Claude Cahun

(France, 25/10/1894 - 08/12/1954)

Born Lucy Schwob in Nantes, France, Cahun, was a pioneering photographer, writer and performance artist whose radical self-portraits and gender-defying persona anticipated many of the concerns central to contemporary art. Throughout her life, Cahun challenged the conventions of identity, sexuality and representation, forging a body of work that continues to resonate with artists and activists alike.

Cahun was born into an intellectually engaged, Jewish family who were deeply involved in the literary and publishing world and this early exposure to the avant-garde scene fostered her creative ambitions. Cahun began experimenting with photography and writing as a teenager and, by the early 1910s, she had adopted the gender-neutral pseudonym "Claude Cahun", signaling her rejection of traditional gender binaries and artistic expectations.

In 1919, Cahun formed a lifelong romantic and artistic partnership with Suzanne Malherbe, who worked under the name Marcel Moore, and together they cultivated a collaborative practice that blurred distinctions between author and subject. In 1920s Paris, the pair became closely associated with the Surrealist movement, yet Cahun’s introspective and conceptual approach gave her a distinctive autonomy within Surrealism.

Created primarily between the 1910s and 1930s, Cahun’s self-portrait photographs constitute her most enduring contribution to twentieth-century art. In these staged, meticulously composed images she adopts a series of shifting personae - androgynous figures, theatrical characters and uncanny masks. Through costume, gesture and gaze, Cahun explored the instability of identity and the performative nature of selfhood, prefiguring later feminist and queer critiques of representation. Her declaration, "Under this mask, another mask; I will never be finished removing all these faces", encapsulates her lifelong interrogation of authenticity and artifice.

Beyond photography, Cahun was an accomplished writer. Her 1930 book Aveux non avenus (Disavowals or Cancelled Confessions) merged literary poetry and visual photomontages into a single, multifaceted inquiry in an experimental meditation on the self and society.

In 1937, Cahun and Moore relocated to the island of Jersey where their lives took on a new political dimension. During the German occupation of the Channel Islands in World War II, they engaged in a covert resistance campaign, producing and distributing anti-Nazi propaganda at great personal risk. Arrested by the Gestapo in 1944, they narrowly escaped execution and were released after the liberation of Jersey in 1945. The psychological and physical toll of imprisonment, however, affected Cahun’s health for the remainder of her life.

Rediscovered in the late twentieth century, Cahun’s oeuvre has gained recognition for its prescient engagement with issues of identity, gender fluidity, self-representation and artistic autonomy. Today, her work occupies a vital position in the history of modern art, bridging Surrealism, performance and queer theory, and continuing to inspire new generations to question the boundaries of identity and image.

Image: Claude Cahun (Lucy Schwob), Marcel Moore (Suzanne Malherbe) Untitled (c.1925). Gelatin silver print, 10.3 x 7.4 cm. Museum of Modern Art, U.S.A.