CLAUDE CAHUN: THE THIRD SEX

Danielle Knafo @2000

Masculine? Feminine? But it depends on the situation. Neuter

is the only gender that always suits me.

-- Claude Cahun

Sometimes she is dressed like a man in a suit, a debonair

dandy, and a sassy sailor. At others, she is a heavily made-up

doll or poupée. Here, she is a vamp, a fairy, a third-sexed

youth lifting barbells. There, she is a yogi seated cross-

legged, a young child curled up in a cupboard. Her head is

shaved or hair cut short, dyed pink, gold, and silver. She

gazes from behind bars, masks, the reflection in her mirror,

or beneath a glass jar. Who is this androgyne who even flaunts

her Jewishness by wearing a large Star of David or showing off

her majestic beak-nosed profile?

She is Lucy Schwob born in 1894 in Nantes; she is Claude

Courlis, a lesbian whose lifelong partner was her stepsister;

she is Daniel Douglas, named after Oscar Wilde’s lover, Lord

Alfred Douglas; she is “the unnamed soldier,” veteran of the

Jersey Resistance sentenced to death for urging occupying

German troops to mutiny and desertion; she is Claude Cahun, a

little-known Surrealist photographer, writer, actor, object

maker, and political activist. At a time when anti-Semitism

and homophobia were widespread, Cahun's daring self-portraits

were revolutionary in their challenge of traditional notions

of gender, race, sexuality, and identity.

Cahun's art prompts a number of questions in the mind of

the viewer: When an artist assumes multiple roles in her work,

is it due to a sense of security that allows her to play with

her boundaries of self and identity? Is it rather that she has

no clear sense of herself and, through disguise, desperately

seeks to discover her true self? Is such an artist merely

exaggerating the traditionally feminine connection between

artifice and self-image? Does she exemplify the postmodernist

claim that there is no such thing as a stable, cohesive self,

that one's identity is constantly changing and merely a matter

of construction and perception? Is she correctly viewed as a

feminist heroine who has succeeded in taking her image in her

own hands? Or is she a lost soul who exchanges mask for

masquerade in a never-ending game of charades?

In this chapter, I wish to examine the life and work of

Claude Cahun, an emblematically elusive artist, through the

prism of psychoanalytic theory, and to follow her through the

veils and labyrinth of her personae, private iconologies, and

artistic intentions.

Lost and Found

Claude Cahun was an extremely prescient artist whose

remarkable series of photographic self-portraits, the first of

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its kind, reflects a provocative stance that eludes simple

categorization. Her art offers no clue that it was created

almost a century ago. She appears to be a woman of our time,

yet history had nearly forgotten her. Despite the fact that

Cahun was the only woman photographer to have remained loyal

to the Surrealist movement, she is absent from many

anthologies on Surrealist art. Even otherwise comprehensive

books on women surrealist artists (e.g., Chadwick, 1985;

Caros, Kuenzli & Raaberg, 1995) do not mention her (Chadwick's

1998 book corrects this oversight.). When included, she is

often assumed to be a man or killed off by the Nazis in World

War II.

It has only been a short while that Cahun has begun to

achieve a small but notable degree of recognition and

celebrity among select art connoisseurs. One reason for this

recent discovery may be attributable to the fact that Cahun

seems to perfectly illustrate the popular contemporary

conception of identity—particularly gender identity—as a

performative and fluid construct rather than a biological

condition. I refer here to Judith Butler’s theory of

performativity (Butler, 1990).

I agree that Cahun represents her psychological

complexity through a compelling series of self-studies in

which she dons costumes and disguises, engaging in games of

masquerade and gender-bending. Whereas her art seems, at first

glance, to exemplify Butler’s theory, it should be noted that

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her theatricality, evident in many of the poses she assumes

and costumes she wears, derives also from several theatre

productions in which she acted. I shall attempt to demonstrate

throughout this paper that her dramatic flair had deeper roots

too. She once exclaimed, "The happiest moment of my life? —

The dream. Imagining that I am someone else. Acting my

favorite role (1930, p. 66)."1

Cahun performed numerous roles. She has frequently been

compared to contemporary postmodern artist, Cindy Sherman,

precisely because both women take on role after role as they

engage in games of mask and masquerade. Cahun's photographs,

small and intimate, most the size of a snapshot, prefigure

Sherman's early black-and-white film-inspired stills.

Nevertheless, the differences between the two artists are

perhaps greater than the similarities. Whereas Sherman's true

self and identity are not meant to be part of her work—she is

all appearance with no hint of an inner self; one is always

aware of the unique individuality of Cahun, the person, who

imbues all of her photographs in spite of her ever-changing

roles. “Put on some makeup, apply a false nose – scrape away,

the grimace reappears, the woman is always underneath (Rice,

p. 77),” she wrote early on in life. Sherman's images are

adopted primarily from external feminine stereotypes, film,

and historical figures. Most of Cahun's transformations emerge

from theatrical sources and from her pre- and unconscious

fantasies and dream life.

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 “La Sainte Famille”

Although little biographical information exists on her

early life, it is known that Cahun came from a wealthy,

literary Jewish family on her father's side.2 She was

influenced by, and strongly identified with, the prestigious

men in her family: her father, Maurice Schwob, owned a

successful liberal newspaper, Le Phare et la Loire, and her

uncle, Marcel Schwob, was a well-known Symbolist writer. In a

striking early self-portrait photograph, Cahun assumes the

exact pose taken by her father in a photograph of him; each is

depicted in stark profile emphasizing a duplicate beak nose.

The nearly identical, even eerie, likeness between father and

daughter is deliberate and reveals Cahun's conscious object of

identification.

Cahun's mother is noticeably nonexistent in nearly all

accounts of her life. Marie-Antoinette Courbelaise came from a

Catholic, anti-Semitic family. Her marriage with Maurice

Schwob was troubled from the start. She had her first mental

breakdown when Cahun was a mere four years old and was

subsequently institutionalized in a psychiatric clinic where

she remained indefinitely. Cahun recalls: " My memory of her

was the expression of a half-childish nonchalant

gaiety...laughing through her tears even during a crisis

(LePerlier, 1994, p. 289)." Although her mother’s exact

diagnosis is unknown, Cahun’s description, as well as the high

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incidence of women hospitalized for hysteria at that time,

suggest that she may have belonged to this group. Cahun

perhaps referred to her mother’s illness when she avowed,

“Before I was born, I was condemned to death. Executed by

default (LePerlier, 1994, p. 19).”

The photomontage, Self Pride, is crucial in its depiction

of Cahun's family romance, "La Sainte Famille (Holy Family),"

as she ironically called it. It consists of an oedipal drama,

set in a triangle, containing mother, father, and child, all

symbiotically attached to one another. Although the child, a

girl, is bound to the mother, it is the father who clutches a

lock of her hair. The child, in the middle of this rather

violent scene, tightly grasps her dove, a bird of peace.

Another image shows a beheaded, castrated male statue from

whose abdomen sprouts a tree, like an umbilical cord.3 The

tree's branches grow disembodied parts of Cahun's body, her

sense organs. Many pictures of a developing embryo are also

displayed. In the final and largest, there are two embryos

rather than one. The idea of twinship as a replacement for a

defective symbiosis is one of Cahun's solutions to her

detrimental upbringing. The barbells and directive that she is

in training are repetitive motifs in her art and relay the

message that she is constantly trying to build a self, the way

one builds a body (bodybuilding). The implication is that when

she succeeds, which is doubtful considering her second message

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("I will never finish removing all these masks..."), she will

be ready to be kissed (i.e., attain real intimacy).

This photomontage, therefore, represents a reconstruction

of the familial origins of Cahun’s developmental struggles. As

a result of a violent and symbiotic situation with her

parents, she prefers to recreate her birth situation, this

time the way she wills it to be. Once she is reborn as a twin

(with her stepsister?); once she is born from a man (rather

than her mother). These alterations result in a disembodied

self, one whose senses are fragmented, primarily male

identified and, moreover, fictitious. I.O.U., the sub-title

Cahun gave to this photomontage, reveals the score she kept

with her family. She “owes” them for the masks she wears,

masks that require her to remain in a frozen state of

"training," an adolescent prison from which there is no

escape. Other self-portrait photographs depict Cahun behind

bars, with hands outstretched, and face enclosed in a glass

jar. Still others show her strangled and beheaded. Her self-

made prison is the outcome of the family of her childhood, a

childhood destroyed by madness.

Cahun had a difficult time in her youth. Her father

feared she was prone to madness like her mother and, when

classmates during the Dreyfus affair teased her, made the

decision to send her away to school. She first attended Oxford

and later returned to France to study at the Sorbonne, where

she took a degree in literature and philosophy.

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 Cahun had an older brother, George. For unknown reasons,

both she and her father broke off relations with him. After

obtaining a divorce from her mother, Cahun’s father remarried

Mme Malherbe, a widow who had a daughter, Suzanne. Cahun fell

madly in love with her new stepsister. She compared her

encounter with Suzanne to being struck by lightning and having

inspired “a jealous and exclusive passion…Soon nothing existed

for me except for my relationship with Suzanne (Le Perlier,

1994, p. 263).” This relationship consumed the adolescent

Cahun and caused considerable distress to her family who made

attempts to curtail it. Cahun reacted with anorexia and

suicidality, but refused to give up her first and only love.

Indeed, this was a love that satisfied Cahun’s need for

symbiosis (they referred to themselves as Siamese twins) as

well as her incestuous homosexual desires (that found no

outlet due to her mother’s absence). This was a love that

precluded separation and loss, a love whose constancy and

loyalty would accompany her throughout her life.

La Belle Epoque: Paris and Surrealism

Cahun's intellectual, sexual, and financial independence

attracted her to Paris where she moved in 1920 with Malherbe.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, they joined an

extraordinary group of talented lesbian women who flocked to

Paris. Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Sylvia Beach and

Adrienne Monnier, Djuna Barnes and Thelma Wood all contributed

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to Paris' international avant-garde culture and lesbian sub-

culture.

Cahun was drawn to the tenets of Surrealism, a movement

that reached mythic status after its Parisian début in the

1920s. André Breton, the father of Surrealism, was deeply

influenced by psychoanalytic discoveries and repeatedly paid

tribute to Freud for the privileged place he accorded the

substratum of consciousness as manifested in his

Interpretation of Dreams. As an art movement, Surrealism aimed

to tap into and reveal the reality that underlies the world of

appearances -- the unconscious, the irrational, the realm of

dreams. For the Surrealists, the dream was believed to be

superior to the waking state, fantasy more potent than

reality, and the unconscious mind more revealing than

conscious thought.

Because of its emphasis on deeper areas of consciousness,

Surrealism, promised the possibility of more complex,

multidimensional attitudes toward women. The truth is that

Surrealists' relationship to women was a highly complex and

ambivalent one. On the one hand, they admitted several

brilliant women to their inner circle. They also admired, even

exalted, feminine qualities they thought were preferable to

the flawed thinking of men. On the other hand, these very

qualities were associated with insanity, sexuality, Otherness,

and in Bataille’s theory of the informe, chaotic baseness.

Women were essentially treated as objects expected to serve as

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inspiration for male genius and to allow manipulation of their

bodies for aesthetic purposes and male sexual desire.

The function and image of women in the Surrealist circle

therefore frequently assumed the conventional mythological or

allegorical roles of muse, child, or femme fatale. Although

Surrealists insisted on transgression beyond bourgeois

boundaries, through revolution and emancipation, their

homophobia and advocacy of heterosexuality was well-known. It

is said that Breton avoided Cahun because he disliked her

unconventional (unfeminine?) appearance and behavior (Kline,

1998). He nonetheless encouraged her efforts and claimed she

was one of the most singular spirits of the time.

It should not come as a surprise that the majority of

Surrealist representations of women reflect a strong,

traditional masculine bias. Women are exalted, feared, or

degraded in the photographs of Man Ray, Jacques-Andre

Boiffard, Raoul Ubac, Maurice Tabard, and Hans Bellmer (This

is also true of the paintings of René Magritte, Salvador Dali,

Max Ernst, and Paul Delvaux.). The female torso, for instance,

frequently stands by itself -- faceless, headless -- a

fantasy dream site of male desire. When the face is present,

it is often veiled, caged (e.g., Ubac, Mannequin, 1937),

distorted, or hidden in shadows (e.g., Ubac, Portrait in a

Mirror, 1938). Hans Bellmer's photographs of dolls (La Poupée)

or his “Unica” series also assault woman's physical integrity

and wholeness by depicting the female body as a headless

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conglomeration of parts often tied together and bruised. It is

interesting in this context to mention the French proverb:

Femme sans tete tout en est bon (A headless woman is all to

the good).

It has been convincingly argued (Krauss, 1985) that the

Surrealist manipulation of the female body can best be

understood as a visual and aesthetic manifestation of male

perversion. The photographic techniques employed by the

artists to crop the female body result, not coincidentally, in

that body's resemblance to a male phallus. Freud (1927) argued

that the nude female body, with its lack of penis, evokes a

fear of castration in the spectator, a fear that can be

allayed by a fetish. The Surrealist female nudes, cut to

phallic form represent the artistic solution to the male

Surrealists' castration anxiety: the re-inscription of the

phallus on or as the female body that was originally found to

lack it. On an unconscious level, then, the photographs

collapse the difference between the sexes. An example is Man

Ray's Anatomies (ca. 1930), a cropped shot of a woman's neck

and chin with her head raised upward, resembling a giant,

erect penis.

Like her male counterparts, Cahun wished to elevate the

unconscious, the irrational, and the dream as inspiration and

method for her art whose focus was also the female body.

Unlike most Surrealist works, Cahun's photographs are not

castrative and fetishistic, nor do they display her devoid of

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selfhood. Her photographs embrace her own image and challenge

the gaze that had become accustomed to objectifying women. The

very fact that hers were self-portraits, works in which she

was both artist and model, subverted the social and sexual

hierarchy in which the artist is quintessentially male and his

material female.

Cahun’s self-portraits broke new ground in their ability

to contest the conventional relationship between gender,

spectatorship, and work of art. Her impetus to shift away from

conventional positions of masculinely-derived subjectivity had

political as well as personal reasons. Her self-portraits

consist mostly of close-ups of her impressive face that draw

the viewer to her powerful facial expressions.

In a 1928 self-portrait, for instance, in which she

stands next to her mirror, the mirror doubles her face and she

stares at the viewer rather than at her reflection. Cahun here

challenges the traditional notion of woman's relationship with

her mirror as an expression of female vanity. More

importantly, she disrupts the fixed polarities of gender

difference and the privileging of gaze to men by showing that

she is not simply the object of a gaze. Her eyes in this

portrait, as in most of her oeuvre, are unwavering, strong,

and confrontational; they stare us straight in the eye. This

image therefore indicates both self-reflection and the

interplay between Cahun's and the spectator's gaze. A woman

looks at herself looking at the viewer who looks at her.

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 Cahun’s art depicts a new vision of woman, a vision not

devoid of humor. She ridicules, parodies, and takes even the

most serious of subjects -- her identity -- with a grain of

salt. For instance, in a series of photographs she produced in

1927, she gazes coyly at her viewers as she introduces them to

a novel self. She lifts a set of toy barbells. Her face is

made up and her nipples and cheeks are accentuated. Her hair

is slicked and curled. Who is this person? How can we

categorize her along gender lines? The T-shirt she wears

offers an enigmatic and humorous reply: "I AM IN TRAINING:

DON'T KISS ME." Cahun transcends gender and sex; she pushes

beyond traditional values, and invites us along for the ride.

Like Duchamp’s creation of alter-ego, Rrose Sélavy in

1920, Cahun changed her name and staged a drama of the

opposite sex. But her alterations of identity surpassed that

of a drag performance.4 Cahun does more than appropriate

masculine features; she creates a third sex. She conceived a

hybrid cultural identity not easily assimilable within the

overdetermined categories of masculine and feminine. One can

appreciate her fascination with the writings of Havelock

Ellis, an early sexologist, whose controversial theories

allowed for the possibility of a third sex. Cahun translated

Ellis who wrote: "We may not know exactly what sex is; but we

do know that it is mutable, with the possibility of one sex

being changed into the other sex, that its frontiers are often

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uncertain, and that there are many stages between a complete

male and a complete female (1933, p. 195)."

Continuing Ellis’ line of thought, Marjorie Garber (1992)

has recently advised that we entertain a “third space of

possibility” when considering gender. This third space calls

to mind D.W. Winnicott’s “potential space,” a space in which

the child attempts to separate from and maintain a tie with

the mother at one and the same time. According to Winnicott

(1971), potential space is the location in which creativity

originates. Thomas Ogden (1994) has adopted Winnicott’s notion

of an intermediate area as that which best describes the

intersubjective (transference-countertransference) playing

field in psychoanalytic therapy. Ogden calls this space of

illusory, yet real, encounter between therapist and patient a

“third analytic space.” I believe that Cahun employed her art

as a third -- creative – space, a space that permitted the

existence of unresolved paradoxes, and a space in which she

gave birth to a third sex.

Self-Creation

Cahun appears to have developed a hatred for everything

maternal as a result of her chaotic early years. With irony,

she wrote: “The mother was so unappetizing that the infant was

offered an aperitif before being served the breast (1930, p.

137).” It is as if she wished to “vomit the mother (Kristeva,

1982, p. 47)” in her efforts to deny her matrilineage. She

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changed her name from Lucy Schwob, chosen by her mother, to a

purposely ambiguously-gendered pseudonym taken from her

paternal grandmother’s brother, Léon Cahun, an eminent

orientalist (Cahun adopted other pseudonyms, including Daniel

Douglas, an homage to Oscar Wilde's lover.). As with Duchamp,

Cahun’s choice of a name that is a close relative of Cohen,

the appellation of Jewish Priests, clearly emphasized her

Jewish affinity at a time when anti-Semitism was on the rise

in France.

It is important to note that Cahun also rejected her

father’s family name. That she had ambivalent feelings toward

her father as well as her mother is indicated in two 1932

photographs, the first of which she titled Le Père (The

Father). In it, a figure with a bird’s head lies on the sand

with a shovel in hand and a thin metal stick impaling its

abdomen. The figure lies as if dead, stabbed by the rod.

Although the stick lends it an erect phallus, a vulva shaped

crevice is dug in the sand between its spread legs, thereby

creating an ambiguous gender.

In a second photograph with this figure, the shovel that

was placed in its hand is now stuck between its legs. Cahun

stands adjacent to it with only her stomach and legs visible.

She presses a skirt made of seaweed to her hips and four

strips dangle down the length of her legs. Two of the strips

hang between her legs, echoing the vagina-phallus motif.

Cahun’s shadow, also originating from between her legs, plays

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with light and dark elements. The father image is superimposed

on that of Cahun’s. The photograph therefore blurs the

boundaries between the two figures and the two genders all

within a dream-like ambience.

These two photographs in Cahun’s oeuvre deal with her

irresolute relationship to her father. She does not simply

appropriate his manhood; she plays with it, sometimes

aggressively, and comes up with a third possibility, a

possibility that combines femininity (skirt) and masculinity

(phallus). The latter photograph may therefore additionally

represent a statement to Breton, the père/father of

Surrealism, in that it echoes numerous photographs by male

Surrealist artists depicting headless bodies that conflate

gender distinctions.

Cahun had ambivalent relations with both parents;

nevertheless, she idealized her father and dismissed her

mother. Cahun was not alone in her rejection of the maternal.

In a curious coincidence, Surrealists too had an intrinsic

revulsion of maternity; they even advocated childlessness.

Despite the fact that Cahun consciously tried to disassociate

herself from her mother, a powerful unconscious identification

can be gleaned from her art. For example, in a daring

photomontage, she places her arms around an inverted

photograph of her shaved head to create the impression of a

newborn emerging from the uterus. Indeed, her oeuvre is

replete with images of birth in which she appears to give

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birth to herself over and over again the way she wishes to

appear.

Cahun's repeated self-creation seems aimed at

defiantly replacing her mother by proclaiming that she

alone was responsible for her creation. Paradoxically,

her appropriation of the maternal function brought her

closer to her mother, for she was now identified with the

maternal, a creator in her own right. Alluding to the

enormous significance that the maternal had in shaping

her identity, Cahun sometimes signed her name with a

small c embedded and contained within a larger C.

Cahun (1930) believed that the quest for

authenticity contributes to self-creation, in a

metamorphosis of the self. Although she strove for

authenticity, her conscious rejection of her maternal

identification led to the creation of a fictitious self

that may have been artistically innovative but was, at

times, alienated from her true self. At age thirty-three,

in a moment of reflection, she wrote: "I spent my life

passionately, blindly desiring that things be other than

what they are. I have only accumulated fictitious values

(LePerlier, 1992, p. 129)."

Whereas she vehemently attacked motherhood, Cahun’s

attendance at lectures on mental illness in Parisian

hospitals, as well as her numerous self-portraits, might

reveal her never-ending search for her lost mother.

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 Surrealists too possessed a fascination with madness in

women because of their perception of them as nearer to

the irrational, the unconscious, the primitive, and the

visionary. Woman embodied the mad Other -- at once

powerful, perilous, endowed with talent, nocturnal, and

delicate -- who inspired both awe and fear. They sought

to mime “convulsive beauty” in their art, which they

associated directly to the infamous displays of hysterics

in Charcot’s Salpetrière. Argon and Breton exclaimed: “We

Surrealists are anxious to celebrate…hysteria, the

greatest poetic discovery of the end of the 19th century

(Argon & Breton, 1928, p. 20-22).”

Cahun clearly had personal reasons to pursue as well as

take flight from the mad woman. In her autobiographical book,

Aveux non Avenus, she questions: "Maman! why are boats in the

water, maman?" and replies to herself, "But the mother is

elsewhere, out of the water, out of the boat, out of her mind

(Cahun, 1930, 148)."

Cahun went so far as to adopt the face of a "mad woman"

in some of her photographs. In one disturbing self-portrait,

in which she resembles a psychiatric patient, Cahun's shaved

head is unnaturally elongated and her gaze confused and lost.

The eroticism, suggested by Cahun’s décolletage in this

photograph, provides an additional locus of tension in its odd

conjunction with the stark portrayal of insanity. This self-

portrait, probably the most bizarre in her oeuvre, resembles

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an otherworldly extraterrestrial, a cone head, and therefore

accentuates her difference. Its protracted skull can also be

interpreted as a type of “erection of the head (Lacan, 1992),”

which transforms her into a phallic woman.

In addition to these readings, I believe that Cahun’s

maternal identification in this self-portrait is what renders

it so uncanny and poignant.

The Uncanny Double

The more Cahun took on the identity of her “mad” mother,

the more her self-portraits evoke an uncanny air. Freud (1919)

referred to the uncanny as a particular category of aesthetic

or life experience that produces anxiety by leading “back to

what is known of old and long familiar(p. 220)," thereby

creating confusion between the symbolic and the real. The

double, a figure that is somehow identical to or

interchangeable with the self, is one of the most

disconcerting examples of the uncanny. Freud asserted that the

double produces uncanny experiences because it "harks back" to

"a time when the ego had not yet marked itself off sharply

from the external world and from other people (p. 236)."

Is not the maternal body, then, the prototype for all

uncanny doubles? And can not the photograph, which undoes

separation by preventing the past from being erased, represent

a way to maintain one’s tie to the mother? On one level,

Cahun's double self-portraits, of which there are several, can

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be interpreted as representing the manner she found to unite

with her mother whom she lost at a very young age. Cahun's

unconscious search for her mother is further revealed in her

powerful need to return to the comfort of the womb. In one

photograph, for instance, she is depicted as a true femme-

enfant; in pigtails and bobby socks, with bow in hair, she

literally curls up in a fetal position and dozes on a shelf

inside a womb-like cupboard. (As a child, she was known to

have hidden under the kitchen table to seek refuge from family

turmoil.)

An even more striking example of Cahun’s attempt to unite

with the maternal body is a 1928 double self-portrait

depicting a set of her profiles, one facing to the left and

one to the right, superimposed on a rock-like edifice. The

entire picture is symmetrical; it has been folded in half to

resemble a Rorschach blot. In fact, several inkblots stamp the

photograph as a direct allusion to the psychological

projective technique aimed at uncovering unconscious

personality traits. Closer scrutiny reveals the outline of a

human torso on the stone formation. Cahun's placement of her

twin heads at the center of this body accordingly creates the

image of a heart. In her art, Cahun reunites with her mother

and becomes the heart of the body she was once separated from.

Two additional self-portraits exist with the same rock

backdrop. In one, she is depicted swimming, as if in the womb,

in opposite directions. Like the earth sculptures in Ana

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Mendieta's “Silueta” Series (1970's), these works in Cahun's

oeuvre also concern the reunion with the mother through a

merger with Mother Earth (Knafo, 1996a).

In the same manner that male Surrealist images have been

compared to fetishistic solutions for the artists’ denial of

sexual difference; I believe Cahun’s photographs can be viewed

as the solution she found for her denial of separation from

and loss of her mother. In her art, Cahun created a third

space, akin to Winnicott’s potential space, meant to bridge

between reality and fantasy, inside and outside, self and

object -- mother and child. When she photographed herself,

Cahun treated herself as both subject and object, possibly

echoing the manner in which she was first treated as an object

by her mother. Her auto-portraiture could, therefore, be

viewed as an arena in which she transferred her original

maternal care onto her art.

By recreating the early mother-child relationship, she

now identified with both passive and active roles. In 1996, I

proposed the term artistic transference for the representation

of this early mother-child dyad and its simultaneous attempts

at reparation that take place in the creation of artworks. One

purpose of Cahun's art, I would like to suggest here, was to

come to terms with her early maternal loss. Fusing her image

with that of her mother's allowed her to restore the broken

tie she had with her mother as well as to create a new image

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of woman in art. Creation for Cahun was in essence a re-

creation.

Cahun’s double self-portraits therefore reverse Kohut’s

concept of the “selfobject” as one connoting the use of an

Other as part of the self. For her, it is the self that

becomes the Other. Her double self-portraits create a new type

of relating to the self, a self-othering, as it were. Through

her works, Cahun seems to communicate that the self is not a

unified concept but, rather, a complex arrangement of sameness

and otherness that at its best encourages dialogue among its

parts.

Cahun’s double images recur throughout her oeuvre and

additionally allude to an emphasis on self-perception and

self-awareness. They also suggest her narcissistic struggles

that found a suitable stage in her art. She once wrote

“Narcissism? Of course. It is my best feature (LePerlier,

1994, p. 128).” In a rarely titled 1928 double self-portrait,

Que me veux-tu? (What do you want from me?), Cahun depicts two

shots of her head, one in profile and one in three-quarter

view. The heads are joined at the neck and resemble Siamese

twins. Both are bald like newborns, revealing the forceful

shape of her skull. It appears as though one whispers into the

ear of the other the answer to her question. The figure on the

left looks bewildered as she stares into space. In this

powerful double self-portrait, Cahun is symbiotically tied to

herself rather than to her mother and she searches, through a

22
process of twinship, for answers to questions about her

identity.

Cahun used this same photograph as a model for a drawing

that graced the cover of a novel, Frontières Humaines, in

1929. There too the image was accompanied by a text: "N'ayez

pas peur d'etre dévorés (Do not fear being devoured)." It is

as if Cahun needed, in her drawing, to create sharper

boundaries in order to counteract the verbal message of being

swallowed alive.

Cahun's preoccupation with the theme of the double, then,

also concerns its protective function against loss of self.

Otto Rank, who lived in Paris from 1926-35, explored the

double motif in anthropology and literature and stated that

"The idea of death ...is denied by a duplication of the self

(1971, p. 83)." If Cahun -- through an inevitable

identification with her mother -- were to die or go mad, her

second – created -- self would no doubt survive. Perhaps

sensing that she was in danger of losing her self, Cahun

defensively and instinctively created a second self, an

imaginary companion -- at times even a Doppelgänger.

The interrelated themes of sister-double-mirror most

certainly relate to Malherbe’s presence and influence in

Cahun’s life as well. Cahun regarded Malherbe as her alter ego

and even referred to her as "l'autre moi," the other me.

Malherbe’s entry into Cahun's life when she was fifteen years

old permanently changed it. Cahun developed a sense of

23
security from this woman who, unlike her mother, remained

completely devoted to her and never left her side. Like Cahun,

Moore, whose chosen name was Suzanne Malherbe, adopted an

ambiguously-gendered pseudonym, Marcel Moore. Cahun’s

relationship with Moore was not entirely unambivalent. In

1930, she compared happy lovers to a hermaphroditic monster or

Siamese twins whose entanglement she likens to a serpent or

Gordian knot that she asserts ought to be severed.

The Mirror

The eye was a recurrent theme in Surrealist art. Breton

lauded the virtues of vision because of its sensory immediacy.

Surrealists were indebted to the psychoanalytic theories of

Freud and Lacan, both of whom connected the visual with

sexuality.

In an arresting androgynous 1927 self-portrait, Cahun is

surrounded by a black background and the black turtleneck she

wears, her whitened face emerging like a ghost. She has a

painted widow’s peak; one penciled eyebrow, and heavily tinted

lips. She is neither male nor female, human nor inhuman,

beautiful nor ugly, but some combination of them all. A circle

is created by her arms that wrap around and grip a reflecting

object resembling a crystal ball. Most striking is the cutting

glare she casts at us. We are compelled, as if hypnotized, to

take part in a visual showdown, to stare back and forth

24
between her powerful eyes and the ball meant to reflect our

own.

On one level, Cahun's attention to eyes and mirrors in

her art indicates her self-perception as seer and visionary.

On another level, it reveals a deep yearning for the mirroring

of which she was most likely deprived during her early years.

Lacan (1944) was the first to delineate an episode he

called the "mirror phase," referring to the infant's initial

discovery of the self in the mirror. For Winnicott (1967), the

mother is the primordial mirror, and it is through the

infant's interactions with her that the inchoate definition of

self takes place. Analysts like Freud, Winnicott, and Kohut

have emphasized the importance of mirroring in the

psychoanalytic relationship.

I have tried to demonstrate that the same search that

takes place between mother and infant, and between analyst and

patient, is also undertaken by artists in the creation of

their works (Knafo, 1993). In particular, the self-portrait is

an apt, self-evident, means by which an artist acts as a

mirror to herself, simultaneously reflecting her need for

self-definition and her attempt to achieve it. Indeed, Cahun's

diffuse wide stare in her "mad" self-portrait resembles that

observed in the infantile gaze and contrasts with the direct,

narrowly focused look in her more masculine identified self-

portraits.

25
 I would like to suggest that the self-portrait photograph

in Cahun's oeuvre became a surrogate for the reciprocal

encounter with the mother's face. Lacking the beneficial,

identity-feeding mirroring responses from her mother at a

crucial time in her development, Cahun hungered to provide

herself with that which her mother could not: a mirror image.

She wrote:

A sheet of glass. Where shall I put the reflective

silver? On this side or the other: in front or behind the

pane?

Before. I imprison myself. I blind myself. What does it

matter to me, Passer-by, to offer myself a mirror in

which you recognize yourself, even if it is a deforming

mirror and signed by my own hand?...

Behind, I am equally enclosed. I will not know anything

of outside. At least I will recognize my own face -- and

maybe it will suffice enough to please me (LaSalle &

Godeau, 1992, p. 12).

The mirror served not only to reassure Cahun of her very

existence; it was a reminder of the pain of individuality, the

loss of her reflection in her mother’s eyes. Cahun’s solution

to her denial of the reality of separation and loss was

accomplished partly through a symbolic merger with her mother

and partly by providing herself with a substitute

mirror/mother in her art.

26
 It is interesting that French psychoanalyst, Luce

Irigaray (1985), challenges the mirror of male theories by

conceiving of it in feminine terms, as the speculum, a curved

mirror doctors use most frequently for vaginal examinations.

For Irigaray, it is only a mirror that looks into the woman,

which is capable of actually seeing her. Irigaray’s mirror,

like that Cahun was seeking to establish in her art, allows

for a more diffuse and fluid identity.

Confessions

In addition to her series of self-studies, Cahun wrote an

autobiographical book, Aveux non Avenus (1930), a major art

document in which text and images are interwoven and inform

one another. Like memory, the text weaves discursively,

nonlinearly, elliptically, and free-associatively as it

explores its major theme: definition of self. The title, Aveux

non Avenus is itself revealing. “Aveux” means confessions;

“non avenus” refers to the legal term "null and void." Cahun

tries to avoid being pinned down at any cost and declares in

her title that whatever she is about to confess in this

autobiographical treatise will be automatically disavowed.

Cahun's confessions are not merely narrations, but

implications of thoughts and acts about which she feels

ambivalent. Indeed, to confess rather than narrate is to

implicate oneself directly. Cahun's ambivalence is represented

in the juxtaposition of grandiosity on the one hand and self-

27
hating guilt on the other. For example, she identifies with

God when she writes her formula:

Dieu x Dieu = moi = Dieu

DIEU (Cahun,

1930, p. 34).

She also provocatively states that she created God in her

image. Yet, self-aggrandizement is often followed by a strong

need for punishment: "It is not without second thoughts that I

shave my head, pull out my teeth, my breasts -- all that

bothers or is in my way -- stomach, ovaries...(Cahun, p.

234)."

Aveux non Avenus includes ten black-and-white

héliogravures of brilliant photomontages created with Moore.

Like the dream, the photomontage is composed of multiple

visual images; it uses symbols and is timeless. Cahun's

photomontages represent some of her strongest works. In them,

she opened up the Pandora’s box of her unconscious and

essentially gathered bits and pieces of photographic self-

portraits, cut them up like paper dolls, and arranged them to

form images of birth, wombs, mirrors, disembodied lips and

eyes. She simultaneously illustrated her need for oral and

visual satisfaction and expressed her anger and anxiety

through disintegration and fragmentation. Cahun deconstructed

the self in order to reconstruct it anew; what was once

destroyed is re-created, reintegrated, and, ultimately,

regained. It is perhaps significant that Cahun charged Moore

28
with the task of assembling the many images in her

photomontages.

The Mask

Related to the theme of the mirror and the double is that

of the mask. Cahun’s masks are often uncanny in their

combination of Eastern and Western, doll and human, child and

adult features. At times their purpose is to simply hide her

eyes, the bearers of her soul.

The ambiguous and equivocal metamorphosis enabled by the

mask relates to its allowing one to become something other

than the self while remaining what one is. Yet, the question

arises as to the nature of the gap between one’s presumed

identity and its representation. Which face is the truer and

more authentic — the mask or that concealed by it?

Wearing masks further underlines the burden of alienation

carried in a woman like Cahun who dared to play with

conventional codes of femininity (Lichtenstein, 1992). In

Aveux non Avenus, she exclaims: "I wish to change skins, to

tear mine off (Cahun, 1930, p. 231)." Indeed, in her time, a

woman who did not fit into the rigidly circumscribed gender

roles had little leeway in terms of defining herself.

Whereas Cahun's masks offered her some freedom from societal

roles, she confessed to having paid a heavy price for them:

In front of the mirror, on a day full of enthusiasm,

you put your mask on too heavily; it bites your skin.

29
 After the party, you lift up a corner to see…a failed

decal. With horror you see that the flesh and its mask

have become inseparable. Quickly, with a little saliva,

you regulate the bandage on the wound.

I remember, it was Carnival time. I had spent many

solitary hours disguising my soul. Its masks were so

perfect that when they happened to run into each other on

the plaza of my consciousness, they didn’t recognize one

another. …But the facepaints that I’d used seemed

indelible. To clean them off, I rubbed so hard that I

took off the skin. And my soul, like a face galled to the

quick, no longer resembled human form (Rosemont, 199 , p.

52).

For Cahun, artifice became fused and often

indistinguishable from her true self. In one mysterious self-

portrait, one wonders whether she is even present behind a

mask with a dazed expression and a limp body slumped into a

chair. Similarly, the photomontage enigmatically titled Self

Pride displays a text that winds around a string of seemingly

endless images of Cahun and states: "Sous ce masque un autre

masque. Je n'en finirai pas de soulever tous ses visages"

(Under this mask is another. I will never finish carrying all

these faces).

Is Cahun expressing the contemporary view that the self

is a mask with no original? Is she illustrating Lacan’s

opinion that the encounter with one’s mirror image is

30
inherently an act of méconnaisance (misrecognition), that what

we perceive and build our identity from is not our true self,

that there is no one-to-one relationship with our mirror

image, and that what we see is merely a copy, not unlike a

photograph? As in her "unavowed confessions" (Aveux non

Avenus), Cahun's self-portraits promise revelation yet, quite

frequently, flaunt disguise.

Cahun desperately attempts to feel alive by creating a

drama in which she simultaneously writes, directs, and plays

all of the characters. In fact, many of her 1928 self-

portraits with mask show her in front of a partially separated

curtain, as if to let us know that there is more to what meets

the eye and that she is behind the scenes, pulling the

strings. For instance, upon closely examining the photograph

of a slumped, masked, doll-like character, one discerns two

fingers on either side of the chair on which she sits. Once

aware of the fingers, the proportions of the photograph

instantly shrink so that the doll-like figure becomes a size

that fits inside an adult hand. These confused physical

proportions reveal the blurred boundaries between childhood

and adulthood and indicate the in-between state in which she

found herself. Even as an adult, Cahun seems to say that she

continued to see herself as a child. Before and behind the

scenes, big and little, Cahun secretly communicates the

message that she is creating an illusion in which there are

multiple layers of mask and manipulation.

31
 Masquerade

Masks therefore become masquerades as Cahun theatrically

dresses in men's suits, a swami's costume, or a rag doll's

attire. Whereas masks create tension between artifice

(surface) and reality (depth), masquerades imply that the role

or the performance is all there is. According to performative

gender theory, it is not who we are but what we do that

matters. Butler’s (1991) groundbreaking articulation of the

performative aspect of gender is relevant to Cahun’s

theatrical tableaux because it contends that gender consists

in impersonation of masculine and feminine roles, both of

which are considered to be elaborately designed masquerades.

It should be recalled that Cahun performed in a short-

lived symbolist-influenced experimental theater, Pierre

Albert-Birot’s Le Plateau. Her transgendered identities were

probably inspired by theatre models such as Sarah Bernhardt,

Ida Rubenstein, and Beatrice Wanger. Nevertheless, practically

all the roles Cahun played, not only her gendered

constructions, involve some form of pretense. Her art can be

seen and understood as demonstrating the highly constructed

and composite artificiality of identity.

Interestingly, during the years Cahun was busy

masquerading, psychoanalyst, Joan Rivière (1929), wrote what

is now considered a classic paper on women who employ

“womanliness as masquerade.” In it she noted that masquerade

32
was a phenomenon encountered in some intellectual women who

deal with the anxiety of trying to be successful in a

masculine world. She wrote: "womanliness could be assumed and

worn as a mask, both to hide the possession of masculinity and

to avert the reprisals expected if she was found to possess it

… The reader may now ask how I define womanliness or where I

draw the line between genuine womanliness and 'masquerade.' My

suggestion is not, however, that there is any such difference;

whether radical or superficial, they are the same thing (p.

306)." Cahun certainly expanded Rivière’s arena of masquerade

to include more than womanliness. It is significant, however,

that both Rivière and Cahun were ahead of their time in their

conceptions of femininity as construction rather than essence.

Indeed, Cahun wished to construct a personal narrative,

to stage a mise en scène, which involved borrowing from such

mythological figures as Judith, Salomé ,Sappho, Satan, Janus,

and Narcissus. Some of her heroes are masculine, some

feminine, some androgynous, some ambiguous, some unreal, and

some absurd. Her physical distortions, fragmentations, and

rearrangements often result in a sideshow verging on the

grotesque. At times, it seems she plays with the notion of

woman making a spectacle of herself as she dramatically

transforms herself into either a monstrous beauty or a person

possessing sublime ugliness. Playing with seduction and

repulsion, she tries to be all characters at once, but is

sometimes left with none that feels real. Her numerous

33
identities seem to cancel each other out in the final

analysis. On the next to last page of Aveux non Avenus, she

writes:

In vain I try to put my body back in its place (my body

with its dependencies), to see myself in the third

person. The I is in me like the E is taken in the O

(1930, p. 236).

For Cahun, identity was never coherent or singular, its

determination repeatedly and indefinitely deferred.

Rebellion and Death

Cahun acknowledged that she wished to do everything in

the extreme -- to provoke, scandalize -- as long as she could

have an effect. An example is a 1925 self-portrait in which

she ostentatiously displays her Jewishness by defiantly

wearing a large, knit Star of David around her neck.

Coincidental with Cocteau’s alienated enfants terribles, Cahun

was a rebel in life as well as art. She joined L'Association

des Ecrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires in 1933. In 1934,

she published a pamphlet, Les Paris sont Ouverts (Place your

bets), a fierce attack on the propagandist cultural policies

of the Communist party. In 1935, along with Breton and Georges

Bataille, she co-founded Contre-Attaque, a group organized by

the Surrealists in response to the rise of Hitler and the

spread of fascism in France.

34
 Cahun and Moore left Paris for the British Isle of Jersey

off the northern coast of France in 1937. Jersey was the place

she spent her childhood holidays and that in which she claims

to have loved herself for the first time (Cahun, 1930). The

two women lived there peaceably until 1940 when the Germans

invaded, at which time they launched an active subversive

resistance effort that lasted four years. Cahun and Moore

literally flooded the island with anti-Nazi propaganda to

demoralize the occupying German army and encourage soldiers to

desert. Their efforts were signed "The soldier with no name."

Although the signature’s intent was to camouflage, it is

nonetheless revealing that Cahun, whose given name was Schwob,

signed the propaganda as someone who has "no name." Cahun and

Moore created photomontages, wrote pacifist testimonies, and

rewrote German marching songs.

In July 1944, they were arrested by the Gestapo, tried

and sentenced to six months imprisonment for listening to the

radio and death for inciting German troops. With

characteristic repartee, Cahun asked the judge which sentence

they should serve first. In 1945, a self-portrait shows an

ever-defiant Cahun with a Nazi eagle insignia clenched between

her teeth. She and Moore escaped execution but were imprisoned

for nearly a year. Moore survived a suicide attempt. The

Nazis, who considered it pornographic, destroyed much of the

women’s artwork.

35
 Some of Cahun’s art of the late 1930s and 40s lacks the

concentrated passion of her earlier work. This may be due in

part to the fact that she was older and therefore less likely

to be concerned with issues of identity characteristic of

adolescence or young adulthood. It is a mature woman whom we

see in her later photographic self-portraits, one whose facial

expressions remain intense, but are also resigned and sad.

There are few disguises or bizarre poses. In fact, some

resemble photographs taken on trips in which the model poses

in front of a chosen site. Although they appear more prosaic

than her earlier work, Cahun’s face continues to stand out in

its expressiveness. It is the face of a woman who has

experienced a lot. It remains a face filled with mystery. Of

course, it is possible that Cahun’s spirit was broken after

her war ordeals and that her passion for life was replaced by

a preoccupation with death. She is said to have never

recovered after her release from prison.

During these years, Cahun made many art objects in which

she does not figure except by implication. Poupée (1936), that

for which there exists the largest number of variations and

photographs, is a strange doll covered with newspaper

clippings. Its torso is the masthead of the organ of the

French Communist Party, L’Humanité; its arms are formed from

headlines about “Hitlerian fascism” and the Spanish Civil War.

A set of false teeth are pasted onto its head and held open in

a perpetual Munchian scream. On its neck are the words

36
“ASSEMBLEMENT MONSTRE (Monstrous Composition).” In 1930, Cahun

wrote, “I only believe in the monsters I myself have created

(p. 62).”

Probably the most fascinating and enigmatic self-

portraits taken during these years are two (1939) that portray

her lying on the ground, eyes closed, surrounded by menacing

foliage, stalks of plants closing in on her body. Cahun’s

conspicuous use of flowers in her work may relate to

Bataille’s (1929) views that flowers signify both the beauty

and hideousness of human sexuality. Her discernible desire to

join the earth and her mother (Mother Nature) also anticipated

comparable self-portraits by Frida Kahlo and Ana Mendieta,

both of whom depict themselves merged with natural forces

(Knafo, 1996a).

Nineteen forty-seven marks a year in which Cahun was

plainly preoccupied with death. Many of her photographs are

shot in a cemetery; some display a skull and others blot out

her face. At times, she seems to mock death, for example in a

portrait in which she poses next to a tombstone with cigarette

dangling from her mouth. She feigns a knowing expression and

stands on a plot of ground on which the words "PRIVATE

PROPERTY" are spelled out in large letters. Most certainly

laughing at a private joke, Cahun plays with death, with us,

and with herself. There are some things that we shall never

know about Cahun. There are things she most definitely took

with her to the grave.

37
 A series of eight self-portrait photographs from 1948 (Le

Chemin des Chats) depicts a white-haired, barefoot, and

blindfolded Cahun gripping a leash led by a cat on a narrow

pavement in a cemetery. In 1953, the year before she died, she

again approached the subject of death. Blindfolded and

clutching a large bag, this time she follows the cat who leads

her down a precariously dangerous and narrow chute, evidently

to her death.

Although she made plans to return to Paris in the early

1950s, due to poor health Cahun remained in Jersey until her

death in 1954. Moore moved after her companion's demise. She

eventually found life unbearable and, in 1972, repeated her

suicidal gesture of 1944, and this time died.

The Art of Multiple Selves

In this new millennium, homosexuality is no longer

regarded as a psychological disorder by mental health

professionals. Desires of transexuals and transgendered

individuals have begun to be acknowledged and queer theory

conceived. It is generally accepted that sex and gender are

not considered clear-cut terms defining precise categories.

Freud’s theory of gender development is being reformulated by

scholars like Irene Fast (1984) who has shown that children’s

early experiences are undifferentiated with regard to gender.

In the 1920s and 30s, Claude Cahun tackled subjects that

we are only beginning to appreciate today. She was clearly a

38
pioneer in her highly original explorations of female identity

in her art. Cahun contested woman’s place in the existing

society order and created new and original representations of

femininity. By performing her Otherness through multiplicity

and artistically playing with her marginality, she engaged her

audience to reevaluate some of the possibilities of what a

woman might be.

Cahun clearly eludes classification. Each theory seems

too narrow to contain her multiple metamorphoses and too

restrictive to comprehend the breadth and depth of her being.

Breton’s Surrealism, Butler’s performativity, Rivière’s

masquerade, Lacan’s mirror, and Freud’s uncanny each enhances

our understanding of Cahun and her art, but none do her

justice.

It is tempting to understand Cahun’s innovations solely

in terms of postmodern conceptions regarding the fluidity and

performativity of gender and identity. Although I have

succumbed to this temptation in my paper, I have tried not to

do so exclusively. While I believe that Cahun’s art easily

lends itself to interpretations based on theories that have

been refined only a little more than a decade ago, I think it

is risky to apply such retrospective analysis to Cahun without

considering the personal, social, and cultural climate in

which she lived.

Cahun clearly enjoyed the transgressive pleasures

entailed in gender-bending and cross-dressing. Nonetheless,

39
she admittedly suffered from her use of mask and masquerade

and was aware of the danger and potential violation of self

entailed in her “games.” Cahun took on abundant identities,

but her self remained firm and constant in its longing. I

therefore believe it is crucial to not overly romanticize

Cahun’s strategic and aesthetic use of multiplicity, since at

least one reason for her doing so derived from a deep sense of

loss and confusion.

Cahun was admittedly troubled from early childhood

onward. The search for her lost mother and the fear of

resembling her and becoming mad herself permeate her artistic

efforts. Never one to escape painful truths, Cahun confessed

that much of her life and work, replete with its masks and

masquerades, involved the creation of fictitious identities

for which she paid the heavy price of alienation and

confusion. The audacious assurance witnessed in many of her

photographs is therefore best understood when combined with

the insecure exclamations in her writing. Toward the end of

Aveux non Avenus, Cahun reaches the following conclusion:

Make myself another vocabulary, brighten the silver of

the mirror, blink an eye, swindle myself by means of a

fluke muscle; cheat with my skeleton, correct my

mistakes, divide myself in order to conquer, multiply

myself in order to assert myself; briefly, to play with

ourselves can change nothing (Kline, p. 74).

40
Whereas Cahun explored transgendered themes and symbolically

overturned sexual binarism revealing the masquerade inherent

in all identity, hers was also a ceaseless battle to manage

powerful needs and anxiety.

Cahun bravely, perhaps counterphobically, confronted her

deepest fears, all the while asking, through her art, that the

spectator not shy away from difficult subjects including

sexuality, insanity, and difference. Although she lost her

mother to madness at an early age, she made numerous attempts

to compensate for this loss. In her somewhat incestuous (half-

sister) object choice, she found a companion who supplied her

with the unconditional and symbiotic love she desperately

sought. Cahun also found an outlet for her anger through

political activity. Most importantly, however, she employed

her art as a substitute mother/mirror on which she creatively

played with her boundaries of self, gender, and identity.

Cahun recaptured the nonverbal relationship with her

mother in the form of artmaking. Relating to her self as an

object, as her mother once had, entitled her to take over the

transformative function of the mother. She not only represents

what went wrong in this relationship; she also makes attempts

at reparation. The transferential repetition and working

through that are so visible in Cahun's art echo the familiar

processes that take place in psychoanalytic treatment. The

early mother-child dyad is transferred onto and into the

artwork in both form and content through a constant dynamic of

41
externalization and internalization (Knafo, 1996). I believe

this dynamic is what enabled Cahun to create a third sex -- a

sex both and neither male and female -- in a potential third

space that bridged the great divide which threatened to

separate her from her mother.

Cahun was ahead of her time but, in many ways, she was

also a product of her time. Like her Surrealist peers, her art

focused on the female form. Her fascination with madness also

coincided with Surrealism’s attraction to hysteric conditions

and convulsive beauty. Even Cahun’s overt lesbianism and

cross-dressing were not unique in Paris between the wars.

Despite obvious similarities with other artists who lived in

the same time and place as she, Cahun possessed unique

characteristics that hail her as an artist of vision. Her

self-portraits differed from her male Surrealist colleagues'

overdetermined depictions of women as revered fetishized

objects. Cahun, at one and the same time, created an art

object and became the object of meaning. Hers was an art

concerned with cultural coding of the female body rather than

the body itself (Bate, 1994).

Cahun courageously brought to the surface previously

hidden or feared aspects of the self, thereby empowering

woman's ability for a more liberated self-definition, a

definition that allowed for multiplicity and paradox. Her art

foreshadowed much of what would later emerge in women's art.

Feminist artists like Hannah Wilke, Carolee Schneeman, and

42
Adrian Piper, adopted her combination of the personal, sexual,

and political. Cahun's use of the mirror, double, mask, and

masquerade were also subsequently taken up by Frida Kahlo,

Lorna Simpson, and Cindy Sherman in their work. The self-

portrait in drag has become increasingly popular with male

artists like Pierre Molinier, Andy Warhol, Matthew Barney,

Lyle Ashton, and Yasuma Morimora. That Cahun remains one of

the only women (with the exception of Kahlo, Piper, and

Sherman) whose art depicts her in drag again marks her

enlightened and unique contribution to “herstory” in Western

art. Her body of work represents one of the most advanced

self-investigations of a woman artist up to her time and

including our own.

Cahun's revolutionary self-portrait photograph series was

the first of its kind in the history of art. As such, her

oeuvre remains remarkable for its inventiveness. Replete with

theatrical gender bending and self-staging, the revolt against

social and sexual conventions in Cahun's art possesses a

powerful contemporary resonance. In it, she made an early

statement about the willed metamorphosis of self and identity

in a world filled with multiple paradoxes of feminine desire.

This fact, at first glance, makes it difficult to comprehend

why so few people are familiar with her work today, especially

since it seems to belong to our time as well.

I would like to propose that this omission is at least

partly due to the artist's conscious and unconscious

43
strategies of obfuscation. It is perhaps not a coincidence

that, when remembered, Cahun has been taken for a man or

assumed dead in 1945. Whereas she was not a man, Cahun

certainly played with the idea of being a man; she often

dressed like a man, and even adopted a name that obscured her

gender. And, although she did not die a premature death in a

World War II concentration camp, she desired to kill off a

part of herself at a very young age. My suggestion that Cahun

contributed to her own glaring absence from art history is not

meant to excuse art historians who have taken years to unearth

many talented women artists including Cahun. It is merely to

submit that Cahun’s “disappearing act” may denote an uncanny

replica of the way she once experienced that of her mother.

Therefore, in order to undo the obliteration of a truly

fascinating woman and her art, it may be necessary to excavate

not only Claude Cahun, the mature artist and master of

deception; but also, Lucy Schwob, the young girl who, in

search of her lost mother, lost herself and became lost to the

world.

44
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48
1
All translations are mine unless otherwise noted.
2
Biographical data on Cahun’s life are taken from Francois Le Perlier’s 1992, 1994, and

1995 publications.
3
Cahun’s beheaded man is perhaps her response to the male Surrealists’ plethora of

images of faceless females

4
See Judith Halberstam, 1998, for a rich exploration of “female masculinity.”

49