Autoportrait is one of a series of self-portraits by Claude Cahun, née Lucy Renee Mathilde Schwob. Her first recorded self-portraits date to approximately 1913, and she continued to use photography as a means of questioning, challenging and reinventing concepts of identity and gender throughout her practice. Many of her works were destroyed in the forties following her imprisonment by the Nazis for her political activism. Alongside her longtime partner, Marcel Moore (née Suzanne Alberte Malherbe), Cahun’s work as both an artist and writer was groundbreaking in its exploration of gender fluidity and sexuality at a time when such topics were otherwise suppressed.
Claude Cahun, Autoportrait, 1928, reprint c. 2006, C-print. SFU Art Collection. Gift of Gordon Harris, 2018.
Title
Autoportrait
Artist
Claude Cahun
Year
1928, reprint c. 2006
Medium
C-print
Collection
SFU Art Collection
Donor
Gift of Gordon Harris
Year Acquired
2018
Artists
Claude Cahun (1894-1954) was a Jewish-French artist who was an integral member of the Surrealist movement and a prominent political activist in the French Resistance. Born Lucy Renee Mathilde Schwob, Cahun took the gender-neutral name Claude around 1919. Cahun settled in Paris in the twenties where she became involved with the avant-garde and Surrealist movement. Cahun’s work has been widely exhibited with prominent solo exhibitions at the Jeu de Paume, Paris; Art Institute of Chicago; and Frye Art Museum, Seattle. Though Cahun was active primarily in the first half of the twentieth century, her work did not receive widespread recognition until the late twentieth century when French art historian François Leperlier reinvigorated interest in her work. Cahun’s early experiments with performativity, gender and identity re-emerged from the depths of history at a time when many artists, especially women and queer artists, were challenging mainstream constructions of gender, identity and sexuality.