Claude Cahun was a French surrealist photographer, sculptor, and writer know all about her in this article as like her Biography Family, Parents, Husband, Education, Children and Net Worth.
Claude Cahun Biography
| Name | Claude Cahun |
| Birthdate ( Age) | 25 October 1894 |
| Died | 8 December 1954 |
| Place of Birth | Nantes, France |
| Nationality | French |
| Marital Status | Married |
| Spouse/Partner | Marcel Moore |
| Children | Not Known |
| Parents | Mary-Antoinette Courbebaisse |
| Education | Parsons Mead School, University of Paris |
| Profession | Photographer |
| Net Worth | Not Known |
| Last Update | 2022 |
Claude Cahun was a French surrealist photographer, sculptor, and writer.She is best known as a writer and self-portraitist, who assumed a variety of performative personae.
Cahun’s work is both political and personal. In Disavowals, she writes: “Masculine? Feminine? It depends on the situation. Neuter is the only gender that always suits me.”During World War II, Cahun was also active as a resistance worker and propagandist.
Early Life and Family
Cahun was born in Nantes in 1894,into a provincial but prominent intellectual Jewish family.Avant-garde writer Marcel Schwob was their uncle and Orientalist David Léon Cahun was their great-uncle. When Cahun was four years old, their mother, Mary-Antoinette Courbebaisse, began suffering from mental illness, which ultimately led to their mother’s permanent internment at a psychiatric facility.In their mother’s absence, Cahun was brought up by their grandmother, Mathilde.
Cahun attended a private school (Parsons Mead School) in Surrey after experiences with anti-Semitism at high school in Nantes.They attended the University of Paris, Sorbonne.They began making photographic self-portraits as early as 1912 (aged 18), and continued taking images of themself through the 1930s.
Around 1914, they changed their name to Claude Cahun, after having previously used the names Claude Courlis During the early 1920s, they settled in Paris with lifelong partner and step-sibling Suzanne Malherbe, who adopted the pseudonym Marcel Moore.
Claude Cahun Husband, Was Claude Cahun Married
During the early 1920s, she settled in Paris with a lifelong partner and step-sibling named Suzanne Malherbe who was later called Marcel Moore. The two became the step-sibling when Cahun’s biological divorced father and Moore’s biological widowed mother married each other. This happened after Cahun and Moore got involved in a romantic and artistic relationship. For the rest of their life, Cahun and Moore started working on their collaborated projects like written works, sculptures, collages, and photomontages. The pair published many of their articles and novels and befriended Robert Desnos, Henri Michaux, and Pierre Morhange.
Professional Career
Cahun’s works encompassed writing, photography, and theatre. They are most remembered for their highly staged self-portraits and tableaux that incorporated the visual aesthetics of Surrealism. During the 1920s Cahun produced an astonishing number of self-portraits in various guises such as aviator, dandy, doll, body builder, vamp and vampire, angel, and Japanese puppet.
Cahun’s published writings include “Heroines,” (1925) a series of monologues based upon female fairy tale characters intertwined with witty comparisons to the contemporary image of women; Aveux non avenus, (Carrefour, 1930) a book of essays and recorded dreams illustrated with photomontages; and several essays in magazines and journals.
In 1994 the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London held an exhibition of Cahun’s photographic self-portraits from 1927–47, alongside the work of two young contemporary British artists, Virginia Nimarkoh and Tacita Dean, entitled Mise en Scene. In the surrealist self-portraits, Cahun represented themseld as an androgyne, nymph, model, and soldier.
In 1937 Cahun and Moore settled in Jersey. Following the fall of France and the German occupation of Jersey and the other Channel Islands, they became active as resistance workers and propagandists. Fervently against war, the two worked extensively in producing anti-German fliers.
Many were snippets from English-to-German translations of BBC reports on the Nazis’ crimes and insolence, which were pasted together to create rhythmic poems and harsh criticism. They created many of these messages under the German pseudonym Der Soldat Ohne Namen, or The Soldier With No Name, to deceive German soldiers that there was a conspiracy among the occupation troops.
In 2018, a street of Paris took the name of “Allée Claude Cahun – Marcel Moore”(area of Saint-Germain-des-Prés – Montparnasse, near the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs where Claude and Suzanne lived).Rupert Thomson’s 2018 novel, Never Anyone But You, was based on the life of Cahun and Moore. It was favourably reviewed by Adam Mars-Jones in the London Review of Books.
Cahun and Moore’s WWII activism and heroism are documented by Jeffrey H. Jackson in the 2020 book, Paper Bullets: Two Artists Who Risked Their Lives to Defy the Nazis.Google honored Claude Cahun by showing an animated Doodle on its home page in many countries on October 25, 2021, on the anniversary of what would have been their 127th birthday.
