Claude Cahun: Beneath this Mask

Claude Cahun: Beneath this Mask

Event Date: 
22/01/2016 - 10:00am to 05/03/2016 - 5:30pm
Venue: 
Exeter Phoenix

French photographer Claude Cahun (1894–1954) achieved posthumous fame for her elusive self-portraits in which she assumed multiple personae. Born Lucy Schwob, she adopted the pseudonym in 1917 to free herself from the narrow confines of gender. At the beginning of her career she was aligned to the Surrealist movement and was friends with André Breton; however she distanced herself both politically and physically after fleeing France on the eve of Nazi occupation. Cahun settled in Jersey where she embarked upon her defining photographic series, in which the subversion of traditional...