Claude Cahoun (Lucy Schwob)
Claude Cahoun (Lucy Schwob)
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. 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.
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 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.
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."
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.