Excerpt from “Claude Cahun: Re-imagining the Feminine Ideal”
Art history research paper. The artist known as Claude Cahun is best known for her inventive, subversive, and gender-bending photographic self-portraits. However, she was also a prolific writer and active political leader. Lucy Renée Mathilde Schwob is the creator of Claude Cahun. What first manifested itself as a pseudonym under which she began publishing her writing in 1917, later grew to encompass a whole persona which she performed and reproduced in photographs and who lived in parallel with Lucy Shwob the person. The line between Lucy the person and Claude the persona is broken and blurry, but the effort to create a character is clear. Claude Cahun, as a gender ambiguous name, created a mouth piece for Lucy Schwob that was untainted by sexist or anti-Semitic views. The character also gave her the space to imagine an identity that could not exist in her world. In the same way that Cahun created a pseudonym to free herself from her restricted identity as Lucy Renée Mathilde Schwob and live her life on her own terms, Cahun created imagined identities in her photography and writing which attempted to liberate her characters from their predefined roles. |