Claude Cahun, Autoportrait, ca. 1939, black-and-white photograph, 3 1/8 x 3 7/8". © Jersey Heritage.
Curated by Juan Vicente Aliaga and François Leperlier
Too gay to be a muse, Claude Cahun (née Lucy Schwob, 1894–1954) rode Surrealist tenets out to the margins of the movement. Her bold intransigence (it is said that André Breton, hearing that she would be at a certain café, would choose another) situated her in a productive marginality, motivating an extraordinary range of photographs that compromised the stability of identity that had hitherto dominated the medium. Presenting 140 photographs and documents, as well as catalogue essays by Patrice Allain, Tirza Latimer, and the curators, this show aligns Cahun’s images with her literary works, her politics, and her collaboration with her lover and stepsister, Marcel Moore.
