LIBERATED
The Radical Art and Life of Claude Cahun
by Kaz Rowe
J. Paul Getty Trust. 96 pages, $19.95
CLAUDE CAHUN was an essayist, a novelist, a pamphleteer, a sculptor, an artist, a monologist, an actor, and a photographer during the early 20th-century Surrealist movement in France. In collaboration with Marcel Moore, Cahun created photographic self-portraits and hosted a salon with regular attendees that included André Breton and Sylvia Beach. Cahun and Moore were very active in the French Resistance against Hitler and the Nazis. They were lovers from the time they met in 1909 until Cahun’s death in 1954.
Born Lucy Renée Mathilde Schwob in 1894, Cahun might have preferred the term “non-binary” over “lesbian” if she were alive today. In her 1930 memoir Disavowals, she wrote: “Masculine? Feminine? It depends on the situation. Neuter is the only gender that always suits me.” Marcel Moore (née Suzanne Alberte Malherbe), it appears, was similarly noncommittal on the matter of gender.
That “neuter” quotation is one of many that occur throughout Kaz Rowe’s new graphic biography of Cahun, Liberated: The Radical Art and Life of Claude Cahun. Rowe, a cartoonist, illustrator, and YouTube influencer, is a graduate of the Art Institute of Chicago. They completed their BFA in 2018 with a brief comic biography of illustrator J. C. Leyendecker titled “He Lives in the Echoes.” While working on Liberated, Rowe turned to YouTube, where they create educational videos about underrepresented queer histories. Rowe was drawn to Cahun and Moore’s “breathtaking life story” and produced a loving homage of graphic nonfiction to honor them.
Born in 1894, in Nantes, France, Lucy Schwob was raised by her grandmother from 1897 to 1905. Her grandmother taught her about their Jewish heritage and exposed her to the literary classics. In 1908, Lucy went to the Parsons Mead School in Surrey, England, to ensure her safety amid the anti-Semitism in France that had been stirred up by the Dreyfus Affair. (One day in school, she was tied to a tree with a skipping rope and stoned by anti-Semitic students.) She met Suzanne Malherbe in 1909 and “the love that dares not speak its name lay like a golden haze upon my horizon.” Seldom apart from each other, Lucy and Suzanne traveled throughout Europe before settling down in the Montparnasse section of Paris in 1918. In addition to exploring the gay and lesbian bars, art salons, galleries, and “eccentric nightlife” of Paris, Lucy studied philosophy and literature at the Sorbonne while Suzanne studied drawing at the École des Beaux Arts in Nantes. Their first publication together, Vues et Visions, published in 1919 under their new nom de plumes, featured Lucy’s writings and Suzanne’s drawings.
World War I had left deep scars on France and the rest of Europe: “trenches, broken spirits, and broken bodies … [leaving]France and the rest of the world struggling to come to terms with our new reality.” In response, Cahun and Moore published a memoir titled Disavowals, which featured Cahun’s writings and Moore’s collages, in 1919. Of Disavowals, Cahun said: “I tried as hard as I could—with dark humor, provocation, defiance—to force my contemporaries out of their sanctimonious conformity, out of their complacency.” They also published two books of essays, Heroines (1925) and Aveux non Avenus (1930), in addition to several essays for various magazines and journals.
Cahun used photography as a means to explore identity through highly staged self-portraits in various provocative personæ, some of which appear in Liberation. With Moore behind the camera, Cahun assumed a wide variety of poses that ignored or flouted prevailing gender codes. In 1932, Cahun joined the Association des Écrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires (Association of Revolutionary Writers and Artists), where she met André Breton and other prominent Surrealists, and exhibited several works along with them. In 1935, they participated in the founding of the left-wing anti-fascist alliance Contre Attaque with fellow Surrealists André Breton and Georges Bataille.
With fascism and anti-Semitism growing in France and the rest of Europe, Cahun and Moore took refuge in 1937 on Jersey, an island in the English Channel. In 1940, the second year of World War II, the Germans occupied Jersey. The Nazis required all Jews and German speakers to register with the occupiers, but Cahun and Moore refused. From 1940 through the end of the war, they wrote anti-German pamphlets and fliers, which they distributed despite the Nazi occupation. In fact, they often signed their work “Der Soldat Ohne Namen” (“The Soldier with No Name”) and, dressed as Nazis themselves, surreptitiously placed the fliers in soldiers’ pockets or on their chairs, or threw them into soldiers’ cars and home windows. At other times, they dressed in nondescript “masculine” clothing and roamed the city, writing the phrase “Sieg? Nein: Krieg! Ohne Ende!” (“Victory? No: War! Without End!”) on buildings, newspapers, packages, and even on papers pulled out of discarded cigarette packs. Stated Cahun: “I continued this on subsequent walks, scribbling the phrase on anything I could write on and leave behind.”
Despite their great caution, Cahun and Moore were arrested by the Gestapo on July 25, 1944, and sent to prison. “I took all responsibility, trying to save Suzanne’s life. Then I confessed my Jewish ancestry,” Cahun tells us. The pair were sentenced to death for their role in creating anti-Nazi propaganda. With Germans recognizing that the end of the war was nigh, they pardoned Cahun and Moore on February 20, 1945. With the rest of Europe, Cahun and Moore celebrated V-E Day and their release from prison on May 8, 1945. But not even the end of the war brought the end to anti-Semitism in Jersey, so the pair returned to Paris, where they remained until Cahun died on December 8, 1954. Moore followed many years later, on February 19, 1972.
At fewer than ninety pages, Rowe’s Liberated merely scratches the surface of Cahun’s life and art. But perhaps that’s appropriate as Cahun’s art often dealt with surfaces: poses, masks, assumed or discarded identities. The book pays tribute to Cahun’s Surrealistic photography and æsthetics, her aggressive anti-fascism, and her enduring, indestructible love for Marcel Moore. It is an inspiring (albeit sometimes bleak) story of two gender-bending queer artists who fought to remake their world in a way that was more pleasing to themselves and less harsh for everyone. For that reason alone, Liberated is a book that should be celebrated.
Hank Trout has served as editor at a number of publications, most recently as senior editor for A&U: America’s AIDS Magazine.
