The Surrealists certainly didn’t shy away from metamorphosis. Salvador Dali’s The Persistence of Memory, with its dream-like desert scene, clocks melting and bending into the indistinct earth, remains one of the most enduring images from the early years of the movement. The Spanish innovator is instantly recognised by his eerie and ethereal paintings and of course, that ubiquitous moustache. At the same time there was a master of disguise quietly climbing through the ranks of the crowded surrealist scene in France. Claude Cahun refused to stay silent for long.
Born Lucy Schwob in Nantes at the turn of the twentieth century, the accomplished artist gained renown for her shape-shifting persona and the multiple aliases she assumed. From ‘Daniel Douglas’, drawing inspiration from the English author Lord Alfred Bruce Douglas, famously the lover of Oscar Wilde, to ‘The Unnamed Soldier’, an anti-Nazi propagandist on Jersey during the Second World War, Cahun was a chameleon.
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Just as irreverence and subversion characterised her photography and writing, frequent physical transformations ensured that she and her work consistently escaped comprehensive definition or the constraints of a fixed genre. Ever the enigma, Cahun revelled in reinvention, casting herself as the lead role in the series of self-portraits that she assembled into montages over the course of several decades. She makes the effortless transition from a shaven-headed gamine to a strikingly made-up Marlene Dietrich look-alike, never failing to surprise the viewer with her refusals of consistency and convention. It is for this reason that Cahun is widely credited for her defiance of traditional gender norms; her playful approach to the expression of the non-binary aspect of her self succeeded in rooting her firmly in the canon of intersectional feminist art.
Among her most well-known works is I am in training. Do not kiss me, an image which depicts her resting a pair of weights on her shoulders, sporting a slicked-back cowlick hairstyle and the melancholic gaze of a Pierrot clown. Adopting a role commonly perceived to be masculine while retaining some feminine aspects of her appearance, Cahun refutes the idea that gender identity is permanent, restrictive and assigned at birth, instead favouring flux and transience.
As well as conquering the visual arts with her creativity, Claude Cahun’s forays into prose were equally experimental. 1925’s Heroines was a tongue-in-cheek take on the presentation of female characters in myth and fantasy, rewritten to reflect the pressures of the contemporary period. Cahun inherited this voracious appetite for literature from her family, and found a supporter and collaborator in Suzanne Malherbe, who was to become her lover. The years that followed Cahun and Malherbe’s move to the Channel Islands were marred by the repercussions of their political engagement: they were imprisoned and sentenced to death by German forces prior to their eventual liberation. Cahun was tormented by her arrest and harrowing detainment until her death in 1954, and put her work on hold. Now, over a century after she began, Cahun’s oeuvre remains just as modern and influential as ever.
