Thread by @WhoresofYore

This is Claude Cahun (1894-1954), the best Jewish, French, gay, writer, photographer, surrealist, and anti-fascist WW2 activist you never heard of.

Thread 👇🏼

Cahun was born Lucy Schwob, in 1894 to a prominent intellectual, Jewish family – which included the avant-garde writer Marcel Schwob. Cahun’s mother suffered severe mental illness and was permanently hospitalised when they were just 4 years old.

Following anti-Semitic bullying at their high school in Nantes, Cahun came to Surrey to attended a private school in Surrey, after which they were accepted into the University of Paris, Sorbonne.

Suzanne Malherbe was Cahun’s stepsister, they fell deeply in love as teenagers and left for Paris together. They stayed together and collaborated on many art projects until Cahun’s death. This is Moore on the left.

Around 1919, Lucy Schwob took the name Claude Cahun, after having previously used the names Claude Courlis (after the curlew, a thin bird with a long beak) and Daniel Douglas (after Lord Alfred Douglas, the lover of Oscar Wilde).

Claude would later write "Masculine? Feminine? It depends on the situation. Neuter is the only gender that always suits me." Suzanne Malherbe adopted the pseudonym Marcel Moore.

Around 1922 Claude and Moore began holding artists' salons at their home. Among the regulars who would attend were artists Henri Michaux and André Breton and literary entrepreneurs Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier.

During this time, Cahun began producing surrealist self-portraits in variety of costumes, such as aviator, dandy, doll, body builder, vampire, and angel, that challenged traditional gender roles.

In 1937 Cahun and Moore moved to Jersey, which became occupied by the Nazis in 1940. Being a Jewish lesbian couple, famous for producing art that challenged gender roles, you would be forgiven for thinking that Claude and Moore would either leave or keep their heads down.

Instead, they reverted to their original names, told the nazis they were sisters, and became active as resistance workers and propagandists.

They turned their talents to producing anti-German fliers, compiled from BBC reports on the Nazis' crimes, which were then put together to create poems and critical articles. The couple would then attended the German military events & put their flyers in soldier's pockets.

In 1944, Cahun and Moore were arrested and sentenced to death, but the sentence was never carried out as the island was liberated from German occupation in 1945. They survived, but their home and property had been confiscated and much of their art destroyed by the Germans.

Sadly, Cahun's health never recovered from the brutal treatment in jail, and they died in 1954. After Cahun’s death, Moore relocated to a smaller home. Tragically, Moore died by suicide in 1972 and was buried with Claude Cahun in St Brelade's Church, Jersey.

In 2007, David Bowie created a multi-media exhibition of Cahun's work in the gardens of the General Theological Seminary in New York. He said of Cahun:

“You could call her transgressive or you could call her a cross dressing Man Ray 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.”

Also - the image in the very first tweet isn’t not actually Claude Cahun. It is Gillian Wearing, recreating one of Cahun’s self portraits in 2012 (Cahun, left and Wearing, right)

My mistake. Apologies for mixing my Cahuns up. X