Masculine? Feminine? It depends on the situation. Neuter is the only gender that always suits me.
This exploration of gender was a recurring theme throughout Cahun’s body of work.
Expression and Photography
Born into a well-off family with deep literary traditions, Cahun contributed to many French publications throughout their life.Taking their first self-portrait in the early 1910s allowed the artist to examine and experiment with gender. Around this time, Cahun tried out various pseudonyms before settling on Claude Cahun – using their grandmother’s maiden name thereby embracing their Jewish heritage while rejecting their father’s prestige.
After attending Sorbonne University, Cahun and Moore settled in Paris together and began hosting artistic and literary ‘salons’ in their shared home.
Attendees included the likes of André Breton, Sylvia Beach and Man Ray. Cahun was also actively involved in the Surrealist movement, founded by Breton, through writing, photography, and theatre. Though a male-dominated group, they were politically aligned with Cahun who drafted texts for and exhibited with them.
Gender
Yet, it is the question of gender that Cahun is most recognised for tackling today. Cahun’s self-portraits document their experimentation with gender expression. Donning clothing, makeup and props, they portrayed a cast of characters, blending and subverting masculine and feminine elements. In one of Cahun’s best-known images, their dark fringe is styled into two curls over their forehead reminiscent of a moustache.
Referencing the strongman archetype, Cahun’s pose and costume are at once coquettish and mocking, juxtaposing masculine and feminine stereotypes.
In another well-known, albeit much less theatrical portrait, Cahun poses in front of a mirror – often thought to represent duality and introspection. Mirrors are also associated with vanity, however, in this image, Cahun is turned away from the mirror, looking directly at the viewer as their reflection peers out and away. Here, the artist is bare-faced and has closely cropped hair. The ‘real’ Cahun shields themselves with the lapels of their coat looking vulnerable while their reflection confidently gazes beyond the mirror with their neck purposefully exposed.
Their exploration of gender was not limited to photography. In 1925, Cahun wrote Héroines (Heroines) as a collection of monologues told from the point of view of famous women in literature and history, including Helen of Troy and Sappho. Cahun’s most infamous literary work was the 1930 ‘anti-memoir’ Disavowals. This was a collaboration with Moore that included photomontages and an experimental writing style through which the artist grappled with their own identity and place in the world, including allusions to gender dysphoria. They also translated the sexologist Havelock Ellis’s The Task of Social Hygiene (1912) into French, giving it the subtitle The Woman in Society.
Activism
Claude Cahun’s life and art were filled with resistance and defiance. The artist’s shaved head was a clear rejection of the strict gender norms at the time. Discourses surrounding gender and sexuality did not exist in Cahun’s time as they do now, making Cahun and Moore important examples of gender expression and queer relationships. But gender norms were not the only thing Cahun and Moore resisted.
Cahun was of Jewish descent and, in 1937, moved to the island of Jersey together with Moore to escape mounting fascism in mainland Europe. There, they lived together with their cats spending their days making art. However, Nazi occupation brought this idyllic lifestyle to an end. Instead of being evacuated to England, Cahun and Moore embarked on an underground resistance campaign. They wrote leaflets mocking the Nazi regime and lamenting the futility of the war which they signed ‘der Soldat ohne Namen’ (The Nameless Soldier) and left tucked into cigarette packets or under windshield wipers where German soldiers might find them.
They were eventually caught for these activities in 1944 and imprisoned then sentenced to death. They managed to evade this fate when the island was liberated in 1945, and Cahun was subsequently awarded the Medal of French Gratitude in 1951 for their acts of resistance.
Sadly, much of Cahun’s work was lost or destroyed during their prosecution. Their work and their collaborations with Moore were also largely written out of art history until the late 1980s and early 1990s when there was a sudden surge of interest in their art and lives. In 2007, David Bowie curated a multi-media exhibition of Cahun’s work for the Highline Festival in New York and in 2018, Paris named a street in honour of Cahun and Moore. Though often unappreciated and unacknowledged during their own lifetime, queer artists like Claude Cahun have existed throughout history. Thanks to greater awareness and research efforts, we can now celebrate Cahun’s artistry and bravery as an activist and queer icon.
The DE-BIAS project aims to highlight underrepresented voices as a starting point to recontextualise contentious cultural heritage collections. Through co-creation events, crowdsourcing initiatives, the creation of a vocabulary and knowledge graph of contentious terms, and the creation of an online tool to detect biased terms in cultural heritage metadata, DE-BIAS aims to help the cultural heritage sector into the postcolonial era.