[DISPLAY_ULTIMATE_SOCIAL_ICONS]
Laurie says:
The Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco has a remarkable exhibition called Show Me as I Want to Be Seen. Curator Natasha Matteson positions surrealists Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore alongside ten 21st century artists — Nicole Eisenman, Rhonda Holberton, Hiwa K., Young Joon Kwak, Zanele Muholi, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Gabby Rosenberg, Tschabalala Self, Davina Semo, and Isabel Yellin — contending with the thorniness of representation in all its current-day complexity.
I’m going to be posting about the exhibition later in the week. I found it brilliant and fascinating after seeing it twice. (Once was definitely not enough.) It is, in a sense, about portraiture, and it made me consider many aspects of my Memory Landscapes project.
We studied Cahun in the Gay History Project in the 80’s, but seeing her work again in the originals made a much more profound impression on me. The original work wasn’t available then, and seeing it in the larger context of the exhibition also gives a different and far more complex perspective.
From Me, Myself and I: Exploring Identity Through Self Portraits by Kerry Manders:
For Cahun, identity is always a mask — necessarily strange and ambiguous; her oeuvre constructs a self that is mutable and elusive. At times, she looks directly at the camera, daring and defying the audience to return her gaze; other times, she turns and looks away, blindfolding or covering her eyes. Whether concealed or conspicuous, adorned or bare, Cahun asserts that no exposure fully reveals her.
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Born Lucy Schwob in 1894 in Nantes, France, Claude Cahun adopted her androgynous pseudonym to pursue work that, in addition to photography, included performance art and experimental writing…. Cahun’s main — not to mention her first and most significant — spectator and collaborator was her lover Suzanne Malherbe, an artist and graphic designer known professionally as Marcel Moore. They met as schoolgirls in 1909 and began a lifelong romantic and artistic partnership. Their lives became even more intimately entwined when they became stepsisters after Cahun’s father wed Moore’s mother in 1917…
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The collages employ the iconography of Surrealism. As her biographer François Leperlier notes, Cahun was “one of the rare women who actively participated in this movement in its most critical and complex years.” Cahun, with Moore, explored the irrationality of dream narratives, the limitations of realism, and the insights of the subconscious. Like photographers Florence Henri and Dora Maar, Cahun and Moore were largely erased from histories of the movement. Art historians and scholars continue to correct these omissions, analyzing them now alongside Man Ray and Pierre Molinier, and citing them as crucial precursors for Nan Goldin and Cindy Sherman, photographers who offer similarly unflinching and critical depictions of gender, sexual and representational politics. .
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“Masculine? Feminine?” she wrote in her book “Aveux non Avenus,” published in English as “Disavowals.” “It depends on the situation. Neuter is the only gender that always suits me.”
New York Times Overlooked*, June 24, 2019:
As writer and photographer, Cahun worked at upending convention. “My role,” she wrote in an essay published after her death, “was to embody my own revolt and to accept, at the proper moment, my destiny, whatever it may be.” Cahun’s writing is complex and often difficult to follow, scholars say. But it provides context for the photographs and the weave of her life.
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The photographs are by far her most compelling work. At first, scholars thought of them as self-portraits. But the gathering consensus is that Cahun choreographed and posed for the photos, and that her romantic partner, Marcel Moore, who was born Suzanne Malherbe, often pressed the button. It was a collaboration.
Cahun died on Dec. 8, 1954, at age 60, on the tiny Channel Island of Jersey off the Normandy coast of France. Hardly anyone noticed. “Disavowals,” her most heartfelt book, had not been well received. And she had never exhibited the photographs.
In the 1990s, however, she received a rush of attention as gender issues were gathering steam around the world. “Suddenly,” said Vince Aletti, a New York photography critic and curator, “she seemed incredibly of the moment.
(*Overlooked is a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths … went unreported in The {NY} Times. This month [they]’re adding the stories of important L.G.B.T.Q. figures.)