Intersecting Identities in the Images of Claude Cahun

Written by Joan Meyer 

Edited by Ellie Finkelstein

Figure 1: Claude Cahun, untitled self-portrait (with short hair), 1928,silver-gelatin print, 18 x 23.8 cm, private collection

Since her rediscovery in the 1980s, Claude Cahun and her work have been studied nearly exclusively in terms of gender and sexuality, at the expense of her Jewish identity and its visual expression. Her recuperation into the Modernist canon is largely predicated on presenting her as part of 1920s Lesbian Paris, the social and creative circles of both native French and foreign expat lesbian artists and writers. This is due in part to the content of her photographs in which she appears with short hair and wears men’s clothes, her life-long partnership with another woman, her contemporaneousness with Romaine Brooks and Natalie Barney, as well as the increased attention given to the performative and constructed nature of gender roles and identities in the 1980s. Yet, in not attending to the ways in which being Jewish intersected with her lesbianism, this scholarship fails in a pivotal way. Cahun's work in portraiture engages with issues of identity in multiple ways simultaneously. She evokes her Jewish identity that launches a scathing critique of racist and anti-Semitic discourse, while also referencing her Judaism with positive associations to her individuality, especially as a woman and a lesbian. For the impact of her art to be fully appreciated, it must be understood as an embodiment of these intersections of identities, as they existed in the early to mid-twentieth century Europe.

Claude Cahun's photographs were rediscovered by scholar François Leperlier in the early 1980s, and began to draw interest from scholars after her work appeared in Paris at the 1985 show, “L'Amour Fou: Photography and Surrealism” curated by Rosalind Krauss and Jane Livingston [1]. Cahun’s entry in the biography section of the exhibition catalogue listed her date and place of birth, and death as unknown, erroneously stating that she was deported to, and died in a concentration camp [2].  Since then, discussions of Cahun’s Jewishness, if it is mentioned in the scholarship at all, are generally limited to describing her as a “French Jewish artist,” or a brief biographical mention that she “was born to a prominent Jewish French family.” Further, art historians have favored a focus only on the external, visible factors in her photographs that call attention to her gender and sexual identities, ignoring those that point to how the issues of womanhood and lesbianism are in conversation with her Jewish identity.

The relatively small body of literature on Cahun has been framed by post-structuralist feminism [3]. Scholars have regularly relied on Feminist scholar, Judith Butler's Gender Trouble, also a Jewish lesbian, to lend credence to their readings of gender performativity in her work, while also invoking sources contemporaneous to Cahun, such as Havelock Ellis' Sexual Inversion and Joan Riviere's 1929 article, “Womanliness as Masquerade,” [4]. Tirza True Latimer in particular, attempts to place Cahun and her partner Marcel Moore (born Suzanne Malherbe) within the context of the elite circles of “Lesbian Paris,” [5]. This appears to be part of a larger pattern of white-washing Jewish lesbians of the period in feminist and queer theory scholarship, as the same treatment is given to Gluck, to whom Brooks was openly hostile [6].  It is also particularly problematic given that both Brooks and Barney were affiliated with the Fascist movement and that the “Jewish question” was very prevalent in Cahun’s lifetime [7].

Cahun was born in Nantes, France in 1894 and died on the Channel Island of Jersey in 1954. In those sixty years, anti-Semitism was continually renewed from the wake of the Dreyfus Affair to the collaborative Vichy government. Cahun was personally victimized for her Jewishness far before her decision to flee Paris for Jersey Island in 1937 and her imprisonment by the Nazis as a result of her subversive anti-German propaganda during Jersey's occupation. As a child, she was the victim of an anti-Semitic attack by her classmates and had to transfer from her school in Nantes [8]. Cahun would have grown up with the knowledge that her countrymen perceived her as Jewish and treated her as such. It did not matter to them, nor would it matter under Nazi racial purity laws, that Cahun was not Jewish halachically (under Jewish law). While Jewish identity is typically traced matrilineally, Cahun was Jewish through her father. This was yet another complication to her various identities with which Cahun contended in her life and art.

Figure 2: Unknown photographer, portrait of 
Maurice Schwob, 1917, private collection

The 1928 untitled self-portrait with short hair (figure 1) is Cahun’s declaration of self-consciousness with her Jewish identity. A detailed examination proves that it is a meticulous recreation of a photo of her father (figure 2). The vague background, lighting effects, pose, and orientation of the figure are as near identical as possible in the medium of photography: in both portraits, the figure is centered before a vague background, and the composition is closely cropped around the figure. The light source falls strongest on the face, cranium, and fingers. Both figures cross their arms over their chests. Cahun wears a corduroy suit and a white collared shirt strongly resembling her father’s. Given the oversized fit, it could likely be his. Cahun was known to wear men’s clothing and don her father’s ties [9]. In the monochromatic film, her dyed blond hair mimics her aging father’s white hair and the hairlines of their closely shaven heads are nearly identical. The photo is taken in profile, emphasizing a family resemblance through their noses. Viviana Gravano contends that the stark contrast of her pale skin against what is typically a dark backdrop creates a greater awareness of her silhouette, meant to accentuate her stereotypically Jewish physical traits [10]. Cahun was very aware of her nose, and her writings frequently describe it as a curlew nose (a hooked or aquiline nose) seen in her first pseudonym, Claude Courlis—the French word for curlew. Emphasizing it in this way should be read as a rebellion against the pseudo-scientific racial discourse and physiognomy of the time as well as an act of reclamation of her Jewish identity from not only anti-Semitism but also assimilation.   

Figure 3: Claude Cahun, untitled self-portrait (star of David), circa 1926,
silver-gelatin print, 11.2 x 8.2 cm, collection of Leslie Tonkonow and Klaus Ottmann 

Cahun’s father was an atheist and assimilated Jew who had married her mother, a Catholic from an anti-Dreyfus family. According to her text, Aveux non avenus, Cahun frequently suffered anti-Semitic verbal attacks from her mother’s family regarding her ethnically Jewish features; her mother specifically lamented her daughter's lack of a Grecian nose. Deliberately fashioning herself after a photograph of her father, particularly one that puts their prominently curved noses on display, demonstrates which side of her family she identified with. In fact, from the age of four her paternal grandmother, Mathilde Schwob (born Cahun), raised young Cahun after her parents divorced and her mother was institutionalized [11]. She likely encountered Jewish texts, cultural traditions, and religious ceremonies while living with her grandmother. Her uncle, Leopold Schwob, was a rabbi in Rouen [12]. Cahun apparently considered Mathilde Cahun to be the maternal figure in her life and chose to self-identify as Jewish when she adopted Cahun as a pseudonym. Cahun is a well-recognized Jewish name, the French form of Cohen, equally as identifiable as her birth name, Schwob. Again, scholarship often points to the intentional androgyny of “Claude,” but almost never to the Jewishness of “Cahun.” In a letter to Paul Levy, she writes that she chose it because she identified most strongly with her grandmother’s family, not the successfully assimilated, semi-famous members of her father’s generation: “I always used a pseudonym to write, the name of my obscure Jewish relatives (Cahun) with whom I felt more affinity,” [13].

Figure 4: Claude Cahun, untitled self-portrait, (1929), silver-gelatin print11,7 x 9 cm Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nantes

The untitled 1926 portrait of Cahun wearing a star of David (figure 3) is an even bolder proclamation of her Jewish identity. It illustrates Cahun, naked from the waist up and sitting at a slight angle away from the camera with a beaded or possibly woven hexagram as large as her face hanging from her neck. The shape's wide angles are also consistent with a six-pointed star but the sixth point of the star is broken, probably concealed by the black shape Cahun holds against her body. The shape's wide angles are also consistent with a six-pointed star. The viewer’s eye naturally completes the star by providing the sixth point in one's mental image. The struggle between the actual polygon in the photograph and one's mental image of a six-pointed star gives the symbol prominence in the photograph and might represent her fragmented Jewish identity. It could also be read as a symbol of strength or protection in this turbulent political period as the Hebrew phrase for “star of David” is actually “מָגֵן דָּוִד” which translates to “shield of David” and the star does cover her chest, a very vulnerable part of the body. Regardless, it is still a clear signifier of Jewish identity and had been since the early 17th century [14]. Even if Cahun was not familiar with the intricacies of the Magen David's history, its symbolism was self-evident by the 1920s from its frequent use on the exteriors of synagogues. Scholars like Latimer relegate the star of David in this self-portrait to the minor role of visual pun that designates Cahun as the "star” of the photograph for Marcel Moore, part of what she labels a lesbian subjectivity, and suggest that Cahun's Jewish identity, like the star, is "partially eclipsed" by her lesbianism [15]. However, an artist as attuned to the signs of categories of identity as Cahun would not have made reference to Jewish identity unintentionally and she could not risk willfully ignoring her Jewish heritage in the climate of Europe's rising current of anti-Semitism. In an untitled portrait from 1929 (figure 4), Cahun asserts her Jewish and lesbian identities simultaneously. She is wearing what at first glance might appear to simply be a fashionable mid-20th century headscarf, but the way in which the fabric is tied at the back of her head with two tails of slightly differing lengths, reveals that it is a tichel. This is the head covering traditionally worn by married Jewish women. Choosing to cover her hair in this manner, as a woman in a long-term committed relationship with another woman, is an act of reclaiming her Jewish heritage and legitimizing her relationship within that religious tradition. This “self-portrait” was actually a collaboration with her creative life partner Marcel Moore, and wearing this scarf within it identifies herself as a married Jewish woman, implying that she sees their partnership as a marriage. This is a powerful statement asserted by a Jewish lesbian in 1929 before same-sex unions were recognized under civil or Jewish law. Additionally, liberalism of the 1920s and 30s was underscored with an increase in conservatism and anti-Semitic conspiracies that “Jewish influence” was responsible for the introduction of homosexuality into an otherwise respectable society.

Figure 5: Claude Cahun, Self Portrait (with Nazi badge between her teeth), 1945

Perhaps the most poignant proof of how Cahun’s Jewish and lesbian identities were in dialogue with one another is the portrait of her with a Nazi badge between her teeth (figure 5). The photograph was taken in 1945, after she and Moore were liberated. They were imprisoned for the last two years of the war and sentenced to death for their participation in the resistance. Cahun had refused to register as Jewish and she and Moore were active members of the Contre-Attaque group, a radical group that Surrealist artists organized in response to the rise of Hitler and the spread of Fascism in France. In 1937 Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore fled the country for the Isle of Jersey but it too was occupied by the Nazis in 1940.  Working as “Der Soldat Ohne Name” (The Soldier with No Name) the two women mounted a large-scale resistance campaign that included writing and distributing anti-Nazi leaflets. They distributed these leaflets and other anti-Nazi tracts inciting German soldiers to mutiny wearing a variety of disguises. They would write messages and rework poems on paper that they would then slip into Nazi officer’s coat pockets. They even snuck into the officers’ mess, which was located in a hotel across the street from their house. They also hung a banner in the neighbouring church which read: “God is Great but Hitler is Greater! Jesus died for Man, but Men die for Hitler!” [16]. Both women were arrested, tried, and sentenced to death for these acts. German soldiers destroyed much of their artwork, including original photographs, photo-plates, and negatives. In 1944, they were both arrested and tried for their crimes. They were granted a reprieve at the last minute when the war ended, and the photo was taken shortly after [17]. It is clear in this context, that the portrait is a powerful testament to their survival and their victory over the Vichy regime. Cahun, who would have been forced to wear a yellow star, defiantly bites down on a Nazi badge as her partner, who once bore a pink triangle badge, takes the shot. She wears men’s clothes, maintaining her more masculine lesbian aesthetic. Upon closer inspection, it becomes apparent that this Nazi badge is one of the Third Reich eagle adding what is possibly a visual pun: Cahun, who had once named herself after a very different bird, the Curlew for her Jewish nose, proudly holds a symbol of their hate in her beak as she stares boldly into the camera.

Given the historical period in which Cahun lived and demonstrated political activism, the gap in literature about her, in regards to her Jewishness, is particularly glaring. The visual vocabulary of sexuality and gender is unquestionably crucial to Cahun’s oeuvre, but the issue of self-representation is not limited to lesbianism and womanhood. Her photographic interrogation of identity is best considered in the context in which it was created, and not solely as a prefiguration of current feminist and queer theories. Cahun continuously made clear mention of her Jewish identity and the complex social, cultural, and historical associations conjured by such references must be attended to in critical thought to achieve a more complete understanding of her creative project.

endnotes

[1] Francois Leperlier, Claude Cahun: L’exotsime interieur. (Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard. (2006), 28. [2] Michelle Gewurtz, Equivocally Jewish: Claude Cahun and the Narratives of Modern Art (Boston: Brandeis University Press, 2012), 1. [3] Lucy R Lippard, "Scattering Selves." Inverted Odysseys: Claude Cahun, Maya Deren, Cindy Sherman. Ed. Shelley Rice. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998), 36. [4]Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminisim and the Subversion of Identity, (London: Routledge, 1990); Havelock Ellis, Sexual Inversion, 3rd ed., vol. 2 of Studies in the Psychology of Sex (Philadelphia: F.A. Davis, 1921); Joan Riviere, "Womanliness as Masquerade," International Journal of Psychoanalysis 10 (1929), 303-13.
[5] Tirza True Latimer, "'Narcissus and Narcissus': Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore," in Women Together/Women Apart: Portraits of Lesbian Paris, (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 68-104. [6] Bridget Elliott, ‘Performing the Picture or Painting the Other: Romaine Books, Gluck and the Question of Decadence in 1923,” in Katy Deepwell (ed.), Women Artists and Modernism (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1998), 70-82. [7] Bridget Elliot and Jo-Ann Wallace, Fleurs du Mal or Second-Hand Roses?: Natalie Barney and Romaine Brooks, and the “originality of the avant-guarde,” in Women Artists and Writers; Modernist (Im)positionings (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), 52. [8] Angela Woodlee, Evidence of Jewish Identity in the Photography of Claude Cahun (Birmingham: University of Georgia, 2012), 9. [9] “Elle portera les costumes de Maurice and ne cessera de jouer avec l’habitat d’homme, autant qu’avec les habits de femmes, les mêlant à d’autres qu’on ne saurait bien determiner” Francois Leperlier, Claude Cahun: L’exotsime interieur. (Paris: Librarie Arthème Fayard. (2006), 82. [10] Viviana Gravano, "Explorations, Simulations: Claude Cahun and Self-Identity," European Journal of Women's Studies 16 (2009), 360. [11] Michelle Gewurtz, Equivocally Jewish: Claude Cahun and the Narratives of Modern Art (Boston: Brandeis University Press, 2012), 4-5. [12] Cahun Family Tree viewed through the Jersey Archives, Jersey Heritage Trust. http://www.jerseyheritagetrust.org. [13] Claude Cahun, Écrits, ed. Francois Leperlier (Paris: Jean Michel Place, 2002), 710. “j’ai toujours porté un pseudonyme pour écrire, le nom d’obscurs parents juifs (Cahun) avec qui je me sentais plus d’affinités.” [14] After the Lateran Council of 1215, sumptuary laws commonly required Jews living in many Christian societies to wear a badge identifying them as Jews when in public. The badges were typically worn on the shoulders or chest, and while the shape these badges took varied, the prevalent form became the star of David by the seventeenth century beginning in Prague and lasting until the laws were eliminated during the Enlightenment. Joaneath Spicer, "The Star of David and Jewish Culture in Prague around 1600, Reflected in Drawings of Roelandt Savery and Paulus van Vianen," The Journal of the Walters Art Gallery 54 (1996): 208-10. [15] Tirza True Latimer, Women Together/Women Apart: Portraits of Lesbian Paris (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 88-105. [16] Corrine Andersen, “Que me veux-tu?/What do you want of me?: Claude Cahun’s Autoportraits and the process of Gender Identification” Women in French Studies 13 (2005):37-50.

[17] Michelle Gewurtz, Equivocally Jewish: Claude Cahun and the Narratives of Modern Art (Boston: Brandeis University Press, 2012), 12-13.