appear next to photomontages that were created
with her partner, Suzanne Malherbe (alias Marcel
Moore). In it she writes:
I’ve spent my solitary hours disguising my soul. The
masks were so perfect that whenever they crossed
paths along the great square of my conscience they did
not recognize each other. Tempted by their comic ugli-
ness, I tried on the worst instincts; I adopted, I raised in
me young monsters. But the makeup I had used could
not be washed away. I scrubbed myself to remove the
skin. And my soul, like a face flayed alive, no longer had
a human form.
Born Lucy Schob in 1894, the daughter of the
publisher Maurice Schwob in Nantes, France,
Cahun grew up in an intellectual Jewish bourgeois
family. Her grandfather and then her father pub-
lished the regional newspaperLe Phare de la Loire,
and her uncle Marcel Schwob was the founder of the
prestigious newspaperMercure de Franceand also a
symbolist writer who had an early influence. After
studies in Nantes and Oxford, England, in 1914
Cahun studied philology and philosophy at the Sor-
bonne, Paris, and published her first article, ‘‘Vues
et visions,’’ inMercure de Franceunder the pseudo-
nym Claude Courlis; after adopting a number of
other pseudonyms, including Daniel Douglas, she
began calling herself the gender-ambiguous Claude
Cahun in 1917, and began her lifetime relationship
with her stepsister Suzanne Malherbe in 1919. Their
apartment in Montparnasse became a meeting place
of Paris bohemians.
Malherbe was a frequent collaborator as well;
between 1929 and 1930, they created ten photo
collages that divided the accompanying text into
panels. This work reached back into a bank of self-
portraits that Cahun used as a sort of self-refer-
ence. In these collages, she is working through the
fragmentation of the body—mostly faces, but
often hands, arms, legs, and eyes—that float in
the black visual space. The collaboration between
Malherbe and Cahun also allegedly extended to
many self-portraits in which Malherbe operated
the shutter release.
That Cahun’s work circles around the issue of
self-identity was surely influenced by the fact that
the patriarchal structure of society did not provide
a role for a lesbian Jew. The typical role of the
female artist in surrealism was that of model,
muse, and lover of male artists. However, in the
lesbian subculture of Paris in the 1920s, Cahun
found support and also a forum for her works,
which to that point in her life had never been
exhibited. She became friends with the writers and
editors Adrienne Monnier, proprietor of the book-
store La Maison des Amis des Livres, a favorite
meeting place for the Parisian literary community,
and Sylvia Beach, a prominent lesbian expatriate
and owner of the English-language Paris bookstore
Shakespeare and Company.
The 1930s led to increased politicization of
Cahun’s art, and she entered public life as an acti-
vist. In 1932, she met Andre ́Breton and, alarmed
by the growing fascist movement, joined for a short
while L’Association des E ́crivains et Artistes Re ́vo-
lutionnaires (AEAR), a group of revolutionary
artists. After a disagreement in 1933 between the
organization and the surrealists, whose art was
deemed in conflict with the aesthetic line of the
Communist International, she left the group and
formulated her critique of it in ‘‘Les Paris sont
ouverts’’ (translated as Place Your Bets The Parises
are Open; 1934). Here, she warned that blind party
loyalty would impoverish poetry. In the same year,
she became a member of the antifascist political
coalition Contre-Attaque, founded by Georges
Bataille and Andre ́Breton. In the 1930s, she main-
tained loose contact with the surrealists and signed
onto most of their declarations.
During her collaboration with the surrealists in
the mid-1930s, she produced works that she exhib-
ited in 1936 as part of the Exposition surre ́aliste
d’objets in Paris and London. In conjunction with
this, she published the text ‘‘Prenez garde aux objets
domestiques’’ (Beware of Household Objects) in
Cahiers d’Art. She also created a series of surrealist
objects by assembling photographic tableaux, in
which numerous artificial human substitutes, such
as mannequins, marionettes, and dolls self-made
from newspaper, were arranged on a surface with
everyday objects. She created the seriesPoupe ́e,
which displayed a soldier made from the newspaper
L’Humanite ́, the central organ of the French Com-
munist Party, and critically reflected on the position
of the Communist Party during the Spanish Civil
War. She staged another series with wooden mar-
ionettes that she arranged in a scene beneath a glass
bell jar.
In 1937, to escape the looming Nazi threat, she
moved with Malherbe to the Isle of Jersey, Eng-
land; she illustrated a collection of poetry for chil-
dren by Lise Deharme, Le Coeur de Pic(Pic’s
Heart), with still-life photographs resembling
tableaux. During the Nazi occupation of France,
Cahun and Malherbe were suspected of spreading
antifascist propaganda and in 1944 were impri-
soned, condemned to death, and remained in aCAHUN, CLAUDE