where's the love song to set us free?

artsexbooksandpolitics:

CLAUDE CAHUN was one of the first twentieth-century females to dress up an photograph herself in the name of art. Claude, née Lucy Schwab, was born in Nantes in 1894. Her life partner and step-sister, Marcel Moore, née Suzanne Malherbe, collaborated with her on much of her work. Claude’s sexual identity was so confounding that some books on surrealism list her as a man.

Claude took pictures of herself in a range of gender-bending stereotypes that would make Dennis Rodman jealous: male dandies, ultra-feminine maidens, and ambiguous adrogynes. And she could be poetic about it. “Only artifice in me, so little primitive,” she said. “Beneath this mask, another mask. I will never be finished lifting off al these faces,” she wrote on a photograph.

Claude scandalized everyone, including the male surrealists she hung out with. Like her, they got off on flouting convention and shocking bourgeois society. Part of their shtick was to fetishize the feminine, presenting women in male-generated stereotypes: muses, young virgins, vampires, decapitated and mutilated torsos. But, like so much Western art, their work was about men ogling women. Claude’s pictures were a relief from this sometimes monotonous aspect of art history. Instead of presenting herself as a passive object ready to be consumed by a heterosexual male gaze, she defiantly presents herself as both object and subject of her own sexual fascinations.

These surrealists, who marginalized the real women around them in favor of the idealized ones in their minds, were also homophobic. So Claude’s statement about homosexuality (“My opinion about homosexuality and homosexuals is exactly the same as my opinion about heterosexuality and heterosexuals. All depends on individuals and circumstances. I claim a general freedom of behavior,” was probably pretty surreal to them! Her assemblage of an eye, tufted with eyelashes suggesting pubic hair, was a show-stopper in the legendary surrealist exhibit of 1936. Writers on surrealism, mostly male, were able to appreciate Marcel Duchamp in drag as Rrose Selavy, but they wrote Claude out of their histories. She is only now being rediscovered.

Claude was a lesbian, a Jew, and a Marxist, three no-nos to the Nazis, who invaded France in 1940. Claude and Marcel fled to the Isle of Jersey, but eventually occupiers marched north and took over the island. Our favorite couple had the guts to resist. They were discovered in July of 1944, condemned to die, and imprisoned in solitary confinement until their execution. The Germans delayed, and Claude and Marcel were liberated ten months later. They never returned to Paris. Claude died in 1954.

… From a German soldier’s 1944 report about them…

“There are very few Jews in the islands. The two Jewish women who have just been arrested belong to an unpleasant category. These women had long been circulating leaflets urging German soldiers to shoot their officers. At last they were tracked down. A search of the house, full of ugly cubist paintings brought to light a quantity of pornographic materials of an especially revolting nature. one woman had had her head shaved and been thus photographed in the nude from every angle. Thereafter she had worn men’s clothes. Further nude photographs showed both women practicing sexual perversion, exhibitionism and flagellation.”

Information and history on Claude Cahun taken from, The Guerrilla Girls’ Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art.