Claude Cahun

Claude Cahun (1894–1954) was the pseudonym of Lucy Schwob, a French artist, photographer, and writer born in Nantes into a Jewish literary family. She studied at the University of Paris and the University of Oxford, and from the early 1920s lived and worked with her lifelong partner Marcel Moore (born Suzanne Malherbe), with whom all her major work was created in close collaboration.

Cahun's practice centered on photography and writing — above all on the photographic self-portrait as a medium for the sustained questioning of fixed identity: sexual, gendered, social. Across hundreds of images made over several decades, she presented herself in states of masquerade, transformation, and ambiguity, refusing any stable image of selfhood. Aveux non avenus (1930), a photo-illustrated book produced with Moore, assembles these images alongside a non-linear text that refuses the conventions of autobiography. She joined the Surrealist movement in the early 1930s and exhibited alongside its members, though her practice remained singular. During the German Occupation, she and Moore conducted a sustained campaign of anti-Nazi propaganda, producing and distributing anonymous leaflets and objects aimed at demoralizing German soldiers. They were arrested by the Gestapo in 1944 and sentenced to death; liberation came before the sentence could be carried out.

Largely unknown during her lifetime, Cahun was the subject of a major critical rediscovery beginning in the 1990s. Retrospectives have been held at the Jeu de Paume in Paris (2011) and at the Tate Modern, and her work is now held by the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate, and major international collections.