Self-Portrait

Author: Marijke Peyser

Lucy Schwob’s parents were well-to-do French-Jewish intellectuals.^[1] The anti-Semitism that prevailed in France around the turn of the century prompted her father to send Lucy to an English boarding school.^[2] When she returned home in 1909 she met Suzanne Malherbe; this was the start of a lifelong love affair. In 1917 they even became stepsisters, when her father married Malherbe’s mother. From 1917 onwards Lucy Schwob used the pseudonym Claude Cahun and in 1930 Suzanne used the pseudonym Marcel Moore for the publication of Aveux non avenus, the book they wrote together.^[3] The use of a male pseudonym reflected the questioning of gender definitions in Cahun’s oeuvre.

Cahun’s earliest photographic self-portraits date from 1911. Although she attached the most importance to her literary activities, her photographic self-portraits were ultimately what brought her great recognition. In them she always took on different roles – an Oriental beauty in Self-Portrait (c. 1911) and a political activist in Humanité figure (Poupée) (1936).^[4] She also took on the guise of a weightlifter, a sailor and a Buddhist monk.^[5] The photographic self-portraits were originally intended as private documents.^[6] They only came to the attention of the general public in the 1990s after a number of exhibitions and the publication of François Leperlier’s oeuvre catalogue Claude Cahun: l’écart et la métamorphose (1992).

In the photographic self-portraits Cahun examined her identity and created a personal world in which she was free of social and religious norms and values. The masks and disguises gave her the freedom to assume different identities.^[7] In the self-portrait shown here Cahun stands in front of a multi-coloured curtain, wrapped in a dark cape with a hood that almost entirely covers her body. Masks are affixed to the cape here and there. According to Cahun, every mask concealed another mask, although she would never succeed in ‘lifting’ all those faces.^[8]

Cahun wrote, published, made Surrealist objects, acted and designed costumes for a number of plays (see Self-Portrait). In 1932 she became a member of the Association des Ecrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires, which had been founded not long before. In this originally Russian group of revolutionary writers and artists, who opposed the rise of Fascism, she met André Breton, Max Ernst and René Crevel. Influenced by Tristan Tzara, Salvador Dalí and Man Ray, Cahun began to concentrate on making Surrealist objects, which she showed at the Exposition surréaliste d’objets staged by Breton in May 1936.