Self-Portrait

Author: Marijke Peyser

This 1929 self-portrait shows Claude Cahun in the role of Elle, Bluebeard’s wife from the fairy tale of the same name.^[1] In the photograph Cahun is made up; her eyes are expressionless, her lips compressed. This photo can be linked to the activities of Cahun and her lover and stepsister Marcel Moore (pseudonym of Suzanne Malherbe) in experimental theatre. At the end of the 1920s they were both members of Le Plateau, an avant-garde drama group led by Pierre Albert-Birot, whose work was strongly influenced by Japanese and Chinese theatre. His actors were given express instructions to make their faces up as masks and confine the spoken word to the essential. This photograph can be seen as a two-dimensional mise en scène that enabled Cahun to disguise herself and assume another identity. She herself said: ‘The happiest moments of my life? Dreams. Imagining that I am someone else. Playing my favourite role’.^[2]

It is not easy to place Cahun’s self-portraits in art history. The first Surrealists – André Breton and Benjamin Péret – preferred to see women as ‘femmes enfant’, passive and kind, a creature that made man complete, was brought to life by him and inspired him.^[3] Female artists perceived this attitude as restrictive.^[4] They strove for social and sexual freedom, and asked themselves what their role was in a world dominated by male artists. Leonor Fini, Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo and Dorothea Tanning all explored this in their work. As a rule their canvases contain a self-portrait, whereas artists like Max Ernst and René Magritte depicted themselves through an alter ego – Loplop for Ernst and the man in the bowler hat for Magritte. In this context Cahun’s photos have a special status: she was the first female photographer who almost exclusively made self-portraits in which she assumed various identities and addressed gender-related issues.

Breton disliked homosexuality, but the inclinations of lesbian women were tolerated in Surrealist circles. The friendship and collaboration between Breton and Cahun are evidence that she occupied a special place in the group. Both were members of the Association des Ecrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires, a society of writers and artists that opposed the rising tide of Fascism between 1932 and 1939. In 1936 Breton and Cahun travelled to London for the International Surrealist Exhibition in the New Burlington Galleries, with which Breton was closely involved. With the acquisition of two of her photographic works in 1996, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen contributed to the rightful reassessment of this Surrealist artist, who was regarded by her contemporaries as one of their own.