A pilot with lens caps for goggles. Little Red Riding Hood, her cape dotted with masks. Her father. A dandy. These are the many faces of Claude Cahun on show in a new exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery that brings the French writer and photographer’s inter-war work into conversation with the work of contemporary artist Gillian Wearing RA.
We don’t know why Cahun took her extraordinary self-portraits. She seems to have considered herself mainly to be a writer, keeping her photography private, bar a few exceptions: the queasily self-regarding What Do You Want From Me?, showing two double-exposed images of the artist’s shaved head, on the cover of a 1929 novel; the alien-like Human Frontier in a 1930 issue of Bifur magazine; and a few of the dress-up self-portraits cut and pasted into the photomontages marking chapter breaks in her autobiography, Disavowed Confessions (1930).
Born Lucy Schwob in 1894, Cahun used several pseudonyms before settling on Claude Cahun. Her life partner (and step-sister), the illustrator and designer Suzanne Malherbe, took the nom de plume Marcel Moore, and the women lived and made art together for nearly 40 years, in Paris, then Jersey, until Cahun’s death in 1954.
After her rediscovery in the 1980s, Cahun quickly became something of a poster girl for feminist art critics, who praised her blurring of gender and identity, and saw her as the predecessor Cindy Sherman Hon RA didn’t know she had. A 1994 show at the ICA put her work into conversation with that of Virginia Nimarkoh and Royal Academician Tacita Dean.
Read the full article here: https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/article/magazine-identity-parade-gillian-wearing-claude-cahun
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