Claude Cahun: a lesbian surrealist artist in Paris

Résumé du document

Claude Cahun was a French artist, writer, poet, and photographer. Her work was personal and political and played with the concepts of gender roles. Her writings suggested she identified as agender, but most academics who wrote about her use feminine pronouns to talk about her and her work. She was a lesbian, from a bourgeois and Jewish background. Through art she interrogated her relationship with the world and with her own identity. The work of Cahun questioned the link between words and images, bodies, sex and social representations, subjects and identity.

Extraits

[...] In 1930 she published Aveux non-avenus, a book of essays and recorded dreams illustrated with photomontages by Marcel Moore. It was a type of autobiography that Cahun called an “anti-memoir”, where she explains how she discovered who she is. The book is full of contradictions, incoherence and self-doubts, that show the struggle of knowing and understanding herself. This collaboration was a way to escape to the triple role assigned to women in the surrealist movement: “muse – model – mistress”. From 1927 to 1930, Claude Cahun also wrote plays (published in 2002 in Ecrits). [...]

[...] Claude Cahun: a lesbian surrealist artist in Paris Claude Cahun was a French artist, writer, poet, and photographer. Her work was personal and political and played with the concepts of gender roles. Her writings suggested she identified as agender, but most academics who wrote about her use feminine pronouns to talk about her and her work. She was a lesbian, from a bourgeois and Jewish background. Through art she interrogated her relationship with the world and with her own identity. [...]

[...] She wrote in favour of the surrealist and avant-garde approach of letting the unconscious guide artistic practice. In 1934, she participated in an exhibition of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, which exhibited Cahun's photographic self-portraits from 1927-47, where she represented herself as a dandy, skinhead and androgyne, model, soldier and nymph. She also shows herself as pierrot, circus weightlifter wearing a T-shirt “Don't kiss me, I'm training”, a race- driver ” In thoses auto-portraits she was reinvented her gender identity. [...]

[...] For example, the surrealist circle around Breton and Aragon was homophobic. C. Artistic collaboration Cahun and Moore lived and worked together. The emblematic “Autoportrait” of Claude Cahun, with short hair and a checkered jacket, is very linked the auto portrait of Suzanne Malherbe, made the same year. They are different but complementary. They collaborated on various sculptures, collages, photomontages and written works. Both of them published articles and novels, notably in the periodical ‘Mercure de France”. In Claude Cahun published her first collaboration with Malherbe, a piece titled Vues et visions (“Views and Visions”) to the literary journal Mercure de France. [...]

[...] Claude Cahun's artistic work A. Self-portraits She made her first photographic self-portraits in 1912-1913, when she was 18 and continued taking images of herself through the 1930's. In those portraits she used herself as a subject, and exanimated gender. She took the gender-neutral forename Claude, and shaved her head to reject social constructions of gender and sexual identity. To her, identity was unstable and mutable: it is why she represented herself sometimes as a man, sometimes as a woman, sometimes as thoroughly androgynous. [...]