Who Was Claude Cahun and What Was The Cause of Her Death?

Claude Cahun was a French photographer, writer, and artist born on 25th October 1894 and died on 8th December 1954. She died of heart failure after a protracted illness that came as a result of the long time she spent in prison.

Apart from her artistic career, the significant thing about Claude Cahun was that she protested gender and sexual norms on society’s general consideration of women to be women and men to be men. With a shaved head and severe gaze, Claude slipped between genders and identities. Although it has been many decades since she died, Cahun’s legacy has remained popular through the years.

Her photograph portraits present a giddy multicolored mix of mystery, sobriety, and exuberance, although obscurity later surrounded her, making her an isolated figure prior to her death. Her writing, according to some scholars, is complex and, most times, difficult to follow. In this article, we revealed everything you should know about Claude Cahun from her early life, career, and all.

Claude Cahun was Born a Female Child in 1894

Claude Cahun was born female on 25th October 1894 and named Lucy Renee Mathilde Schwob . She was born into a middle-class but well-known intellectual Jewish family that originates from Nantes, France. Claude was birthed as a female child, but along the line, she decided to start going by the Neuter gender. In her words, “Neuter is the only gender that always suits me.”

She adopted the sobriquet Claude Cahun in 1914, which means a French distinction that could be either male or female.

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Claude had a brother named George and a great uncle Marcel Schwob, who was a prominent writer and part of the Symbolist movement. Schwob was also well-known across Paris and was a close friend of Oscar Wilde. Cahun’s grandfather, David Leon Cahun, was a notable figure in the Orientalist movement.

In fact, Claude was born in a creative and intellectual environment, and that helped her get immersed in the arts. Her parents got divorced when she was still an infant. Her mother, Mary-Antoinette Courbebaisse, suffered from acute mental illness to the extent that she was permanently detained at a psychiatric facility.

Claude was four years old at that time, and thus, she was mostly raised by her blind grandmother, Mathilde. Her father, Maurice Schwob, was a publisher of the daily newspaper Le Phare de la Loire in Nantes. Maurice later got remarried a few years after he divorced Cahun’s mother.

Claude Cahun was a Non-Binary

Although usually described as lesbian and rarely as transgender, Claude Cahun persistently rejected any gender. “Shuffle the cards. Masculine? Feminine? It depends on the situation,” she wrote in her autobiography, Disavowels. 

Lucy Schwob started her high school education in Nantes and completed it in a private girls’ school, Parsons Mead School, in Surrey, England. She moved to the school as a result of her classmates harassing her with anti-Semitic taunts. After her high school education, Cahun proceeded to the University of Paris, Sorbonne, where she studied Literature and Philosophy.

Claude Met Her Romantic Partner, Suzanne Malherbe as a Teenager

Claude Cahun met her lifelong love partner, Suzanne Malherbe, better known by the pseudonym Marcel Moore during the time she was suffering from depression and suicidal thoughts. She described their meeting as a “thunderbolt encounter,” and their relationship later became one of the vital evolutionary factors in her life and art career.

Meanwhile, in 1917, Cahun’s divorced father married Moore’s widowed mother. Thus, the two became step-sisters. Regardless of this, Moore and Cahun went on to become lovers and moved to Paris in 1919. In Paris, they adopted the non-gendered names: Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore. They got a couple of works of writing for journals and literary magazines and as well performed in experimental theatres.

Cahun and Moore frequently collaborated, but their joint works were not well recognized. It is alleged that Moore was the one who always stood behind the camera during Claude’s portrait shoots. Meanwhile, the two officially got married in 1937 while they were in prison.

Cahun’s Career as a Photographer and Sculptor

Following their meeting, Claude and Moore spent the rest of their lives together and collaborated on several written works, photomontages, sculptures, and collages. They published various novels and articles, particularly in the Mercure de France, and later became good friends with French poets Henri Michaux, Pierre Morhange, and Robert Desnos.

Having grown up in an artistic environment, Claude already had an interest in and basic knowledge of arts from a young age, so she centered her work on photography, writing, and theatre. Regardless, she only started experimenting with photography and self-portrait in the 1920s, creating some charismatic and famous images. During this time, she was with the Surrealist movement, although not closely bound to the group.

In 1922, the two began hosting artists’ salons and events at their home in Paris. Among the artists and literary entrepreneurs that attended include Henri Michaux, André Breton, Adrienne Monnier, and Sylvia Beach. They discussed social justice and talked about communism as a counter-influence on fascism. Cahun and Moore later became friends with Pierre Albert-Birot and the director of the experimental theatre, Le Plateau, and together they acted and designed stage sets and costumes.

In 1925, Claude published the novel Heroines, and in 1930, they published Aveux Non-Avenus, a key collection of writings and photo collages. She wrote several other essays that were published in magazines and journals, including her 1934 short stricture essay Les Paris sont Ouverts. Cahun also worked as a theatrical designer and an illustrator.

Her Involvement in Politics and Activism

Alongside Moore, Claude became interested in politics in the 1930s, and they protested against the rise of fascism in Europe. They joined the Association des Ecrivains et Artistes Revolutionnaires in 1992, and there, they met Andre Breton, one of the instigators and founding founders of the Surrealist movement.

Cahun presented Andre with a copy of her work, Aveux Non-Avenus and he was impressed with the experimental text. This made them quickly become friends, and according to Breton, Claude Cahun is “one of the most curious spirits of our time.” Significantly, their meeting facilitated a closer association with the Surrealist group, and Claude started exhibiting work with them, including the key Surrealist exhibitions that took place in Paris and London in 1936.

Cahun and Moore, alongside Breton and Georges Bataille, attempted the use of art to instigate the tide of war in 1935 during the time a major split occurred between the French Communist Party and the Surrealists. Brenton specifically motivated Cahun to pen a refutation against Louis Aragon, who at that time had left Surrealism and turned to Communism.

Consequently, Cahun critiqued Aragon’s ideas by promoting a kind of art that used poetry rather than propaganda to portray its message through “indirect action”. In 1937, Claude and Marcel moved to La Rocquaise, a house in Jersey, and continued to create both photographic and literary art.

However, in Jersey, it happened that they had little or no contact with the outside world, which effectively brought to an end their participation in the Surrealist movement. At this point, they went back to using their original names and were referred to as “Les mesdames” by the local inhabitants of Jersey. They also became notable for strange behaviors, such as wearing trousers and taking their cats out on a walk on a lead.

Why was Claude Cahun Imprisoned?

In 1940, during the time she was in Jersey, the German forces conquered France and started using the Island as a training ground for new recruits. Then, Claude and Moore decided not to flee but to stay back and participate in the resistance and produced anti-Nazi propaganda.

They waged a secret campaign of moral destruction and disinformation, using Surrealism, a weapon the Nazis had never thought of. Because they were not suspected of any disruptive interventions, they had enough opportunity to attend several events where they would slip into the pockets of the German soldiers leaflets of their homemade anti-fascist poems during the parade with the intention to demoralize the troop.

Since Moor spoke German fluently, they would write fake letters under the pretense of being disgruntled soldiers and then encourage the recruits to desert. Furthermore, they stole propaganda stickers, cut them into resistance flyers, hid them inside cigarette boxes, and kept them randomly in the town for the soldiers to find.

According to Cahun, their activities were simply an extension of the “indirect action” which she advocated during the time she was part of the Surrealist group. She also described the resistance as a “militant surrealist activity.” However, in 1944, Claude Cahun and her romantic partner Marcel Moore were arrested and sentenced to death.

They were charged with listening to BBC broadcasts and provoking the troops to rebel. Before the time they were arrested, the German forces believed that Jersey was home to a full-on resistance movement, not knowing that it was all the handiwork of only two middle-aged “eccentric sisters”.

Cahun and Moore were kept in separate cells for nearly a year and were freed in 1945 when the Island was eventually liberated. Upon returning to their home, Cahun found out that all of her artworks had been destroyed by the Nazis. In 1951, Claude Cahun was awarded the Medal of French Gratitude for chiefly participating in the resistance.

Claude Cahun Died at the Age of 60

Claude Cahun died at age 60 on 8th December 1954 on the tiny Channel Island of Jersey, off the Normandy coast of France, western Europe. Meanwhile, different sources have different reports regarding the cause of Claude Cahun’s death. While some reported that she committed suicide, others have it that she was sentenced to death. Hence, there remains a debate over the actual cause of her death.

However, from a few reliable sources, Cahun died after struggling with a series of poor health conditions of which heart failure was a part. Moreso, it is recorded that the time she spent in prison, coupled with coming home to meet none of her artworks, compounded her health issue. Cahun was buried in the cemetery of St. Brelade’s Church, Jersey

Following her death, Marcel Moore relocated to a smaller home in Jersey and later committed suicide in 1972. She was buried at the same place as Claude at St Brelade’s Church, Jersey. They, respectively, had their birth names written on their gravestones.

Claude Cahun’s Legacy Lives On

Today, Cahun is greatly remembered for her magnificent self-portraits, which used fancy scenery and homemade costumes to fashion lives. Meanwhile, after her death, her writings and photographs were completely forgotten, and Claude faded into obscurity until 1980 when Francois Leperlier, a French art historian, brought them to public recognition.

Since then, Claude Cahun has been acknowledged as a Surreal master. However, while Cahun’s resistance to dictatorship is widely acclaimed, her defiance of the traditional gender binaries is less commended. Cahun’s diverse personae, artistic works, and uncommon personal life have kept her as a figure of interest and inspiration for many subsequent artists.

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The non-heterosexual relationship and gender-shifting self-presentation made her significant to several Feminism-lovers as well as homosexual activists. Moreover, Cahun’s use of photography in self-portraiture saw the advent of an important tradition among non-binary artists. Her expressions and approach tapped into the double desire of artists who wish to explore power, sexuality, and the compound issues of gender.

In 2008, Paris named a street after Cahun and Moore, and in the same year, Christian Dior published an androgynous collection inspired by Cahun. What’s more, Cahun’s works have also been influential in the world today, especially to celebrity figures who are out to break gender binaries, such as David Bowie.

Bowie, in 2007 produced an exhibition of her work in New York. He wrote: “You could call her[/they] transgressive or you could call[/they] a cross-dresser with surrealist tendencies. I find this work really quite mad, in the nicest way. Outside of France and now the UK she has not had the kind of recognition that, as a founding follower, friend, and worker of the original Surrealist movement, she surely deserves.”

FAQs

What pronouns did Claude Cahun use?

Although she was non-binary, Claude Cahun used the pronouns she/her/hers while she lived.

What happened to Claude Cahun?

In 1944, Cahun and her lover, Marcel Moore, were arrested and sentenced to death, but the sentence was never carried out, as the island was liberated from German occupation in 1945. Sadly, Cahun’s health was badly affected by the ill treatment she received in jail, and she died in 1954.

How old was Claude Cahun when she died?

Claude Cahun died at age 60 on 8th December 1954 on the tiny Channel Island of Jersey, off the Normandy coast of France, western Europe. Meanwhile, different sources have different reports regarding her cause of death. While some reported that she committed suicide, others have it that she was sentenced to death. Hence, there remains a debate over the actual cause of her death.

Why did Claude Cahun change her name?

Claude Cahun changed her name as her way of protesting gender and sexual norms.

Was Claude Cahun French?

Yes, Claude Cahun was French. She was born on October 25, 1894, in Nantes, France.