Claude Cahun (1894-1954) has something approaching cult status in today’s art world. However, her work was almost unknown until the early 1980s, when it was championed by the research of François Leperlier, after which exhibitions at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nantes (1994) and the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1995) brought it to public attention. Her life and work (both literary and artistic) bespeak an extraordinary libertarian personality who defied sexual, social and ethical conventions in what was an age of avant-garde and moral upheaval. Among her many photographs, it is undoubtedly her self-portraits that have aroused the greatest interest in recent years. Throughout her life, Cahun used her own image to dismantle the clichés surrounding ideas of identity. She reinvented herself through photography, posing for the lens with a keen sense of performance and role-play, dressed as a woman or a man, as a maverick hero, with her hair long or very short, or even with a shaved head. This approach was extended in innovative ways in her photographs of objects and use of photomontages, which asserted the primacy of the imagination and of metamorphosis. By exploring the many different analyses made of Cahun’s work since the 1990s, and ranging across its different themes: from the subversive self-portraits that question identity, to her surrealist compositions, erotic metaphors and political forays, this exhibition confirms the modernity of a figure who, as a pioneer Autoportrait (1928 / Jersey Heritage Collection © Jersey Heritage) of self-representation and the poetry of objects, has been an important influence for many contemporary artists.

Venues

Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume
Place de la Concorde 1, 75008 Paris, France
www.jeudepaume.org

La Virreina Centre de la Imatge
La Rambla 99, 08001 Barcelona, Spain
www.ajuntament.barcelona.cat/lavirreina/

The Art Institute of Chicago
111 S Michigan Ave, Chicago, IL 60603
www.artic.edu