Claude Cahun : l'exotisme intérieur - LEPERLIER François

Résumé du document

Claude Cahun was born Lucy Schwob in Nantes the 25th of October 1894, in an upper-class intellectual family. She is the daughter of Maurice Schwob, a republican, patriot, progressive and anticlerical man, who directed the newspaper Le Phare de la Loire, and of Marie Antoinette Courbebaisse. She is from a Jewish family, even if she did not believe in god. She had a brother, Georges, who was born in 1888. Her mother was hospitalised for psychiatric trouble when she was young. She suffered from the absence of her mother, considered as a shame by her family, which tried to hide the situation from the rest of the world.

In 1917, her father married Marie Eugénie Rondet, a widow, and the mother of Suzanne Malherbe, who will be the life-long partner of Claude Cahun.
Another important figure of her childhood was Marcel Schwob, her uncle, that she did not had time to meet, but who influenced her by his literature.
As she rejected maternity, children and even family, François Leperlier explains that she did not had a happy childhood.

Extraits

[...] Chapter 13: Move in Jersey and beginning of WW2 In March 1937, Claude Cahun and Suzanne Malherbe moved to Jersey, in La Rocquaise. She spent there three quiet and enjoyable years, before the invasion of the German army. She resisted to the occupation, using her artistic gifts. Chapter 14: Resistance, arrest and trial during WW2 In March 1944, Claude Cahun is summoned at the Kommandantur, and is released. But in July 1944, she is arrested with Suzanne Malherbe. This arrest is very late regarding to their 4 years of resistance, but they looked like two old respectable women. [...]

[...] Their true conflict was about politics, because Claude Cahun was engaged in the left side, while Henri Michaux was apolitical. In effect, in 1932, she joined the Association des Ecrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires (A.E.A.R) and in 1934, she published her lampoon Les Paris sont ouverts. She also knew Pierre Morhange, the leader of a group of young intellectuals who published in Philosophies (Henri Lefebvre, Norbert Guterman, Georges Politzer, Georges Friedmann, Charles-Henri Barbier, Emile Benveniste, Gabriel Beauroy, Jean Caves), also engaged in the left-side. [...]

[...] She used a lot of artistic surnames : M., Claude, Courlis, Daniel Douglas (in homage of Oscard Wilde's lover), Claude Schwob, Claude Cahen, Lucie, Lucette, before choosing definitively Claude Cahun in 1917. She choose the surname “Claude” because of his androgyny, his ambiguity which allowed her to use feminine and masculine pronouns in order to scramble gender identification. In 1918, she wrote about a trial engaged after a representation of Salomé, a play of Oscar Wilde. In her article she wrote in favour of the liberty of expression and behaviours. She came back to this theme in 1925 in a survey led by the homosexual newspaper L'Amitié. [...]

[...] Chapter 12 : Photomontage, Objects, and Le Coeur de Pic From 1921 to 1938, Claude Cahun experimented photomontage. She worked on some of them with Suzanne Malherbe, especially to illustrate Aveux non avenus. During the war, she produced leaflets and documents, and used the photomontage technique. She took self-portraits but also took pictures of objects, particularly between 1935 and 1937. She liked to staged dolls and mannequins. She participated in Le Coeur de Pic, in which she putted 22 pictures, alternated with poems from Lise Deharme. [...]

[...] It was a provocative reflexion about literature and poesy. Chapter 10: 1934-1939 From 1934 to 1939, Claude Cahun lived the more enriching year of her artistic and ideological life, with an enrichment of her photographic work, a clarification and radicalisation of her political choices and a fruitful proximity with surrealism and especially with André Breton. She participated in the radical movement Contre-Attaque. She went to the two biggest surrealist exhibition in 1936 in Paris and London. She met Léon Trotski and wrote with him the manifesto “Pour un art révolutionnaire indépendant” in July 1938, which announced the creation of the Fédération Internationale de l'Art Révolutionnaire Indépendant (F.I.A.R.I) which did not had much time to develop. [...]