits. Both artists went against the grain, presenting themselves in a way that wasn’t expected from women at the time. Cahun often referred to herself as neither male nor female, although she used feminine pronouns when writing.
Her lack of adherence to gender roles and social conventions made her work particularly striking, as her self-portraits saw the artist transform into characters that were hard to pin down. Blurring the lines of gender and emphasising its fluidity, Cahun would don various outfits to portray different characters. Sometimes, they were ultra-feminine, like a doll or fairy. Other times, she appeared masculine, her intense face staring into the lens as she sported a shaved head. She once wrote: “Masculine? Feminine? It depends on the situation. Neuter is the only gender that always suits me”. Although we’re familiar with androgynous figures today, it’s quite incredible to imagine the reaction these images would’ve garnered from a contemporary audience.
Theatre and performance were intrinsic to Cahun’s art, and author Jeffrey H. Jackson explains that she was “always, to some extent, performing”. The artist used performance to attack authority and social norms, eventually extending her practice to revolutionary political activism. In 1932, she joined the Association des Écrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires, where she met Breton, with whom she co-founded the anti-fascist alliance Contre Attaque.
In the late 1930s, Cahun turned her attention towards fighting the Nazis, using her art to attack them. Along with Moore, the artist would make anti-Nazi propaganda, often using satire to communicate their messages. The pair frequently cut out images from newspapers and transformed them into critical poems and collages, sliding their artworks back onto newsstands or leaving them on car windshields. Sometimes, they would plant their flyers in places where German soldiers would find them, tricking them into thinking that one of their men was a secret traitor to illicit paranoia.
Cahun and Moore were bold, risking their safety to fight against fascism. The fact that the Jewish Cahun would attend Nazi events in disguise so she could spread her propaganda was incredibly dangerous. In fact, while living in Jersey, Cahun and Moore were arrested and sentenced to death, although they escaped a tragic fate when the island was liberated the following year.
Cahun died in 1954, and her work wasn’t widely acknowledged and celebrated until decades later. Still, her contributions to Surrealism and her boundary-pushing attitudes towards gender and performance are frequently overlooked. Cahun dedicated every aspect of her life to non-conformism, hitting back at society’s rigid expectations of women to appear as submissive, overtly feminine and passive. Cahun was none of these things, and in a movement that mainly featured female subjects as eroticised forms (think of Ray’s nude women), she presented herself as something completely different.
