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 onLiberated, 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 titledDisavowals, 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 nonAvenus (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 A Power Couple in a Time of War HANKTROUT LIBERATED The Radical Art and Life of Claude Cahun byKazRowe J. Paul Getty Trust. 96 pages, $19.95 Hank Trout has served as editor at a number of publications, most recently as senior editor for A&U: America’s AIDS Magazine. BOOKS March–April 2024 33 Claude Cahun
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