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DOI: 10.1177/1350506809342619 2009 16: 353European Journal of Women's Studies

Viviana GravanoExplorations, Simulations: Claude Cahun and Self-Identity

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Explorations, Simulations:

Claude Cahun andSelf-Identity

Viviana GravanoACCADEMIA DI BELLE ARTI DI MILANO BRERA

ABSTRACT The purpose of this article is to construct a critique of some works bythe French artist Lucy Schwob, better known as Claude Cahun, who was active

between 1910 and 1950. A writer and photographer, Cahun was at first very closeto symbolist positions; later she was closer to the surrealist movement. Her workand her life, continually suspended between genders, and between ‘normality’and ‘deviance’, have so far been analysed mainly through gender studies.This article attempts to restore the inherent complexity of her poetic work andaesthetic. It tries to widen the field of study to deal with the representation of alterity, through reversing the stereotypical representation.

KEY WORDS Claude Cahun deviance female surrealism self-figuration self-identity surrealist photography self-portrait

In 2002, the French historian François Leperlier edited a philologicalcollection of texts by a then little known French authoress: Lucy Schwob, better known as Claude Cahun (Cahun, 2002). Four years later, the samescholar published a detailed biography of the artist (Leperlier, 2006), whichrevealed a really significant corpus, including essays, fiction and photogra-phy. What was odd was that although Claude Cahun was a well-knownmember of the surrealist movement, and well-known by the public, at leastup to the 1940s, she was completely excised from critical histories of litera-ture or arts after her death in 1954. Leperlier alleged that the main reasonfor this ‘repression’ was the voluntary isolation of Lucy Schwob and herinseparable companion Suzanne Malherbe (pen name Marcel Moore) onthe island of Jersey, in the English Channel, ruled by the British Crown. Thisplace suited Lucy’s history, as she lived and grew up between two cultures:her French origin and background, and the English culture that hosted her

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higher education, after her family’s decision to leave France. France had become an insecure country for Jews after the Dreyfus case, which had,marginally, involved Le Phare de la Loire, the newspaper directed by her

father in Nantes. Lucy was only partly Jewish: on the side of her paternalgrandmother, whom she loved so much that she made her the source of hernew surname: Cahun (Leperlier, 2006: 40). Undoubtedly, the decision towithdraw to the margins of cultural life strongly contributed to thedecades-long ‘oblivion’ of her work. I believe we can add to the ‘embar-rassment’ of the critics, given Claude Cahun’s really remarkable number of works, some of which were so difficult to identify because of the over-abundance of names by which she signed them – forming a kind of dis-seminated, pulverized dynamic among the conventional cataloguing of contemporary and modern art. A careful reading of her literature, journalsand private letters and a comparison with her photographs reveals alabyrinth of cross-references that form an articulated meta-linguistic sys-tem. The photographic images have been the subject of my study for sev-eral years, and I believe it is important to understand that all her workforms an integrated whole: the building or showing of what we woulddefine today as a self-identity,1 assembled through the juxtaposition andthe gathering of elements from her background – including her familydescent – and that works exactly as a huge, unfinished cadavre exquis.2

I would like to start from some interpretations that make her an exemplum

for gender studies (Rice, 1999), proposing a reading that at times mayreveal the essential points of her work, and may at other times do theopposite, framing her in an anachronistically postmodern vision – adecontextualized (Chadwick and Latimer, 2003: 127–43) view which doesnot properly acknowledge Cahun’s strong, carnal links to her own times.

Undoubtedly, her biography is a key factor in reading her works: anavowed lesbian, she fell in love with her stepsister, Suzanne Malherbe,daughter of her father’s second wife – whom he married after the prema-ture death of Claude’s mother – and shared her life with her until she died

in 1954 – also sharing a shocking spell of imprisonment during the Nazioccupation of Jersey.3 Part of the feminist literature (Caws et al., 1990)identified some sort of misogynous vein in the underlying philosophy of surrealism, which obscured the creative potential of the women withinthe movement, and which is reported – only to dissent from it – inRosalind Krauss’s essay Bachelors (Krauss, 1999). Such views wouldexplain the apparent absence of Claude Cahun from essays dedicated tosurrealism, in spite of her close friendship and continuous associationwith André Breton, and her official and widely documented presence

within the movement.4

Without going any further into the controversy over the allegedmisogyny of surrealism, something that is worthy of wider discussion, I believe it important – in the specific case of Claude Cahun – to consider

European Journal of Women’s Studies 16(4)354




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that her connection to the movement was characterized by a stronginvolvement, filled with meetings and conflicts, firmly focused on theidea of a ‘surrealist revolution’. It would be unfair to repudiate this ex-

post, to relegate her position to a mere cataloguing of her role as womanand lesbian in this specific cultural context. Lucy Schwob was an intel-lectual, an extraordinary expert on symbolism, an acknowledged mem- ber of surrealism, in an apparently more intimate and less exposed, butcertainly no less committed, dimension. She decided to achieve thisthrough building an imaginary that – working mainly on herself –developed an entire universe of meanings. The continuous attempt toread her, a posteriori, as a sort of ‘precursor’ of postmodern instances isinsufficiently philological. Such a reading would forcibly connect her,for instance, to the work of Cindy Sherman (Chadwick, 1998: 66–81), andwould therefore once more restrict her range of activity and influence toa well-defined – but limited – context.5

I would therefore like to analyse some self-portraits, moving chrono-logically across a very short period of production, in order to attempt areading that, for reasons of space, can only be outlined in this article. Imight summarize my position using a postscript by Claude Cahun as anincipit to the analysis of her photographic works: ‘A présent j’existeautrement’6 (Cahun, 2002: 191).

One of the self-portraits of 1920 (Figure 1), which is now an iconic

image of Claude, represents her from behind, in a dark singlet, her headcompletely shaved, her face turned to the left and her mouth half openwith the corners turned down, looking behind herself out of the corner of her eye. The bizarre position of her shoulders almost suggests a mascu-line, or in any case breastless, bust as seen from the front; the junction between the head and the shoulders is disquieting. Claude does not seemto have been interested in the anamorphic or deforming aspect of surre-alist photography, apart from just one image of 1929, which I mentionlater. In this photograph, nevertheless, a very subtle formal ambiguity

makes this body ‘odd’, because of the well-defined shape of the shavedcranium, and the position that seems to reverse the body, clearly alludingto some sort of inner estrangement, an ambiguity of the limbs. The pro-trusion of the aquiline nose emerges from her profile: an element that in‘racial’ cataloguing7 strongly identifies the stereotypical ‘Jewish type’.

In the series of portraits depicted by Claude Cahun in the texts collectedunder the title Éroïnes, the Old Testament heroine Judith – speaking in thefirst person8 in the description of La sadique Judith – depicts her beloved/hated one, Holofernes:

Ah! Surtout, que me plaisent ces oreilles en éventail, cette nuque au poilcourt, et la superbe verticale du crâne au cou, s’il penche la tête en arrière,

brisée par les plis de reptile! Je les aime parce que j’y reconnais les caractèresdistinctifs, de la race ennemi.9 (Cahun, 2002: 131)

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This description, obviously written some years after the photograph, isincredibly close to the self-portrait in the singlet, even in the detail of theskin folds of the neck, and closes with the phrase ‘the enemy race’, where –in a skilful play of identification/inversion – the artist hosts in her bodythe image of the evil/masculine Holofernes, who was loved, but alsodefeated by the Jewish heroine. In both the text and the image we can seethis same intensive process at work, which I believe characterizes thework of Claude Cahun: taking physical charge of herself, embodying sev-eral conditions in her own limbs, not harmonizing them, or searching forsome resolutive mediation, but keeping them in a constant condition of negotiation and contradiction. In that body, which appears both front and back to be both masculine and feminine, there is no attempt at gratifica-tion, rather, a vital, disquieting sense of the indefinite.

In another text, again contemporary with the photograph and con-tained in Aveux non avenus (Cahun, 2002), Claude Cahun describes a dual-istic portrait that might serve as an extended caption to the photograph:

A l’Inévitable./O fillette gentille, dépose ta grâce de fleur séchée entre lesfeuillets de mes livres et de mes actes préférés, que je m’habitue à ton

parfume dont la faduer m’ecœure un peu encore, et dont l’ivresse amère, etque j’aime! – me suffoque d’abord malgré moi. . ./O mort camarde,ton immutable moule s’impose atrocement aux visages à nez aquilin. Aussiles hommes de ce type te redoutent-ils davantage. Pourtant sois inflexible,masque implacable; reste rigide, que tu les veuilles ou non. Ne te laisse pasinjurier par moi, petite douceur.10 (Cahun, 2002: 191)


FIGURE 1 Self-Portrait from 1920. Copyright Jewish Heritage Museum.




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I would like here to make a short digression on the issue of the nameselected by the artist, who related to Charles Henri Barbier in 1951:

. . . Claude Cahun – qui représentait (représente à mes yeux) mon véritablenom plutôt qu’un pseudonyme.11 (Leperlier, 2006: 41)

I believe this is an essential passage in clarifying that – for Lucy Schwob –Claude Cahun is not an alter ego; it is not, as she declares, a nickname, butis an actual self-nomination, i.e. it is part of the reconstructive process of aself, which, to be effectively accomplished, must start from a basic element,i.e. from the definition of the very coordinates it belongs to, so that – oncereprocessed – they may introduce and contain congenital elements of anew, self-determined personality.

I believe it is not at all an accident that such a new ‘nomination’ of her-self involves the acquisition of a surname taken from her paternal grand-mother, of easily recognizable Jewish descent, something that was rather‘uncomfortable’ at that time. In Confidences au miroir (Cahun, 2002) – apoetic autobiography published for the first time by Leperlier – ClaudeCahun writes, in a form of sorrowful invocation:

Ô mal nommés, je vous renomme! Ô bien aimés, je vous surnomme, Ô dis-crédités . . . objet, sujet, idée, mot, je vous fais confiance.12 (Cahun, 2002: 585)

The representation of her own subjectivity is no longer dictated byany family line, or by birth; rather, it is an a posteriori choice, conscious anddetermined and to transform herself and set up her own world. Hence thereason to choose not only the surname, but also the given name Claude,which enables her to stand on that threshold without revealing her gender(in French it is written the same for masculine and feminine). She also said:

La gêne des mots, et surtout de noms propres, est un obstacle à mes relationsavec autrui, c’est-à-dire à ma vie même. Obstacle si ancien qu’il m’apparaît

en quelque sorte un trait congénital.13 (Cahun, 2002: 585)

Claude Cahun reiterates that the new name does not belong to her‘literature’, but – in absolute terms – to her life, and she mentions the term‘congenital’, a word in vogue at the time as it related to sexual ‘deviations’,such as the homosexuality – analysed by Havelock Ellis, whom ClaudeCahun herself translated from English – within the animated debate onthe ‘genetic’ origin of the then so-called ‘inversion’14 (Ellis, 1966). I there-fore believe it interesting to see some intended ‘physiognomic’ accentua-

tions in her first portraits, like figural ‘renominations’: a way of stagingher claimed ‘belonging’, using the stereotyped signs by which the con-ventions normally depict it. Thus, returning to the elements of the afore-mentioned photographs: the shaving – a clear sign of rebellion becauseof long hair being a strong sign of feminine distinctiveness at that time





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(Doy, 2007: 15–35) – the ostentation of the ‘Jewish’ nose, and the positionof the bust, which androgynizes her, bring to the surface a strong will toidentify herself as an anomalous ‘being’, not only in the meaning of the

‘not readily identifiable’ sexual ambiguity as related to gender, but closeto the aesthetics of anomaly that – at that time – were on a similar level tophotographic representation of lunatics, of ‘deviants’ and of the ‘other’ inmore general terms.

In the figuration Claude Cahun gives herself I see some kind of ‘indi-vidual to be corrected’, in the meaning given by Michel Foucault (1999)in Les Anormaux, which he developed for his lectures at the Collège deFrance between 1974 and 1975. Somebody who can be defined justthrough his or her ‘incorrigibility’, who knows the rules well yet infringesthem willingly, and puts him- or herself on the limits of any normalization,starting with a basic refusal of the family.

I believe it is essential – in understanding Lucy Schwob’s relationshipwith ‘abnormality’ – to take seriously into account how her life had beendisrupted by a traumatic event she herself reshaped by translating andconceptualizing it several times throughout her work. When Claude wasstill a child, her mother was committed to a lunatic asylum, a victim of avery severe depression, from which she would never recover or return, thusdisappearing completely from her daughter’s life. Before being interned,Lucy’s mother, Marie Antoinette, manifested a dramatic refusal of Lucy:

she could not touch her and even committed violent acts against her. Hermother’s detention would generate in Lucy the constant fear, which wasalso obsessively shared by her father, of ending in the same terrible vice-likegrip of mental illness. In these first self-portraits, there is a precise iconog-raphy of alienation, an image suspension between the self-representationand the foreshadowing of a ‘sick’ future. Claude Cahun presents herself willingly as an ostensibly ‘embarrassing’ figure to be looked at, through adeclared deconstruction of her physical features. A feminine body throughthe shaved cranium and the androgynous slimness, ‘ethnicized’ by the

‘Jewish’ nose and the starting point of a more general, deep and continu-ous reflection on this condition of alteration, which would soon find for hera conceptual, intellectual meaning in her approach to the surrealist move-ment. Again, in Aveux non avenues, she writes:

Ah ça je deviens fou! Et la Folie-ô bouche malaise à l’haleine contagieuse quim’a déchiré l’oreille – d’une voix monstrueuse me souffle son doute empoi-sonné: – L’aliénation mentale est-elle subite ou graduelle? Je répète docile-ment: Et la Folie me regarde de ses yeux fixes./ Docilement . . . d’unecompréhension de plus en plus atténuée. Je me surprends à dire:/ –

L’aliénation consciente est elle subite ou graduelle?15

(Cahun, 2002: 195)

Madness is not only a possible, codified condition to be submitted to, but it can be transformed into a voluntarily ‘built’ position, into which can





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one step consciously, keeping for oneself a sought-after threshold. Hencethe choice to portray herself as ‘freak’, crazy, lunatic, ‘other’. We mightagree with Lucy ‘La folie n’est moins vaniteuse que la raison’16 (Cahun,2002: 201). And also:

Je me fais raser les cheveux, arracher les dents, les seins – tout ce quigêne ou impatiente mon regard – l’estomac, les ovaires, le cerveau con-scient et enkysté. Quand je n’aurai plus qu’une carte en main, qu’un bat-tement de coeur à noter, mais la perfection, bien sûre je gagnerai lapartie.17 (Cahun, 2002: 215)

I believe that another self-portrait (Figure 2), housed at the Musée d’ArtModerne in Paris, again dated 1920, validates the assumption that one of the key elements in Claude Cahun’s iconography starts from building aself-identity connected in a very wide sense to the representation of ‘alterity’.The photograph shows her in profile, with her arms folded, but only justvisible, in an oversized velvet jacket with a large shawl collar enclosing thethin body we guess underneath it. The hair is very short, cut in a mascu-line style; a direct light hits the visage and the profile ‘parades’ once more

the aquiline nose, with the same half-open mouth, the corners turneddownwards. The gaze is fixed forward, but the eyelids are slightly closed.This image actually appears as the countermelody of the former: Lucy cov-ers that anomalous body in the jacket, not to hide it, but – in this case – to


FIGURE 2 Self-Portrait from 1920. Reproduced with permission of theMusée d’Art Moderne, Paris.




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highlight it even more and celebrate it, to expose its refiguration. Given thatthe hair has grown a little, this self-portrait, from the same year, must be alittle later than that shown in Figure 1. The shape of the nose gives form to

the rift within the family: a paternal grandmother very proud of her Jewishlineage18 and a Catholic, avowedly anti-Semite maternal family.

Maman me nommait ‘mon petit cochon’! Elle me retroussait le bout de nez.Elle s’attristait de constater que, malgré tout, je n’avais pas le nez grec. Mesoreilles un petit peu décollées la désolait. C’est comme pour le nez ‘Il estpetit; il serait tou à fait joli si . . . Elles seront parfaites tes oreilles, mon petitcrochon, si tu veux bien . . .’ Je la laissais faire. Elle me faisait porter un

béguin . . . qui disparut avec elle.19 (Cahun, 2002: 618)

In these early self-portraits, Lucy/Claude includes all her worst fears, but also her family roots, which she redesigns, transforming them from anessential element to a poetic, formal one. The format of the images – clearlyobtained from a far larger negative in the case of the second – refers to thephotographic portrait, which is already aligned with the documentaryphotograph. It is interesting to note the subtle work of the semiotics of form: the use of a format that evokes identification, and therefore a com-pulsory, institutional pose; it is used to represent herself as a ‘foreign body’, even turning its back, not well identifiable and liminal. It is clearthat Claude Cahun, because of her association with surrealism,20 would

certainly have had the opportunity to see – and, I assume, also to partici-pate in – the research developed in the pages of La Révolution surréaliste,and then Documents and Minotaure, around photo identification images. Apicture of 1924, published in issue 1 of La Révolution surréaliste shows atthe centre a mug shot of the young anarchist Germaine Berton – knownfor having killed the monarchist Marius Plateau, founder of l’ActionFrançaise – surrounded by 28 photo IDs of men ‘suspected’ of surrealism,including Freud and Picasso. The last issue of the same publication thatyear printed another picture, this time having at its centre a reproduction of

Magritte’s painting representing a feminine nude, in a posture reminiscentof Botticelli’s Birth of Venus – or more generically of the Venus pudica – withthe inscriptions ‘je ne vois pas’21 above her head and ‘cachée dans laforêt’22 under her feet, and word ‘femme’ replaced by the feminine image.This is surrounded by 16 photographic portraits of surrealists, all withtheir eyes shut, an obvious tribute to André Breton’s automatic thinking.23

The two photomontages deal – in two different perspectives – with atheme dear to the surrealist movement: the unconditional adhesion to theacts and biography of whoever is breaking the rules, be they criminals,

madmen or any other form of ‘deviation’ or ‘alienation’. The choice of theidentification photograph has – in both cases – a strongly subversivevalue, precisely because of the formal contradiction into which it throwsthe categorizing stereotype, which is consolidated and made ‘scientific’





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by the birth of photography. Allusion is made here to a phenomenon firstintroduced in Disdéri’s Cartes de Visite, and later developed in identifica-tion photographs as a possible tool of self-representation. This often

pushed the most conventional of bourgeois to become exhibitionistswithin the photographic studio, even taking the en travesti well beyondthe stage. Therefore, at least two different approaches to Claude Cahun’sworld lie concealed in the context of the small photographic self-portrait:the scientific identification photograph (psychiatric, criminal and racial,all placed on the same level) and the opportunity of self-definition andself-representation by putting oneself on stage. In 1930, Georges Bataillepublished the essay ‘Figure humaine’ in issue 4 of Documents; the essayintroduces an intense reflection on the inner/outer relationship in therepresentation of the human figure, and hence on its relationship withthe concepts of beauty and deviation. A reading of Nicolas-FrançoisRegnault’s 18th-century anatomical tables, which could be seen in theBibliothèque Nationale de France, and which illustrated human anatomi-cal anomalies and deformations, developed into the awareness of theneed for a ‘human’ presentation, even depicting the worst monstrosities.The twins joined at the head, for instance, assumed a posture to the pub-lic that invoked pity for them; the man with the four atrophic limbs drewa scimitar and wore a beautiful turban. What attracted and interestedBataille was the urgency of ‘staging’ diversity. At the end of 1933, issue 3–

4 of the magazine Minotaure, alongside Salvador Dalí’s text LePhénomène de l’extase, published a sort of photographic mosaic portrayingwomen with closed eyes and half-closed lips, in an ecstatic pose, accom-panied by close-up photographs of ears – reminiscent of Bertillon’santhropometric photographs – and reproductions of artwork detailsshowing figures in ecstasy.

The images clearly refer to the iconography born around the phenomenonof hysteria, which was ‘discovered’ by Charcot, and which he turned into anactual ‘artform’ in his laboratory at the lunatic asylum of the Salpêtrière

in Paris in the early 19th century. In his enlightening essay L’Invention del’hysterie, the historian Georges Didi-Huberman reveals from the very beginning the marvellous and yet terrible focus of Charcot’s research:

J’interroge ce paradoxe d’atrocité: l’hystérie fut, a tous moments de son his-toire, une douleur mise en contrainte d’être inventée, comme spectacle etcomme image; elle allais jusqu’à s’inventer elle même (sa contrainte étaitson essence) lorsque faiblissait le talent des fabricateurs patentés del’Hystérie.24 (Didi-Huberman, 1982: 9)

I would like to make clear here that the idea of discovery works in realityas a system of invention and building of alterity – a key concept to under-stand, for instance, a large part of the colonial literature founded on thedefinition of ‘race’, because, as the anthropologist Mondher Kilani writes:





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‘This is why seeing was systematically invoked in support of saying, andassigned to the task of telling the truth’ (Kilani, 1994: 79).

To return to Claude Cahun, her mother’s madness would mark her for

life, and she would keep a veil of mystery over her concrete manifesta-tion. As an adult, Claude went to look for her mother in Paris, in the asy-lum where she was last seen, to be with her physically, but discovered shehad been dead for years. Again in her ‘confessions’, she wrote:

. . . l’obsédante absence de ma mère, traitée en ‘aliénée’, considérée par lessiens – par sa mère et sa soeur – comme une honte qu’il convient de cacherau ‘monde’, le merveilleux et consternant mystère de ce que les adultesnommaient ses ‘crises’, le déchirement de lui être arrachée, rendue pour enêtre, séparée de nouveau . . .25 (Cahun, 2002: 585)

Claude would find the mystery and pain of this illness representedpublicly in much of the literature and art that – from the beginning of thecentury – focused on ‘lunatic women’, and this became, in my opinion,another central element in her iconography, at least in her first photo-graphic self-portraits, and a conspicuous part of her writings.

The encumbering character of her mother, who was abnegated as a sub-limated image, is to be first of all impersonated, put back on the stage, con-cretized using the stereotyped iconography she had already met as a child,in the refusal and shame of family respectability, and then met again at anintellectual level in the public representation of ‘diversity’. So far, in thedocuments referred to – the Claude Cahun Collection in the Jersey Heritagearchives – I have not found any references to the study of Charcot in herearly years, but Leperlier mentions a visit paid by Claude and Suzanne toa ‘demonstration’ of the patients at the Salpêtrière, in the mid-1930s, accom-panied by a Tunisian friend of theirs, Néoclès Coutouzis, a fellow combat-ant in the Groupe Brunet. In a letter, Coutouzis writes that their interest wasnot medical, but addressed whatever would represent, philosophically andpolitically, the state of ‘alienation’, this was additionally so in view of their

innate opposition to the psychiatric institution itself (Leperlier, 2006: 222).Furthermore, between 1934 and 1935, Claude Cahun, accompanied by

Michaux, Breton and Crevel, attended the lectures of the psychiatristGastone Ferdière (Leperlier, 2006: 223) at the Saint’Anne hospital in Paris.She then remained in close contact with Ferdière – who was to assistAntonin Artaud in Rodez hospital in 1944, submitting him to electroshock –for a long time. We can therefore imagine that Claude Cahun was somehowcapable of what Didi-Huberman defines as the imaginatio plastica (Didi-Huberman, 1982: 13), which is pushing Charcot not to ‘document/describe’

hysteria, but to stage it, up to the actual invention of its representation(which, in its most extreme instances, sees the ‘voluntary’ participation of the sick women themselves), and up to her becoming curator of the Muséede la Salpêtrière, the actual temple of the ‘figuration’ of the disease.





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Looking back at the two Claude Cahun photographic self-portraits, wecan recognize characteristics of the classic iconography devised for thelunatic: the same shaved cranium, the half-open mouth, the attitude of

being closed in on herself, in particular in the image with the jacket, andthe almost terrifying aspect – as in the image of her turning backwards tolook over her shoulder with that disquieting gaze. Claude Cahun presentsthe ‘private’ ghost of her mother’s madness, still using the stylistic ele-ments of the stereotypical representation of the ‘lunatic’ and ‘deviant’, toset up her own public image of ‘diversity’. In a very significant passage of

Aveux non avenues, the artist writes about the infanticide/suicide of amother and her son/daughter, sketching some interesting character traits:

Avis: il a été tué dans le commune de Guerlande un enfant âgé de trente . . .

rrr . . . trois ans: Yves Claudanec. Rapporter l’assassin, 26, rue Saint-Antoine.On promet une récompense./ Cependant, sur la peau du tambour, commesur la toile tendue d’une lanterne magique, je voyais s’inscrire trait par trait,s’effacer, reparaître, tous le soupçons des spectateur: les voyous notoiresdu pays, un oncle de l’enfant, héritier éventuel, enfin la mère elle même.L’image de celle-ci persista, disparaissant un instant pour venir reconstituerla scène d’un égorgement imaginaire. Cette femme, ardente, irréligieuse etpeu bavarde, passait pour folle dans le pays. Elle fixa le regard, les préven-tions. Faute de prouves suffisantes d’innocence, elle fut incriminée incar-céré, tandis qu’elle répétait d’un ton monotone – comme une vache rumine –la tête vraiment perdue cette fois: – Oui c’est moi qui l’ai envoyé à la mort!

Cette parole fut comptée pour un aveu. Et la fille Claudenac marcha vers laguillotine comme pour un départ vers la Terre Promise, riant à travers seslarmes . . . – On a bien fait de la condamner, dit quelqu’un. Elle simule lafolie. Qu’importe à cette femme de vivre? Elle simulait, certes, la foule avaitraison.26 (Cahun, 2002: 198)

At the end of the passage, the idea of feigning madness is explicit, andmight seem an autobiographic, but also a poetic note; and – like in a Greektragedy – the chorus ‘is right’ about the self-confessed infanticidal woman,who goes voluntarily to her death.

In another, less well-known photograph, again of 1920, Claude Cahunis shot from the front, at half length; she wears a singlet – perhaps thesame as in the other photograph – and holds her hands over her ears, asin the gesture of not wanting to hear. The eyes are wide open, the headagain shaved. The white light hitting her face makes it rather two-dimen-sional, and confers on it an estranging fixity. On the one hand, her gestureactually looks almost desperate, like someone who does not want to hear,and once again is reminiscent of the typical iconography of ‘lunatics’ withtheir hands in their hair, or the autistic gesture of isolation from the world.

On the other hand, nevertheless, the strange light that separates the headfrom the shoulders gives her face the character of a mask, introducing atheme that would prove to be central, both in her writings and in many of her subsequent images. The gesture is disquieting, and it conjures a sort





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of humanized dummy ‘changing’ its head, putting another one on itsshoulders. In 1930, Claude Cahun published a self-portrait in the surreal-ist magazine Bifur (Figure 3), where the cranium is again shaved and com-pletely deformed, lengthened out of proportion.27 The head, set against a black background, has an almost frightened gaze. The image immediatelyrecalls a sentence Claude Chaun writes in the fourth chapter of Aveux nonavenues portraying Auriga:

Des seins superflues; les dents irrégulières, inefficaces, les yeux et lescheveux du ton le plus banale; des main assez fines, mais tordues, défor-

mées. La tête ovale de l’esclave; la front trop haut…ou trop bas; un nez bienréussi dans son genre – un berne affreux. . .28 (Cahun, 2006: 241)

Besides the nth reference to the nose, which is ‘well made of its kind’, but in reality obscene, we have the unexpected definition ‘the oval headof the slave’, which evokes a ‘racial’ cataloguing, a ‘downwards’ identifi-cation, a ‘brutish’ category, and especially if we also consider that – in thephotographic image – Claude appears to be constrained, as though herarms are bound. Once again, the image focuses upon the bust, so that anypossible/impossible identification – suspended between masculine andfeminine, but also almost between human and animal, between currentand primordial – passes through the shape of the head and the expressionof the face. A further topic, which is the subject of my ongoing research,are Claude Cahun’s links to what James Clifford defines as ‘ethnographic


FIGURE 3 Self-Portrait from Bifur Magazine, 1920. Copyright JewishHeritage Museum.




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surrealism’ (Clifford, 1988). Certainly her close relationship with Bataille,her link with Documents and therefore her knowledge of Michel Leiris’

works, would imply some degree of closeness with the dawning ethno-graphic thinking within the surrealist environment. It must be added thatsuch a context established an ideal bridge between dealing with alterityin the colonial and racial environment (it must not be forgotten thatClaude Cahun was a fervent anti-imperialist activist) and in the psychi-atric and criminal one. I therefore believe we should develop a new read-ing about the use of the mask in Claude Cahun’s images, preciselyassociating her with ethnographic surrealism, starting with a photographwhere the heads of Claude and Suzanne appear from behind a museum

window exhibiting what are presumably African masks, so that theyappear themselves as ‘finds’ in an exhibition. This can be added to herclear interest in exoticism and orientalism in her first symbolist period,which she also partially inherited from the deep link she felt with heruncle Marcel Schwob, a well-known writer, whom although she nevermet, she considered a sort of guiding star.

In 1928, a self-portrait titled ‘Que me veux-tu?’ (Figure 4) shows a mon-tage of two images of Claude’s head, one turns slightly, with an almostintimidated expression, and seems to be attached to the other, which isturned to look over the shoulder. It depicts a sort of two-headed torso.The title refers to some suspended issue between the two of them, thusmanifesting a strong sense of extraneousness, even repulsion and fear of one another. One of the most interesting aspects of Claude Cahun’sfigurative and literary reflections is the irreducibility of opposites – i.e. the


FIGURE 4 ‘Que Me Veux-Tu?’ Copyright Jewish Heritage Museum.




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refusal to think in a dichotomist, opposing way – and the attempt toconsider not only contamination, but also continuous conflict, as vitalelements. Two figures play two different roles, but contain each other, face

each other and yet are joined at the base. ‘Vie, mort, sœur sans âge. Etpourtant, la cadette, c’est toi: tu ne pouvais exister sans ta fausse jumelle.Vous avez parti liée. Tu ne peux pas l’exterminer sans t’abolir’29 (Cahun,2006: 192). The two ‘opposites’ are actually twin sisters: the one can onlyexist by exterminating the other, who, nevertheless, represents an everreversible alterity, and would therefore lead to some sort of suicide.Lucy’s perplexed visage asks Claude’s hooked profile, ‘Claude, what doyou want?’ or perhaps ‘how do you want me?’ Again in Aveux non avenues,she writes:

Amour? . . . Les amants trop heureux forment un couple pareil au monstrehermaphrodite ou encore aux frères siamois. Si l’on ne peut dénouer, ilfaut couper cet enchevêtrement gordien, ce noeud de serpents. . .30(Cahun, 2002: 213)

Much has been said about Claude Cahun’s connection to the psychi-atrist and philosopher Jacques Lacan, and this is confirmed by Claude’sand Suzanne’s private diary, which records, with a wealth of detail, hisaddress and phone number, as is usual for a good acquaintance at least.As documented by Leperlier, Lacan visited the two women’s house in Parisseveral times. Lacan’s ‘mirror stage’ theory (Lacan, 1966), as a definitionof the self from early infancy, is very close to Lucy Schwob’s vision of apersonality, which – splitting in the vision of alterity – builds the so-calledimago of the self. I would also like to reconnect this image to ClaudeCahun’s enthusiastic adhesion to the idea of ‘narcissism’, which I believewas drawn from Havelock Ellis’s theories (Ellis, 1966), in the early 1920s.

Starting from a detailed analysis of the invention of the term in psycho-analysis, passing through Freud’s theories, Havelock Ellis associates thisconcept with homosexuality. Furthermore, in a text explicitly dedicated to

the theme, Ellis makes continuous references to the mirror image, also,from a literary point of view, mentioning as a meaningful example OscarWilde. Wilde was a literary cornerstone for Claude Cahun, again becauseof the influence of her uncle, Marcel Schwob, who translated Wilde anddefended him in a passionate article of 1918, published in the Le Mercurede France (Cahun, 2002: 451), when Oscar Wilde was attacked for his playSalomé, which was forbidden in England. It would be interesting to recon-nect the mirror image and narcissism to a further series of portraits of bothherself and Marcel; portraits that Claude developed in front of the mirror

and which again, I believe, not only refer to the condition of ambiguity andsplit personality in general, but transcend, in a very deep manner, a trendto analyse the relationship between matter and form, between ‘reality’and image, between materialism and abstraction. This is invested with her





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mystical research, and has connections to laïcal esotericism, which of course was an important theme within the surrealist movement.

As a conclusion, I believe that the corpus of photographic images pro-

duced by Calude Cahun must lead to a re-evaluation of the myriad of connections and the vast network of intellectuals who met and influencedher, and who drew so much inspiration from her polymorph intelligence.

NOTES

1. This refers to the literature connected to the vision of the new anthropologydeveloped after the Santa Fé seminar of 1984, which traced a series of inno-vative paths in social research, opening the way to a new concept of subjec-

tivity, to the concepts of self-representation and identity negotiation, which inturn led to the idea of self-identity in the specific meaning I refer to here. SeeClifford and Marcus (1986) and Marcus and Fischer (1986).

2. ‘Illustrious corpse’ (translator’s note).3. Jersey, an English dominion, was invaded by the Nazis. The two women

started their own peculiar resistance action, dressing up as men and infiltratingthe enemy occupation troops to drop hints in German inviting them to desertand not to pursue their terrible venture. They were arrested, their house ram-sacked, with a terrible loss of their work, and they were sentenced to death.Only the arrival of the Allied Forces saved them from being shot. A wide rangeof documentation, including a very precious journal of the period, is kept in the

Claude Cahun Collection at the Jersey Heritage Museum.4. Claude Cahun’s participation in the surrealist movement is far from marginaland is located within a sharply politicized context. In 1932, she joined theAssociation des Écrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires (AEAR) with her com-panion Suzanne, and then approached the Groupe Brunet, a strongly criticalTrotskyist movement, with the intent of facilitating cooperation betweenthem and the surrealists. In particular, she was associated with Henri Michaux,André Breton himself and René Crevel. In 1933, she signed the AEAR decla-rations Protestez and Contre le fascisme mais aussi contre l’impérialisme français.She thus met Tristan Tzara, Salvador Dalí and Man Ray. In 1934, she publishedLes Paris sont ouverts [The Odds are Open], which generated a vehement

debate within the movement on the political role of culture. Finally, in 1935,she participated in the foundation of Contre-Attaque and met Roger Cailloisand Georges Bataille.

5. I would like to mention here Gen Doy’s recent monographic essay, whichseems to me to depart for the first time from the trend of reading ClaudeCahun’s work only within the ambit of gender studies. See Doy (2007).

6. ‘Today, I exist otherwise’ (translator’s note).7. The term ‘racial’ is used here in a clearly critical way, to indicate any form of

building an identity in a racist way: those that derive from the first anthropo-logical studies up to those related to any sort of diversity, sick people, allegeddelinquents, homosexuals, victims of political persecution. Photography

played an essential role in creating a sort of scientific legitimization to theinvention of the ‘other’, understood from the beginning as a potential enemy.The list of the scholars who contributed to the consolidation of this study of human difference is long, we mention, as reference: Francis Galton’s research,with his text of 1883 Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development; Cesare





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Lombroso’s and Alphonse Bertillon’s systematic museum work; and the veryfamous Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière by J. Martin Charcot.See also: Gilardi (2003) and Muzzarelli (2003).

8. I really find it very relevant that all Claude Cahun’s heroines speak in the first

person, as in the ancient monologues of the great feminine characters of theGreek tragedies; but also – I believe – she used this to emphasize awarenessand strongly objective involvement, which can be related to the firm politicalwill that characterizes all her life and poetics.

9. ‘Ah! How I love those jug ears, that short-haired nape, and the superb verti-cal from the skull to the neck, if he tilts his head backwards, broken by thereptilian folds! I love them because I recognize there the distinctive charac-teristics of the enemy race’ (translator’s note).

10. ‘To the Inevitable./Sweet girl, lay your grace of dried flowers between thepages of my books and of my favourite acts, so that I get used to your scent,whose insipidity still makes me somewhat sick, and whose bitter intoxica-

tion, which I love! suffocates me in spite of myself . . ./Dead companion, yourimmutable mould imposes itself atrociously upon aquiline-nosed faces. Thus,men of this kind dread you even more. Nevertheless, be inflexible, implaca-

ble mask; remain rigid, like it or not. Do not let me insult you, little sweetie’(translator’s note).

11. ‘. . . Claude Cahun – it represented (represents in my eyes) my actual name,rather than a nickname’ (translator’s note).

12. ‘Badly named, I recall you! Well loved, I nickname you. Discredited . . . object,subject, idea, word, I trust you’ (translator’s note).

13. ‘The embarrassment of the words, and mainly of the proper nouns, is anobstacle to my relationships with the others, i.e. to my own life. An obstacle

so ancient that it seems to me it is somehow congenital’ (translator’s note).14. I believe much more attention should be paid to the connection between thepositions of Claude Cahun and the texts of the psychologist Havelock Ellis,who was the first to deal with the acknowledgement of some sort of ‘thirdgender’. The importance Claude Cahun placed on this scholar is shown bythe fact that, in 1928, she translated into French his Studies in the Psychology of Sex, part of which would be published in 1929 in Le Mercure de France as‘L’Hygiène sociale – La femme dans la société’.

15. ‘Ah, I am becoming crazy! And Madness, its sick mouth of contagious halito-sis has torn my ear open – in a monstrous voice it whispers its poisonousdoubt: – Is mental alienation sudden or gradual? I repeat docilely: And

Madness looks at me with its fixed eyes./ Docilely. . . in an understandingthat progressively diminishes. I find myself saying:/ – Is conscious alienationsudden or gradual?’ (translator’s note).

16. ‘Madness is no less vain than reason’ (translator’s note).17. ‘I am having my hair shaved, my teeth pulled out, the breast – all that embar-

rasses or tries the patience of my look – the stomach, the ovaries, the con-scious and encysted brain. When I am left with only one card in my hand, aheartbeat to note, I will certainly win the game’ (translator’s note).

18. Attention should be paid to Lucy Schwob’s more or less intentional andsought-for Jewish ‘origins’. In her texts, God and the mystics are sometimesreviewed in a way that imply that she had an understanding of the messianic

theories of the Hebraism of that time. Her familiarity with some of texts of thephilosopher Walter Benjamin could be investigated, because of her close con-nection in those years with the French librarian Adrienne Monnier, whowould help the German philosopher escape from the Nazis. In support of myassumption, which I am going to investigate further in my research, I would





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like to quote but one sentence drawn from Aveux non avenues: ‘Moi, juive aupoint d’utiliser mes péchés à mon salut, de mettre en œuvre mes sous-produits,de me surprendre continuellement, l’œil en crochet, au bord de ma proprepoubelle!’ (Cahun, 2002: 211) [I am a Jew, up to the point of using my sins for

my salvation, of taking advantage of my by-products, of catching myself con-tinuously, out of the corner of my eye, at the edge of my own garbage can!].19. ‘Mummy used to call me “my little piggy”! She rolled up the tip of my nose.

She had to admit that – in spite of this – I had no Greek nose. My slightly jug ears upset her. It was like the nose. “It is small, it would be very nice if . . . Your ears would be perfect, my little piggy, if you just wanted it . . .” Ilet her do it. She made me wear a bonnet . . . which disappeared with her’(translator’s note).

20. Here, we need to digress and ponder on the possible position of ClaudeCahun within the quarrel that arose within surrealism between Breton andthe so-called ‘heretic’ wing, essentially represented by Bataille. Because

while, on the one hand, Claude Cahun was linked to Breton by very strongties of friendship, on the other, the technical connection between her workand all the members of Documents is rather obvious.

21. ‘I cannot see’ (translator’s note).22. ‘Hidden in the forest’ (translator’s note).23. With regard to this, see: Lahuerta (2004).24. ‘I question this paradox of atrocity: throughout its history, hysteria has been

a pain which needed to be invented, as a performance and as an image; itwent as far as inventing itself (this need was its essence) when the talent of the licensed constructors of hysteria was weakening’ (translator’s note).

25. ‘. . . The obsessive absence of my mother, treated as a “lunatic”, considered by

her own family – by her mother and sister – as a shame that should be hiddenfrom the “world”, the marvellous and appalling mystery of what the adultscalled her “crises”, the ripping of being torn off from her, returned to beseparated again . . .’ (translator’s note).

26. Attention: a child aged thirty . . . rrr . . . three years, Yves Claudanec, was killedin the municipality of Guerlande. Report the murderer, to 26, rue Saint-Antoine. Reward promised./ Nevertheless, on the head of the drum, like onthe stretched canvas of a magic lantern, I saw being inscribed, stroke by stroke,and then erased, and appear again, all those who the spectators suspected: thewell-known roughnecks of the village, an uncle of the child, possible next of kin, and then the mother herself. Her image remained, disappearing for a time

to then reconstruct the scene of an imagined throat cutting. This ardent, non-religious, silent woman was considered the village idiot. She fixed the gaze,the prejudices. Failing sufficient evidence of her innocence, she was prose-cuted, incarcerated, while she was repeating monotonously – as a cow chew-ing the cud – her mind actually lost this time: – Yes, I am the one who sent himto death! These words were considered a confession. And the Claudenac girlwalked towards the guillotine as if she were leaving for the Promised Land,laughing through her tears . . . – It was right to sentence her, somebody said.She pretends to be mad. This woman doesn’t care to live? She was pretending,sure, the crowd was right’ (translator’s note).

27. This image is often compared to André Kertézs’ Distortion series, yet I believe

that – apart from the aesthetic closeness – Claude Cahun’s work has not muchto do with it, because it develops a concept, even formally, connected to alogic totally inherent to the self-portraits of the French artist’s first period.

28. ‘Superfluous breast; irregular, next to useless teeth, eyes and hair of theplainest shade; rather fine hands, but, twisted, deformed. The oval head of the





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slave; the forehead too high . . . or too low; a well-made nose of its kind – anawful deception’ (translator’s note).

29. ‘Life, death, ageless sister. And nevertheless, you are the youngest: you couldnot exist without your false twin. You are tied. You cannot exterminate her

without abolishing yourself’ (translator’s note).30. ‘Love? . . . Lovers who are too happy form a couple like the hermaphroditemonster, or even Siamese twins. If you cannot untie this Gordian Knot, thisserpent knot must be cut . . .’(translator’s note).

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Blessing, Jennifer, ed. (1997) Rrose Is a Rrose Is a Rrose: Gender Performance inPhotography. New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications.

Butler, Judith (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London:Routledge.Cahun, Claude (2002) Écrits. Paris: Éditions Jean-Michel Place.Caws, Mary Ann, Rudolph E. Kuenzli and Gwen Raaberg (1990) Surrealism and

Women. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.Chadwick, Withney (1985) Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement. London:

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Press.Clifford, James (1988) The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography,Literature and Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Clifford, James and George E. Marcus (1986) Writing Culture: Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: The University of California Press.

Didi-Huberman, Georges (1982) Invention de l’hystérie. Charcot et l’iconographie pho-tographique de la Salpêtrière. Paris: Macula.

Downie, Louise, ed. (2006) Don’t Kiss Me: The Art of Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore(2006) London: Tate Publishing and Aperture.

Doy, Gen (2007) Claude Cahun: A Sensual Politics of Photography. London: I.B. Tauris.Ellis, Havelock (1966) Études de psychologie sexuelle. Paris: Cercle du Livre Précieux.

Foucault, Michel (1999) Les Anormaux. Paris: Seuil/Gallimard.Gilardi, Ando (2003) Wanted! Storia, tecnica ed estetica della fotografia criminale,seganeletica e giudiziaria. Milan: Bruno Mondadori.

Kilani, Mondher (1994) L’Invention de l’autre. Essais sur le discours anthropologique.Lausanne: Payot.

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Muzzarelli, Federica (2003) Formato tessera. Storia, arte e idee in photomatic. Milan:Bruno Mondadori.

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Viviana Gravano is Professor of History of Contemporary Art at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Milano Brera and writes for Art’O, a performing and visual arts magazine. Her most important work includes: L’Arte fotografica, Fotografi di tutto ilmondo nelle collezioni italiane (Rome: Carte Segrete, 1996); L’immaginefotografica (Milan: Mimesis, 1997); Crossing. Progetti fotografici di confine(Milan: Costa & Nolan, 1998); Paesaggi attivi Saggio contro la contemplazione.L’arte contemporanea e il paesaggio metropolitano (Rome: Costa & Nolan,2008). Address: Accademia di Belle Arti di Milano Brera, Via Brera, 28, 20121 –

Milano, Italy. [email: [email protected]]
