I Extend My Arms 1931 or 1932 Claude Cahun 1894-1954
There’s been more attention paid of late to pioneering feminist artists: Mary Kelly, Carolee Schneeman, Lynn Hershman Leeson and Maria Lassnig, for example, all receive far more attention now than they did a decade back. Going back further, Claude Cahun (1894 – 1954) has been increasingly prominent. She’s in the new Tate Modern hang, and two teeming multi-artist shows include her highly staged, androgynous and surreally tinged self-portraits which now seem to prefigure Cindy Sherman and the selfie generation.
She’s in Duro Olowu’s teeming celebration of the cultural role and artistic parallels of clothing as an aspect of self-identity (Camden Arts Centre to 18th Sept) and Elizabeth Price’s touring Arts Council show ‘In a Dream You Saw a Way to Survive and You Were Full of Joy’ (Whitworth, Manchester, to 31st Oct).
Cahun was a writer who never exhibited the photographs for which she’s now best known. Here her arms emerging somewhat comically from a torso of rock; and she poses as a deathly exhibit in the British Museum. Cahun, again well suited to current trends, identified as agender,switching from her given name of Lucy Schwob, while her lifelong partner and step-sibling Suzanne Malherbe adopted the name ‘Marcel Moore’. ‘Neuter’, said Cahun, ‘is the only gender that always suits me’.
Crystal Heads, British Museum, London, June-July 1936 1936 Claude Cahun 1894-1954
Most days art Critic Paul Carey-Kent spends hours on the train, traveling between his home in Southampton and his day job in London. Could he, we asked, jot down whatever came into his head?
