Claude Cahun: Beneath this Mask is a solo exhibition of the artist’s critically acclaimed photography. Part of Hayward Gallery’s travelling exhibition in conjunction with Jersey Heritage, it features forty-two striking giclée prints scanned from original photographs. Cahun was a genderqueer French artist and writer who emigrated to Jersey to escape Nazi occupation, fully embodying their art by experimenting with image, setting and costume. Never wishing for fame and remaining relatively obscure until nearly half a century after their death, Cahun is now appreciated for an authentic exploration of the self. Abbot Hall’s survey of the artist’s various personae from the 1910s-1940s offers an opportunity to appreciate this versatile trailblazer of modern self-portraiture and queer self-expression.
Today, contemporary galleries are making room for narratives outside of Western masculine heteronormativity. Work by queer identifying artists is no longer kept to themed exhibitions for celebratory months or locked away in archives, unseen until required for specialist research. Wall space is being shared in an unapologetic way, as representation proves important to visitors and artists alike. Claude Cahun: Beneath this Mask is an investigation of identity and the confines of gender. These questions often surround Cahun’s work and no more so when considering how to properly refer to the artist. I am personally compelled to use they/them rather than she/her pronouns, especially when considering Cahun’s own writing in the 1930 autobiography Disavowals: ‘Masculine? Feminine? It depends on the situation. Neuter is the only gender that always suits me.’
In this exhibition, the curators have chosen to use the pronouns she and her, because Cahun consistently self-referred in written correspondence as ‘elle’ (French for ‘she’), so interpretation has followed this example. Making curatorial decisions based on facts rather than hypotheticals gives a solid basis to the choice made; yet it is important to also consider the viewpoint held by myself and others, such as Dr Onni Gust who, in their response to Adam Mars-Jones’ text ‘I’m a Cahunian’ in a 2018 issue of the London Review of Books, states that:
Cahun rigidly demarcated into ‘male’ and ‘female’. But to take this as proof that Cahun was content with the gender binary represents a stubborn refusal to engage with more than twenty years of discussion of trans and queer histories by academics and activists…We need figures in the past whose lives and identities resonate with our own. If not Cahun, who?
Whilst I understand why Abbot Hall would run with she/her pronouns, acknowledging an alternative is helpful, especially when considering the fluidity of Cahun’s identity and their refusal to be specifically defined. A detailed text on Cahun’s relation to trans identity by Jordan Reznick is available to read in Art Journal Open.
Cahun, a child of middle-class Jewish parents, was born Lucy Schwob in Nantes, France, 1894. At eighteen, Cahun began to take self-portraits and would continue on an artistic path at private school, later working on the periphery of the burgeoning surrealist movement. Not interested in being labelled, they refused Surrealism even though it is a term still so often applied to their work. Cahun shared a life with Marcel Moore, nee Suzanne Malherbe, fellow artist and romantic partner. Eight years later, Cahun’s father and Moore’s mother began a relationship of their own and eventually married which, by default, made Cahun and Moore stepsisters. Cahun and Moore lived together in Paris, integrating into the arts scene there, and left for Jersey in 1937 before the occupation of France during World War Two. There the pair experimented with artistic genre and medium, living radical lives and creating a private body of work. What resulted from their partnership was a personal visual and textual diary that explored the self, often with Moore being the one behind the camera for Cahun’s portraits. Inspiring contemporary artists the world over, most strikingly Cindy Sherman for her Untitled Film Stills series, Cahun’s photographs are considered an early proponent of the now commonplace act of auto portraiture.
Entering Abbot Hall’s upstairs space I hear the melancholy notes of Erik Satie’s Gnossienne No. 2 play out. It is the perfect accompaniment to Cahun’s work which can be carefully contemplated in time to the music’s slow tempo. Both talented French creatives were highly experimental, and this particular musical composition compliments the progressive nature of the artist’s imagery. The exhibition hang is well spaced and non-linear with plenty of room for the viewer to begin at a place of their choosing, meandering from one of Cahun’s persona to the next as they cycle through costumes, settings and hairstyles with child-like curiosity. The whole experience is the visual equivalent of Cahun’s quote, ‘under this mask another mask’, a gradual revelation of one identity to the next.
Beyond the first-floor windows of the space, flanked by photographs, lies Kendal Parish Church and something about the weathered grey stone visible through the glass compliments the low-contrast and warm-tones of these works in a beautiful way. Seeing Cahun’s avant-garde photography on show in a historical setting rather than a white cube contemporary art space adds an interesting element to the viewing experience, reminding us that some of these images are over a hundred years old despite feeling so contemporary.
In the second room of the exhibition, a series of four images, Je Tends Les Bras, incorporate natural stone and rock formations as part of Cahun’s body.
Each in a different pose, Cahun’s hands are sinewy with connective tissue taut in an emphatic gesture moving out of the rocky formation. The artist appears as a headless chimera, alluding to spaces in art where queer bodies can shift and metamorphose without the necessity for articulation. Landscapes as generous spaces of queer acceptance and experimentation continue to be explored by contemporary artists and researchers, their work a visual ode to the possibilities of life outside the city – of which Cahun is a natural precursor. In New York, Nina Chanel Abney cites the landscape as a potential communal Arcadia, centring blackness in scenes of queer care, cultivation, and collective leisure. Similarly, West Cornwall-based Ro Robertson explores a unity between the natural landscape and the body, reclaiming space for LGBTQ+ identities against a history of being deemed ‘against nature’. And in the Northwest of the UK, Kerry Tenby feels an inherent queerness in the freedom and feral-ness of being in rural landscapes.
Many more artistic endeavours are being realised on the peripheries of our towns and cities as the importance of the countryside as a site of solace and safety continues to be explored. Cahun’s outstretched arms welcome a new generation into the embrace of nature. As a cultural institution in a small market town community and with the second annual Kendal Pride just around the corner, Abbot Hall’s exhibition of Cahun’s radical work makes a positive and uplifting statement.
Speaking with Associate Curator for Lakeland Arts, Helen Stalker, it was clear that integrating a variety of narratives into the exhibiting and collecting practices of the institution is important. As she shared with me, ‘the relaunched Abbot Hall has a particular focus on landscape and identity. The story of Cahun’s move to Jersey is embedded in the story of some of the other radical artists we have in the collection, like Schwitters and Goldschmidt, people who had fled and found space in a rural setting’. Cahun’s work was brought back into Stalker’s consciousness by the Radical Landscapes exhibition at Tate Liverpool in 2022.’
As lead image for the exhibition, the coolly modern double portrait uses a mirror to suggest a multiplicity of identity and reality. Mirrors, until this point in time, were considered a sign of vanity in art, especially when made by or featuring women. Here Cahun bucks tradition again by appearing as an inverted Narcissus, with a gaze refusing their own reflection to look beyond the lens. What those searching eyes find is the viewer, in place of photographer Moore, as the object of desire; a fulfilled Echo. There are many more disparate realities to get lost in throughout this exhibition as Cahun shifts between guises – Dandy, Femme, Old Mother, Pierrot, Butch. These are some of the most enigmatic and striking images that art history has to offer, a beacon of hope to new generations of people learning to thrive on the margins.
Claude Cahun: Beneath this Mask, Abbot Hall, Kendal 23 March – 03 August 2024.
Kirsty Jukes is an art historian and writer from Lancashire.
This review is supported by Lakeland Arts.
Published 14.06.2024 by Jazmine Linklater in Reviews
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