Impressive People: Stories of Remarkable Lives - Sykalo Eugen 2025

Claude Cahun – Surrealist artist, Nazi resister, gender-bending photographer — half-forgotten, now iconic

On a salt-lashed island off the coast of Normandy, in a stone house with creaking floors and locked drawers, two old women plotted against the Nazis. One of them kept a dagger under her pillow. The other scribbled subversive messages in flawless German and slid them into soldier’s pockets, sugar bowls, trouser cuffs. When they were finally arrested in 1944, the Gestapo stood baffled by their true identities. One woman, calling herself Claude, refused to admit anything — not her name, not her gender, not her guilt.

Claude Cahun was born Lucy Schwob in 1894, but that name was soon discarded like an ill-fitting coat. She (they? he?) became Claude at twenty, borrowed from a male pseudonym, neutral, elegant, untethered from the tyranny of M or F. Her lover, stepsister, co-conspirator Marcel Moore — born Suzanne Malherbe — shed her own name too. Together, they staged a life that defied every label the 20th century tried to stick on them.

And the world, for a time, forgot them.

But the camera didn’t. The negatives waited.

Today, Claude Cahun is a cult icon. A queer artist, surrealist photographer, gender-nonconforming trailblazer, and wartime resistance fighter — the kind of figure who breaks algorithms because no keyword fully contains her. Search for “genderqueer artist” or “surrealist photography” and you’ll likely find her staring back at you, pale and shaven, eyes wide and unnerving, wrapped in bandages or lounging in a lion’s mane coat, daring you to blink first.

But to rewind: Claude grew up in a library. Her father was the editor of a literary journal, and her uncle was a close friend of Marcel Proust. Imagine being thirteen, Jewish, and in a corseted girl’s body, while eavesdropping on conversations about memory, artifice, and erotic melancholy. Her early life was riddled with absences — a mother institutionalized, classmates who spat slurs, the weight of expectations pressing down like wet wool. Claude responded by slipping sideways out of her assigned role.

By the 1910s, she was dressing in suits, quoting Oscar Wilde, and writing essays on sexual ambiguity. Paris in the 1920s gave her room to breathe. It was the city of masks and liquefied identity, where everyone danced with their shadow. She moved into an apartment with Marcel Moore. The two became both lovers and collaborators, long before the word “nonbinary” would exist to explain their partnership.

They photographed themselves obsessively, ritualistically. But these weren’t selfies. They were performance art before Instagram. Claude’s body became a canvas for transformation. In one image, she’s a sailor with painted tears. In another, a porcelain doll, cold and smooth. Elsewhere, a dandy in a pinstriped coat with lipstick smeared like a question. The images are black and white, but the emotions are high-contrast technicolor: desire, defiance, disorientation.

It’s tempting to call Claude Cahun a transgender artist. Or a genderfluid visionary. Or a feminist surrealist. But labels slip off her like oil on water. She once wrote: “Under this mask, another mask. I will never be finished removing all these faces.” The point wasn’t arriving at a “true” self. It was the removal, the becoming, the blur.

By the 1930s, fascism was on the rise. The couple fled Paris for Jersey — a sleepy Channel Island better known for cows than coups. But when German forces invaded during World War II, Claude and Marcel transformed their exile into resistance. They didn’t join an army. They started a whisper campaign.

They crafted anti-Nazi messages as if they were poetry — dense with irony, moral disgust, sometimes direct quotes from Goethe or Schiller. Then they planted them in places soldiers would least expect. Claude, tiny and spectral, would walk up to a drunk officer at a cafe and drop a note into his coat. Some of the messages were typed on slips of onion paper. Others handwritten, scrawled with urgency. The goal was psychological warfare — to convince the occupiers that dissent was everywhere.

It worked. The Germans were rattled. They called it “the Jersey brainwashing” and launched an intensive manhunt. In July 1944, the women were arrested. Claude nearly died in prison — her health was always fragile — but she survived the war, barely. Marcel cared for her. They returned to their house. They did not speak much about the torture, the trial, the close call with a firing squad.

Claude died in 1954, largely unknown outside of tight avant-garde circles. Marcel followed twenty years later. Their work was boxed up. Forgotten again.

Until the 1990s.

The rediscovery of Claude Cahun’s art was, fittingly, a ghost story. A curator stumbled upon the photographs. They were haunting. They were unplaceable. They felt startlingly modern — almost postmodern — in their irony, theatricality, and refusal to explain themselves. What followed was a renaissance. Exhibitions at MoMA. Essays in Artforum. Gender studies textbooks with her name printed like a revelation.

And yet, even now, Claude resists resurrection as much as she resisted categorization. The Instagram tributes, the academic footnotes, the drag homages — all celebrate her, but they can’t quite pin her down. She flickers at the edge of every frame. Not just as a queer artist or anti-fascist heroine, but as someone who intuited, long before the rest of us, that identity is a choreography — not a destination.

In an era obsessed with authenticity, Claude Cahun whispers: What if the performance is the truth?

There’s something deeply contemporary — even urgent — about her vision. Claude Cahun’s self-portraits feel like prototypes for our curated selves, but with more danger, more bite. She wasn't trying to brand herself. She was trying to unmake the prison of a binary world.

Search engines now return millions of hits for her name. TikTok montages flash her images to glitchy synthwave tracks. College art students paint her eyes into their canvases. And yet, she remains slippery. That’s part of the magic. Every Claude Cahun photograph feels like it’s looking back at you — asking what roles you’ve agreed to play without question.

There’s one image I can’t forget. Claude in a checkered bodysuit, hair cropped, eyebrows shaved, holding a weight labeled “courage.” It’s not a joke. Or maybe it is. That’s the tension. She dares you to ask: Is this drag? Theater? A dare? A confession?

The weight of courage. It’s absurd. It’s unbearable. It’s the only thing that mattered.