“Under this mask, another mask. I will never be finished removing all these faces.” ― Claude Cahun
This week Google honored the 127th birthday of surrealist photographer Claude Cahun (pronounced: caAH) as a Google Doodle. The doodle draws on a series of self-portraits of one of the precursors of the LBGTQ+ community.
Singular plural
Born Lucy Schwob in Nantes, France, Claude Cahun adopted her new name to proclaim her androgyny and to pursue work in photography, performance art and writing. Her parents were successful writers which provided her with the support to live without working for income. She met her life companion in 1909. Suanne Malherbe, better known as Marcel Moore an artist, illustrator and designer became Cahun’s collaborator and her lover. They were romantic and artistic partners. Many of Cahun’s works were collaborations with Moore. In a strange twist, they became stepsisters when Cahun’s father married Moore’s mother in 1917.
The pair called their partnership “singular plural” according to an article by Kerry Manders in the Lens section of The New York Times on July 21, 2014.
“I have come to view the oeuvre attributed to Cahun,” said Tirza True Latimer, Associate Professor at California College of the Arts in San Francisco, “as the product of a collaboration in which she imagined, composed, performed, and her partner Marcel Moore envisioned, visualized, imaged.” The opening photo, bottom row, first image, is a pair of portraits in a mirror with Marcel Moore in the one on the left and Claude Cahun shown in the one on the right. That image is one of the ones recreated in the doodle.
Living in Paris
Cahun and Moore lived in Paris from 1919 to 1937. They worked in the surrealist art movement. They used their unique, at the time, take on sexuality and gender identity as subjects for their photography and writing.
As Hitler came to power, the couple moved to St Brelade’s Bay in the Balliwick of Jersey on the coast of France for the duration of Germany’s occupation where they were active in the resistance. They were captured by the Nazis and sentenced to death in 1944. Their sentences were commuted to life in prison. They were freed when World War II ended in 1945.
Self portraits
Claude Cahun’s main body of work features herself as the subject of numerous “autoportraits.” The opening photo shows Claude’s self-portraiture over a period of 27 years. Top row, L-R, the photos were made in these years respectively: 1929, 1932, 1920, 1945. Bottom row, L-R, 1928, 1928, 1928, 1928, 1947.
Each one has a different style, look and meaning from Claude as Belle in “Barbe Blue” (opening photo, top row, first photo,) to four surreal images of herself (opening photo, top and bottom row, fourth and fifth images.)
Exhibitions
Claude Cahun never promoted her work or sold it. Since she and Moore were independent financially, their collaboration was for self expression. Long after her death in the 1990s, her work received a lot of attention. A New York curator and critic of photography, Vince Aletti said her work “Suddenly seemed incredibly of the moment.”
A museum in Paris held an exhibition organized in part by François Leperlier who published a book on her called Claude Cahun: Masks and Metamorphoses.”
Since 2019, Cahun’s photographs have appeared in group shows in over 10 museums including London’s Tate as well as in Warsaw, San Francisco, Melbourne, Washington and Paris.
“In Cahun you’ve got an artist who turns the camera on themselves to see who else they can become,” said David J. Getsy, a professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago who specializes in gender and sexuality in art. “Isn’t that what we’re all doing now with cellphone photos? This is one reason young people might see themselves in Cahun.”
Street named for the couple
In 2018 Paris’ city council named a street in the French capital’s sixth district that includes its Latin Quarter, Allée Claude Cahun et Marcel Moore. According to Jersey Heritage, a newspaper in the Balliwick of Jersey a channel island off the coast of France, “It is only right that both Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore have been recognized together, as the one would not have existed without the other.”
Together forever
Claude Cahun died in 1954. Marcel Moore died in 1972. They are buried together in the churchyard next to their home. They share a tombstone engraved with their birth names and a pair of Stars of David.
Sources: Lens: New York Times, Project Muse, New York Times, Jersey Evening Post.
Inspirational photographers’ stories are in On Photography.
Memorable people. And I’ll bet they’d have been fun to know.