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180 Claude Cahun and Oscar Wilde L I Z Z I E T H Y N N E During the German occupation of Jersey, Claude Cahun₁ (1894–1954), the French avant-garde photographer and writer, would go for walks with her partner and collaborator Suzanne Malherbe (1892–1972) to search for materials that they could use in their resistance campaign that was designed to spread demoralization and defeatism among the German troops. Cahun recalls finding a page from a German magazine featuring the photograph of a triumphant,marching regiment. She realized that by hiding half of the image, she could completely change its meaning: without their exultant faces, the legs and boots of the soldiers covered in mud appeared extremely exhausted. Carefully cutting the photograph , she describes how, having signed it with the “ritornello” she and her partner used, she “looked for an aesthetic way of presenting it. I found a pretty frame of the right size. It contained a photo of Oscar Wilde and Alfred Douglas —the whole thing dating from so long ago I had almost forgotten it—I don’t know why I had kept it except that we weren’t short of cupboard space either in Nantes or here. I opened the frame, substituted the boots for the 1892 photo and stuck it together again.”² The couple then sneaked into an empty house that they knew was about to be occupied by German troops. They attached the picture to 7 You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. Claude Cahun and Oscar Wilde 181 a wall where Cahun hoped it would be discovered after the soldiers’arrival so the troops would think that a member of their company had made it. Cahun narrates this incident in a letter to her friend Gaston Ferdière in 1946, the year after she and Malherbe had been released from St. Helier Prison at the Liberation on 8 May 1945. It suggests the irrelevance to her, at that moment, of the memory of Oscar Wilde but at the same time gives a wry nod to the aestheticism that she associates with him. The pretty frame, after all, has its uses, and its meanings can be interrogated and made to serve an urgent political purpose through juxtaposition with the base, filthy boots. This emblematic story evokes some of the tensions and continuities between a modernist practice in which objects and images may be dramatically recontextualized or reframed to disrupt or empty out their original significance (here exemplified by Cahun’s photomontage ) and the fin-de-siècle culture from which it emerges. This chapter explores connections between the work of Cahun,now known mainly as a surrealist photographer, and the heritage of Oscar Wilde. The relationship shifted over time, as Cahun’s art and thinking evolved, in the context of the profound social and political changes following both world wars and alongside the art and thinking of the surrealists with whom she finally associated herself in the 1930s.A key figure in Cahun’s engagement with the Decadent tradition is Salomé, a persona she often adopted and alluded to in her writing and photography. Cahun’s reappropriation of some of the same icons and themes that Wilde had utilized from nineteenth-century French literature provides a telling glimpse of how modern homosexual and gendered identities were being forged and resisted out of that tradition. The photographic portraits produced by Claude Cahun with Suzanne Malherbe have become the subject of critical interest since the early 1990s because of their sustained play with identity and gender, anticipating the concerns of contemporary artists and foregrounding the construction of subjectivity through the image.³ Her work, much of it long hidden and neglected, seems to exemplify recent theorizations of gender as performance. As far as is known, many of the couple’s portraits were scarcely exhibited in their lifetime, except in the form of photomontages accompanying Cahun’s text of her experimental autobiographical work, Aveux non avenus (Cancelled Confessions), published in 1930. Born Lucy Schwob,Cahun was known to her contemporaries principally as a writer of poetry, prose, and essays often published in literary journals, including the prestigious You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law...

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