Claude Cahun lived their life in a spirit of rebellion and defiance. From their precocious teenage years as Lucie Schwob, defying conventional ideals of beauty and femininity with their shaven head and male attire, to their direct resistance of German occupying forces, they actively worked against the suppression of liberty and freedom—a life of resistance.

Claude Cahun created some of the most startlingly original and enigmatic photographic images of the twentieth century. Prefiguring by over 70 years many of the concerns expressed by artists today, the importance of their work is increasingly recognized. 

Cahun was born as Lucie Schwob on October 25, 1894, in Nantes in Northern France. They came from a wealthy, interfaith family of intellectuals and authors. Their Jewish father, Maurice Schwob, was the director of the regional newspaper Le Phare de la Loire. Cahun had a difficult relationship with their Catholic mother, Mary-Antoinette Courbebaisse, who seemed to have a personality disorder leading to her being in and out of mental institutions. Cahun’s vague memories convey a sense of a mother disappointed by their child’s lack of “conventional” beauty and outward Jewish appearance. 

Because of Mary-Antoinette’s illness and eventual hospitalization, Cahun was sent to live first with their paternal aunt Marguerite and then with their paternal grandmother Mathilde. Cahun attended school in Nantes and learned classical literature from their grandmother, but they were bullied in school, perhaps because of anti-Semitism heightened by the Dreyfus Affair. Eventually Cahun was sent to Parsons Mead School in Surrey, England, returning to school in Nantes in 1908. 

In 1909, fifteen-year-old Lucie met seventeen-year-old Suzanne Malherbe, who was to become their lifelong companion and lover. Malherbe worked as a graphic artist under the pseudonym Marcel Moore. In 1917, Cahun’s divorced father married Moore’s widowed mother, Marie Malherbe. This entwining of the two families facilitated the children’s artistic collaborations and provided a cover for their intimate relationship. Cahun called Moore “L’Autre Moi”–the other me. For a time, Cahun and Moore lived together in an apartment in Nantes. 

In 1918, Cahun left Nantes to study Philosophy and Letters in Paris. That year they also adopted the surname of their great uncle Léon Cahun, an Orientalist and novelist. They had previously adopted the names of Claude Courlis and Daniel Douglas before settling on Claude Cahun. In 1920, Cahun and Moore reunited in Paris. In the vibrant Paris of the 1920s, they mixed with Surrealist artists and political activists.

Cahun was knowledgeable about contemporary theories on homosexuality. In many of their images Cahun seems to strip themself not only of all female characteristics, but of all gender characteristics. In their androgynous images, they seem to be questioning the definition of lesbian as a woman who desires a woman, as this definition only works if the subject identifies themself as a woman. In their 1930 autobiography Aveux non Avenus, (loosely translated as Disavowals), Cahun wrote: “Masculine, Feminine? That depends upon the occasion. Neuter is the only gender that invariably suits me. If it existed in our language one would not observe this oscillation in my thinking.” 

In a self-portrait done around 1920, Cahun stands in profile. They are turned away from the camera, their shaved head half turned towards the camera. The backdrop is dark and the stark lighting bleaches their skin, emphasizing their prominent nose, chin, and pointed ear, which contrast with their hollow eyes. In this image, Cahun challenges conventional ideals of feminine beauty and presents their own version of beauty, which is both attracting and repelling. This image embodies and projects many of the prevailing fears and anxieties of society. Cahun presented a myriad of personae and performed gender in their self-portraits, highlighting the constructed nature of self-identity and questioning the social constructs around the assignment of particular characteristics to genders. Society identified Cahun as a woman, and they were a lesbian and Jewish, and as such their own identity was particularly dictated by existing social labels and stereotypes. But for Cahun, this offered the opportunity to radically reconfigure their socially dictated stereotype. In his writing, which Cahun translated into English, Havelock Ellis (1859-1939) suggested that there was a third sex—uniting both male and female traits, but existing as neither. Ellis wrote many early studies on human sexuality and gender. While Ellis considered this third sex a pathology, to Cahun it was a way of representing themself outside the normal constraints of gender.

In another self-portrait dating from the same period, Cahun makes multiple references to popular pastimes, such as boxing and matinee theatre. Costumed in boxer shorts, wrist guards, and a leotard inscribed with hearts and the statement “I AM IN TRAINING DON’T KISS ME,” Cahun balances weights bearing the names of comic heroes Totor and Popol, characters created by Herge, writer of the Tin Tin series. They preen for the camera in a manner that accentuates signs of hyper-femininity—paste-on nipples, painted lips, love hearts on their cheeks, lacquered-down spit curls. Training for what? To become a woman? To unbecome one? Training to be a lesbian? They are hyper-feminine, but the breasts are flat, almost asexual. Their upper body is turned, almost flauntingly, to the viewer, but their lower body is turned away, their legs firmly crossed.

In 1929 Cahun joined the obscure theater group Le Plateau, directed by Pierre Albert-Birot. Albert-Birot instructed his actors to paint their faces into expressionless masks and trained them to strip their lines to their essence, so that the words became “white” and the phrasing “monotonous.” Dramatic gesture was to be stripped of all embellishment and was to be firm, legible, and rigorous. In 1929 Cahun played the character of Elle in the play Barbe bleue. Their body language as they pose for the Barbe bleue photos conveys something of the choreographic precision that Albert-Birot demanded from his cast. Le Plateau survived for only one season; usually the performers outnumbered the audience.

Classical and biblical figures were a constant theme in Cahun’s work. In the 1920s they wrote “Heroines,” fifteen monologues based on famous women from the Bible, Greek myth, Western children’s literature, and popular culture. (These stories remained unpublished and today only exist in manuscript form.) The characters present counter-examples to stereotypical myths of feminine behavior, disrupting culturally established norms. Cahun situates these women in the twentieth century, demonstrating the endurance of old myths concerning femininity. But Cahun subverts these traditional female roles by allowing their characters to acquire self-consciousness, which leads them down paths very different from dominant cultural narratives. In Cahun’s hands, Cinderella’s Prince, for example, is really a shoe fetishist and was certainly not charming.

Masks were a constant and repeated device in Cahun’s work. In their 1930 autobiography Aveux non Avenus, they wrote: “Under this mask, another mask. I will never finish removing all these masks.” In a portrait from around 1928, most likely by Marcel Moore, Cahun is masked or obscured but also naked and exposed. They sit on a quilt, whose shapes attractively echo the shape of their body; their arms protectively cover their breasts. Here, Cahun’s hair is cut short and they have positioned themselves symmetrically on the quilt. The image is flooded with soft light. There is a slight shadow in the bottom right corner, probably of the photographer. The photographer’s shadow is a repeated occurrence in Cahun’s work, so much so that it appears purposeful, not accidental. Usually, the shadow appears at the bottom right corner, where we are accustomed to seeing the artist’s signature. Moore’s inclusion in the photograph, via the shadow, is almost an acknowledgement of their presence. The repeated doubling and mirroring characteristics of Cahun’s art seem to be an artistic manifestation of the “other me”— Marcel Moore. The shadow of the photographer reminds us that there is an observer, another person involved with the making of the photograph, and a person who will look at it once the image was made.

Cahun launched Aveux non Avenus (published by Editions du Carrefour) in 1930 at  Librarie José Corti, Paris. The bookshop held a mini exhibition of the photo collages used to illustrate the book. A photograph was chosen to represent the book—a sort of author photograph. This image shows Cahun, hair cropped short, wearing a masculine chequered jacket, looking away from a mirror. The image both invokes and rejects traditional associations with self-reflection. It reminds us of traditional images of women at their toilette and connects with Narcissus, a strong theme in Aveux non Avenus. However, as with their female heroines in the “Heroines” manuscript, Cahun did not simply repeat the story of Narcissus but rather attempted to explore it and rewrite its meanings, questioning notions of artistic creativity, femininity, and sexuality associated with the myth. This image of Cahun is almost anti-Narcissistic in its effect; there is a disruption between the self reflected in the mirror, captured second-hand by the camera (physically exposed, unaware, seemingly lost in contemplation) and the self captured directly by the camera (self-possessed, meeting the camera’s gaze head-on). The image of an androgynous Cahun rejects the traditional image of femininity preening before the mirror, enticing the viewer.

In many ways, Cahun’s defiance was largely publicly unacknowledged until relatively late in life. Their theatrical performances had received little public accolade and were short-lived. The outpourings of their subconscious mind, as dramatized in their autobiography Aveux non Avenus, had received little success in terms of sales or acclaim, even among their friends. Their unhappiness with not being a respected player in the artistic and political Parisian scene, and their wish to move away from the spread of Fascism across Europe, may have been why they moved in 1937 with Marcel Moore to Jersey, a place they had known from happy childhood holidays, perhaps to lick their wounds in an unthreatening secure environment. The couple were at first cocooned in a safe haven in their house La Rocquaise in St Brelade’s Bay, surrounded by many French-speaking, mostly wealthy people, probably living off family money, beside the beach amidst beautiful wooded surroundings and next door to the medieval parish church.

The arrival of German occupying forces in 1940 jolted Cahun and Moore out of their sleepy idyll and drove them into dangerous resistance activities, which could have ultimately led to their deaths—especially courageous as Cahun had been born into a Jewish family, although they did not declare themselves as Jewish as required by German order in October 1940. Not content to sit back and watch as the Island was taken over, Cahun and Moore created a two-person resistance campaign bent on inciting rebellion and dissension among German troops. They created the persona of “Der Soldat Ohne Namen” (The Soldier Without a Name), cast as a mysterious German soldier intent on inspiring rebellion from within the army by pointing out the idiocy of war and ridiculing the actions of the German commanders. These inflammatory words were typed onto sheets of tissue paper and either posted through the windows of German staff cars or left in cigarette packets in the hope that someone would pick them up looking for an increasingly scarce smoke. 

Cahun and Moore would catch the bus into the main town on the Island, St Helier, disguised as little old ladies to blend in with the crowd and deliver their propaganda messages. After four years of this subversive activity, they were caught and arrested in July 1944 and charged with listening to the BBC and inciting the troops to rebellion. It took some time for the German authorities to bring the case to trial, mainly because they simply couldn’t believe that two old ladies could carry out this level of activity without the help of at least one man. (They were only in their early 50s, but being seen as “old” was part of the disguise.) During their interrogation Cahun declared that they were, by their father, of Jewish origin.

In the meantime, German supply routes to northern French ports had been cut off by Allied advances, depriving Jersey of food and supplies but also preventing people from being deported from the Island to death camps in Europe. Cahun and Moore were sentenced to six years imprisonment for listening to the BBC, and to death for inciting rebellion. With typical dry humour, Cahun asked which sentence was to be carried out first. They refused to ask for leniency, but the Bailiff of Jersey and the French Consul pleaded on their behalf and the death sentences were commuted, although without Cahun and Moore’s knowledge or agreement. For Cahun and Moore an execution in the cause of freedom and resistance would have been a fitting end to a life lived in the spirit of defiance. They were the last prisoners to be released from prison just before Jersey’s Liberation on May 9, 1945. A fellow prisoner, a German soldier, gave Cahun the badges from his uniform. It is one of these, the “dirty bird” as it was known, that they clutch defiantly between their teeth in an image that is perhaps the culmination of their life of defiance. It is evocative of so much of Cahun’s life—their rebelliousness and scorn for oppressive authority, whether it be telling them what to look like, what was beautiful, how to think, what to feel or who to love. 

Following the end of World War II, Cahun and Moore remained in Jersey and repaired their house. Weakened by war-time suicide attempts, Cahun died in Jersey on December 8, 1954. Moore committed suicide in 1972.