Entre Nous: Between Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore

In the mid-1990s, images of the surrealist Claude Cahun crossed the Atlantic from France to the United States, where her edgy portraiture captured the imagination of new audiences. Theatrical images such as I'm in Training, Don't Kiss Me (ca. 1928) seemed to parallel today's postmodern, feminist, and queer theories of gender and embodiment (fig. 1). Costumed in boxer shorts, wrist guards, and a leotard inscribed with hearts and the admonition "I'm in Training, Don't Kiss Me," Cahun balances a dumbbell endorsed by a team of comic heroes (the boy scout Totor and his sidekick Popol) in her lap, crosses her legs incongruously (exposing a smudged knee), and preens for the camera in a manner that accentuates signs of hyperfemininity: two paste-on nipples, two painted lips, two lacquered-down spit curls, two bright hearts to redden her cheeks.¹ "Training for what?" she prompts the viewer to ask. To become a twosome? To unbecome a woman? The earliest theories emphasizing the role of social conditioning in the production of gender issued from the same decade this photograph was taken. For example, the English psychiatrist Joan Riviere published her paper "Womanliness as a Masquerade" in 1929, and the abortion rights activist Madeleine Pelletier claimed in her pamphlet L'amour et la maternité (1923) that the chasm separating the sexes was largely the work of society.²

Since the 1995 retrospective "Claude Cahun, Photographe" at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Cahun's striking mise-en-scènes have appeared in major exhibitions exploring intersections of gender play, surrealism, and photography.³ The recent publication of Cahun's collected writings, edited by her biographer François Leperlier, has lent new impetus to scholarship on both sides of the Atlantic.⁴ This essay departs from the territory explored by Leperlier and the other surrealist-focused scholars who followed in his wake.⁵ The study of original photographic negatives, letters, and unpublished manuscripts unavailable to Leperlier in the 1980s during his preliminary research has led me to draw some new conclusions. Most significant, in the light of this archival material, I have come to view the oeuvre attributed to Cahun as the product of a collaboration in which she imagined, composed, performed, and her partner Marcel Moore envisioned, visualized, imaged.⁶

Figure 1.

Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, I'm in Training, Don't Kiss Me, ca. 1928. All figures courtesy of the Jersey Heritage Trust Collection

Hardly anyone would deny that the photographs typically described as "autoportraits" result from some sort of collaboration, since Cahun could not possibly have realized the majority of them alone, even with the aid of a timer or cable release. This observation alone suffices to compromise the word self in the generally accepted formulation "self-portraiture." Yet the categorical designation has provided scholars, curators, and other contemporary viewers with what seems a viable term of convenience.⁷ Framing the collaborative work done by Cahun and Moore as self-portraiture has both conceptual and ethical implications because Cahun's collaborator was also her lover. What social norms and artistic hierarchies does the erasure of Moore accommodate and to what extent did the two artists attempt to forestall (or, in effect, foreordain) this erasure? Certainly, the overvaluation of the individual artist by Western cultural institutions and markets has colored reception of Cahun's work. Yet Moore's characteristic reluctance to step into the limelight has, by default, also focused critical attention on Cahun.⁸

The Jersey Heritage Trust collection—held on the island where the two sought refuge in 1937 and then remained—preserves material that makes both the fact and the thematic of this collaboration apparent. When Cahun describes the photographs as "our photography" or "our amateur efforts" in letters to friends, her use of the first-person plural possessive acknowledges Moore's involvement.⁹ Negatives, whose film sleeves as often bear the name of Moore as of Cahun, preserve images of both taken in the same settings, indicating Moore's involvement in...