Only In Dreams

Claude Cahun at Jeu de Paume 24 May - 25 September 2011

“I was right: …art, life: it amounts to the same thing. It belongs to the one who goes the farthest in the dream—or in the nightmare.”

--Heroines, by Claude Cahun

It is generally accepted nowadays that the Surrealists were pretty much a boys-only club.  Girls were allowed primarily only as muses, the female body depicted as dangerous and ideal.  Except to Claude Cahun, a photographer, collagist and writer who existed only as a minor player on the fringe of the movement until the mid-1980s, when Cahun’s work was rediscovered and widely celebrated, Cahun’s photographs on a par with Man Ray, and collages equal to Max Ernst  Unlike Man Ray, Ernst and even Breton, Cahun’s work investigates the female body as a jumping off point to ask larger questions about gender, identity and societal definitions of self.

What made Claude Cahun different from the boys in the club is that she was actually a woman.  Born Lucy Schwob in 1894 to an established intellectual family in Nantes, Lucy was already asking questions about gender and identity by the time she met illustrator Suzanne Malherbe, her lifelong collaborator and partner, at the age of 15.  They published their first collaboration, Vues et Visions, in 1914 and Schwob changed her name to Claude Coulis, a name that served for its androgyny and that she should finally settle into Claude Cahun.  

As early as 1912, Cahun was dressing up, dressing down, shaving her head and eyebrows or pouting in pencil-thin eyebrows and full lips for the camera, her self-portraits playfully questioning and challenging contemporary ideas gender and societal definitions of identity as she embarked on her lifelong pursuit to capture the uncapturable Self.

The Claude Cahun exposition at Jeu de Paume is the most comprehensive retrospective of Cahun’s work in 16 years, and includes , including original letters, political tracts, writings, collages and, of course, photographs.  Notable not only for their subject matter -- pre-dating Yoko Ono, Cindy Sherman and even David Bowie by presenting that artist as the work of art – the photographs are also important for their high level of technical prowess as well.

In 1919, Cahun and Malherbe moved to Paris and met, finally, the Surrealists – a group she at once identified with but remained only the fringes of. Cahun herself claimed to be “born a Surrealist” which, judging by her early writings, illustration and photography, appears to be less a boast than a simple statement of fact.  Cahun produced a large body of writings, photography, drawings and collage, sometimes on her own and sometimes with Malherbe, all the way up to the German occupation of Paris.  She was profiled in the Chicago Tribune European edition (who only referred to her as Ms. Schwob), worked with Breton, Henri Michaux and Robert Desnos and was, as Breton called her, “one of the most curious spirits of our time,” although it is unclear if he meant inquisitive or bizarre.

Frustrated with the Resistance (or lack thereof) in Paris, she and Malherbe retired to Jersey, only to find the island occupied by the Germans whom they dutifully harassed with yet more performative art in the form of subversive poetry and tracts they gleefully stuffed into soldiers’ pockets, through open car windows and into empty cigarette cartons to be discovered by greedy soldiers.  They were eventually captured, imprisoned and sentenced to execution, saved at the last moment by the ending of the war.

While a serious artist, Cahun’s native sense of humor persists throughout all the works on display, as it did throughout her life, where even near the end of her life, her favorite on-going project was to be led around a Jersey graveyard blindfolded by her cat on a leash.  

Her early photographs display her wry humor as well: Cahun as a golden Buddha, her head shaved and masculine while her undeniably feminine legs emerge from the folds of her holy robes; Cahun as effeminate body builder, the words “I am in training don’t kiss me” scrawled across her chest; Cahun as femme fatale, as Pierrot, as her father, as a young boy, as a specimen, her disembodied head on display in a glass vitrine.  

And this perhaps is the best representation of Cahun, or how Cahun saw herself: specimen, on display, to be preserved, studied, explored.  

Since her “rediscovery”, Cahun has since been claimed as a mascot for feminist and lesbian groups, but to hold her as only relevant to those groups is a disservice to a woman who explored the relationship between homosexuality and narcissism, who stated “neutral is the only gender that always suits me”, who pursued photography, collage, writing, poetry, acting and drawing with equal fervor; a woman who quite doggedly defied every definition narrower than “artist”.  But she went farther still, her entire life an unrelenting, exhausting pursuit of self, that ever-changing, fluid, goassamer entity that exists only in nightmares… or dreams.

May 2011, Vingt Paris Magazine