In this blog we are going to tell you about Courbebaisse Mary, so read this blog carefully to get the complete information.
Claude Cahun, named Lucy Renee Mathilde Schwob, was indeed a French futurist photographer, artist, & writer who lived from 25 October 1894 until 8 December 1954.
In 1914, Schwob acquired the pseudonym Claude Cahun. Cahun is most known for working as a writer & self-portraitist who took on a multitude of alter egos.
Cahun’s writing is political as well as personal. She says in Disavowals, ” “Are you a man? Feminine? It depends on the conditions. Only the gender of neutral appeals to me.”
Cahun also worked as a resistance fighter and publicist during WWII.
Early Life and History About Cahun or Courbebaisse Mary
Cahun was born in Nantes in 1894 to a Jewish family from the provinces who were notable intellectuals. Her uncle was garde author Marcel Schwob, & her great-uncle was Orientalist David Léon Cahun.
Cahun’s mother, Mary-Antoinette Courbebaisse, developed mental illness when she was four years old, leading to her mother’s lifelong imprisonment in a psychiatric institute.
Cahun was raised by her grandma, Mathilde, while her mom was away.
After experiencing racism at high school in Nantes, Cahun went to a private school in Surrey.
She studied at the Sorbonne University in Paris.
She immediately took photographic self-portraits when she was 18 years old, in 1912, and remained to do so throughout the 1930s.
After using the nicknames Claude Courlis (after the curlew) & Daniel Douglas, she altered her name to Claude Cahun around 1914. (after Lord Alfred Douglas).
She moved to France in the early 1920s with her longtime lover Suzanne Malherbe, who went by the alias Marcel Moore. After Cahun’s separated father & Moore’s widowed mother remarried in 1917, the two became step-siblings, eight years following Cahun & Moore’s artistic & romantic union began.
Cahun & Moore worked together on a variety of published literature, sculptures, photomontages, & collages for their entire lives. They accompanied Henri Michaux, Pierre Morhange, also Robert Desnos, and published articles & novels, most especially in the monthly Mercure de France.
Cahun & Moore started hosting artists’ workshops at their home in 1922. Henri Michaux & André Breton, as well as literary businesspeople Sylvia Beach & Adrienne Monnier, were regular attendees.
Cahun’s Contribution
Literature, photography, and drama were all part of Cahun’s work. Her most famous works include elaborately produced self-portraits & tableaux that combined Surrealist visual principles.
Cahun painted a staggering number of self-portraits in numerous disguises during the 1920s, including pilot, dandy, doll, fitness model, vamp even vampire, goddess, & Japanese puppet.
Cahun’s portraits generally include the artist gazing directly at the viewer, with his head shaved, revealing only his head & shoulders, or a blur of gender indications and mannerisms, all of which serve to undercut the patriarchal gaze.
Miranda Welby-Everard, a researcher, has commented about the role of theatre, performing, or costume in Cahun’s work, speculating on how it may have influenced the writer’s sexual representations.
“Heroines,” a story line of dialogues centered on women fairy tale characters entangled with humorous analogies to the modern image of women; Aveux non avenus, a novel of writings & documented fantasies depicted with graphite; as well as several articles published in magazines and books are among Cahun’s published works.
Cahun became a member of the Association des Écrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires in 1932, and it was there that she encountered André Breton and René Crevel. Following this, she became involved with the surrealism movement and went on to engage in a variety of surrealism shows, such as the London International Surrealist Exhibition or the Exposition surréaliste d’Objets, both in 1936.
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Photographs by Claude Cahun
Cahun’s portrait of Sheila Legge placed in the middle of Trafalgar Square with her head veiled by a bunch of flowers & pigeons perched precariously on her arms outstretched from the London show was widely circulated in newspapers and later reprinted in a number of publications.
Cahun co-founded the left-wing anti-fascist group Contre Attaque with André Breton and Georges Bataille in 1935, and wrote a brief polemic essay, Les Paris sont Ouverts, in 1934. Cahun was described by Breton as “one of our time’s most fascinating souls.”
Cahun’s photographic self-portraits from 1927–47 were exhibited with the work of two young contemporary British artist, Virginia Nimarkoh & Tacita Dean, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 1994, under the title Mise en scène.
