BURIED TOGETHER
Partner Suzanne Malherbe, buried together
Queer Places:
Sorbonne, Sorbona, Parigi, Francia
St. Brelade’s Bay Hotel, La Route de la Baie, Jersey
St Brelade, La Marquanderie, Saint Brélade JE3 8LL
Claude
Cahun (25 October 1894 – 8 December 1954), born Lucy Renee Mathilde
Schwob,[1]
was a Jewish-French photographer, sculptor and writer.[2]
Artist Liv Schulman created a series of films: Le Goubernement, a
six-episode fiction imagining the destiny and work of women, lesbian, queer,
trans and non-binary artists who lived in Paris from 1910 – 1980. The episodes
traverses and overlay over 70 years of history and hosts the stories and fate
of artists that were erased from the great twentieth century modernist
narrative including Claude Cahun.
Lucy Renee Mathilde Schwob adopted the gender-ambiguous name Claude
Cahun in 1917 and is best known for self-portraits, in which she assumed a
variety of personas.
Her work was both political and personal, and often undermined
traditional concepts of static gender roles. She once explained: "Under
this mask, another mask; I will never finish removing all these faces."
Historical homosocial and homosexual communities of expatriate American
and English women lived in Paris on the Left Bank of the Seine during
the opening decades of the twentieth century. The place and time has
captured the imaginations of feminist and queer historians, literary
critics, art historians, and cultural theorists. These histories of
women and their cultural productions are attractive because they demand
a rethinking and rewriting of the canonical histories of masculine
modernism. The geographical and spiritual locus for these groups were
the literary and artistic salons of
Natalie Barney
and Gertrude Stein, as well
as the bookshops and publishing houses owned by
Sylvia Beach and
Adrienne Monnier. Congregating at
these cultural landmarks, Janet
Flanner, Colette,
Renée Vivien,
Djuna Barnes,
Hilda Doolittle,
Claude Cahun,
Marcel Moore (Suzanne
Malherbe), Anaïs Nin, and many others
invented new ways of living and representing themselves and each other.
Martha Vicinus writes: The most striking aspect of the lesbian coteries
of the 1910s and 1920s was their self-conscious effort to create a new
sexual language for themselves that included not only words but also
gestures, costume and behavior.
Lillian Faderman notes
that these Parisian communities “functioned as a support group for
lesbians to permit them to create a self-image which literature and
society denied them.”
Claude Cahun self portrait c.1927 courtesy Jersey Heritage collections
Claude Cahun self portrait c.1928 courtesy Jersey Heritage collections
Born in Nantes in 1894, Cahun was born into a provincial but prominent
intellectual Jewish family.[3]
Cahun was the niece of an avant-garde writer Marcel Schwob and the
great-niece of Orientalist David Léon Cahun. When Cahun was four years
old, her mother, Mary-Antoinette Courbebaisse, began suffering from mental
illness, which ultimately led to her permanent internment at a psychiatric
facility.[4]
Due to the absence of her mother, Cahun was brought up by her grandmother,
Mathilde Cahun.
Cahun attended a private school (Parsons Mead School) in Surrey after
experiences with anti-Semitism at her high school in Nantes.[5][6]
She attended the University of Paris, Sorbonne.[5]
She began making photographic self-portraits as early as 1912 (aged
18), and continued taking images of herself through the 1930s.
Around 1919, she changed her name to Claude Cahun, after having
previously used the names Claude Courlis (after the curlew) and Daniel
Douglas (after Lord Alfred Douglas).
During the early 1920s, she settled in Paris with her lifelong lesbian
partner and step-sibling
Suzanne Malherbe, who adopted the pseudonym Marcel Moore.[3]:69
For the rest of their lives together, Cahun and Moore collaborated on
various written works, sculptures, photomontages and collages. The two
published articles and novels, notably in the periodical Mercure de
France, and befriended Henri Michaux, Pierre Morhange, and Robert
Desnos.
Around 1922 Claude and Moore began holding artists' salons at their
home. Among the regulars who would attend were artists Henri Michaux and
André Breton and literary entrepreneurs
Sylvia Beach
and Adrienne
Monnier.[7]
Cahun's works encompassed writing, photography, and theatre. She is
most remembered for her highly staged self-portraits and tableaux that
incorporated the visual aesthetics of Surrealism. During the 1920s Cahun
produced an astonishing number of self-portraits in various guises such as
aviator, dandy, doll, body builder, vamp and vampire, angel, and Japanese
puppet.[3]:66
Many of Cahun's portraits feature her looking directly at the viewer,
with her head shaved, often revealing only her head and shoulders
(eliminating the body from view), and a blurring of gender indicators and
behaviors which serve to undermine the patriarchal gaze.[8][9]
Her published writings include "Heroines," (1925) a series of
monologues based upon female fairy tale characters and intertwining them
with witty comparisons to the contemporary image of women; Aveux non
avenus, (Carrefour, 1930) a book of essays and recorded dreams
illustrated with photomontages; and several essays in magazines and
journals.[10]
In 1932 she joined the Association des Écrivains et Artistes
Révolutionnaires, where she met André Breton and René Crevel. Following
this, she started associating with the surrealist group, and later
participated in a number of surrealist exhibitions, including the London
International Surrealist Exhibition (New Burlington Gallery) and
Exposition surréaliste d'Objets (Charles Ratton Gallery, Paris), both in
1936. Cahun's photograph of Sheila Legge standing in the middle of
Trafalgar Square with her head obscured by a flower arrangement with
pigeons perching on her outstretched arms from the London exhibition,
appeared in numerous newspapers and later reproduced in a number of books.[11][12]
In 1934, they published a short polemic essay, Les Paris sont Ouverts,
and in 1935 took part in the founding of the left-wing anti-fascist
alliance Contre Attaque, alongside André Breton and Georges
Bataille.[13]
Breton called Cahun "one of the most curious spirits of our time."[14]
In 1994 the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London held an exhibition
of Cahun's photographic self-portraits from 1927–47, alongside the work of
two young contemporary British artists, Virginia Nimarkoh and Tacita Dean,
entitled Mise en Scene. In the surrealist self-portraits, Cahun
represented themself as an androgyne, nymph, model, and soldier.[15]
In 2007, David Bowie
created a multi-media exhibition of Cahun’s work in the gardens of the
General Theological Seminary in New York. It was part of a venue called
the Highline Festival, which also included offerings by Air, Laurie
Anderson, Mike Garson and Ricky Gervais.
Cahun’s work was often a collaboration with Marcel Moore. Cahun and
Moore collaborated frequently, though this often goes unrecognized. It is
believed that Moore was often the person standing behind the camera during
Cahun's portrait shoots and was an equal partner in their collages.[8]
With the majority of the photographs attributed to Cahun coming from a
personal collection, not one meant for public display, it has been
proposed that these personal photographs allowed for Cahun to experiment
with gender presentation and the role of the viewer to a greater degree.[8]
In 1937 Cahun and Moore settled in Jersey. Following the fall of France
and the German occupation of Jersey and the other Channel Islands, 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 Nazis'
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, and in cigarette boxes for soldiers to find.
Additionally, they inconspicuously crumpled up and threw their fliers into
cars and windows. In many ways, Cahun and Moore's resistance efforts were
not only political but artistic actions, using their creative talents to
manipulate and undermine the authority which they despised. In many ways,
Cahun's life's work was focused on undermining a certain authority;
however, their activism posed a threat to their physical safety.
In 1944, Cahun and Moore were arrested and sentenced to death, but the
sentence was never carried out as the island was liberated from German
occupation in 1945.[13]
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 lover
Marcel Moore.
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