I’ve been thinking about Claude Cahun, Sherry Wiggins and LuÍs Branco, 2025.
Introduction
French artist, photographer and writer Claude Cahun (1894-1954) and her partner in art and life, artist Marcel Moore (1892 -1972), have been on my mind (and part of my art practice) for several years. Luís Branco and I shot the image above, as part of the series I’ve been thinking about Claude Cahun, while working at La Napoule Art Foundation on the French Riviera. I am thinking (again) about Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore as I prepare to make a pilgrimage to Jersey Island this February.
Claude Cahun (born Lucy Renée Mathilde Schwob) and Marcel Moore (born Suzanne Alberte Malherbe) lived out the last years of their lives on the island of Jersey, the largest of the Channel Islands, located in the English Channel between England and France. They moved from Paris to Jersey permanently in 1937. The Germans occupied Jersey (and the other Channel Islands) beginning in 1940; Cahun and Moore lived under German occupation from 1940 to 1945. During this period, Cahun and Moore undertook a valiant and creative campaign of resistance to the Nazis, the war and the occupation of Jersey. Four years into the occupation, they were discovered and arrested; they were jailed, tried and sentenced to death. Fortunately, the war ended, and the island was liberated before they were killed. They were released on May 8, 1945.
Jersey Heritage, an organization that protects the island’s culture and heritage, artifacts and archives, houses the largest collection of Cahun and Moore’s artworks, writings, and photographic works. Jersey Heritage also holds their letters and the records of their anti-Nazi, anti-fascist activities. https://www.jerseyheritage.org/history/claude-cahun-and-jersey/
St. Brelade’s Parish Church cemetery, beside the house where Cahun and Moore lived, is their burial ground. In my ongoing homage to and obsession with Cahun and Moore, I am making the trip to Jersey to explore the island where they lived and to make new photographs with my creative partner, photographer Luís Branco.
I will use feminine pronouns for Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore throughout this blog post. The gender-neutral pronouns we utilize today were not in use during their lifetimes. I will also stick, primarily, to the pseudonyms Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore that Lucy Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe adopted early in their lives.
In February of 2025, as artists in residence at La Napoule Art Foundation in France, Luís Branco and I created many new works in direct conversation with Cahun and Moore’s photographic works. These performative photographs reference works that Cahun and Moore made in the 1920s in Paris. Our combined images (both theirs and ours) are theatrical, sometimes campy, serious but not self-serious. I cut my hair short and acted out my more butch and thespian self. You can see many of these works on my website: https://www.sherrywiggins.com/work/m-in-training-with-claude-cahun
I shaved my head in an act of solidarity with Cahun. Cahun and Moore’s photographic portraits from roughly 100 years ago have been an inspiration for me and for many others. Cahun’s radical resistance to gender identification as either male or female, her fearless portrayal of the fluidity and theatricality of identity is so relevant today.
On a personal level, Cahun’s work has been a provocation to examine my own cisgender female identity. The haircut was liberating for me: through it I realized that I identify (in current terminology) as a straight femme living in a queer world.
Que me veux tu?, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, 1929.
What do you want from me?, Wiggins and Branco, 2025.
A transmutation occurs in me (a reconfiguring of my own identity) in the act of reinterpreting and re-representing Cahun in photographs. This uneasy but welcome metamorphosis / transfiguration of self that I have established with Cahun has continued to be a catalyst for my work.
Jersey before the War
Cahun and Moore vacationed on Jersey during the years before 1937. In contrast to the theatricality and sophistication of the images they made in Paris, the images they made on Jersey communicate a profound connection to the elements and the natural surroundings of Jersey. We see Cahun occupying liminal spaces, between earth and water, body and environment, self and nature.
In the first image below, Cahun’s figure is doubled and reversed and swathed in gauzy fabric in waters that border a rocky ground. The profile of Cahun’s golden head is doubled and opposed as her face merges and emerges within the terrestrial surface she faces in the second image. Cahun’s figure is barely visible within the rippled waters in the image En Océanie. In these photographs, Cahun and Moore mirror, double, reverse, mask and reflect concepts of self and identity within the natural surroundings of Jersey. I love these images; they align with many of the photographs that Luís and I have made on land and waterscapes over the last several years.
Untitled (Double Body), Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, 1928.
Untitled (Double Face), Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, 1928.
En Océanie, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, 1932.
I have recently discovered the work of feminist scholar Amelia Groom. Groom was in Jersey doing research on Cahun and Moore and wrote this:
Something I didn’t understand until I travelled here (Jersey) is that the Channel Islands sit in waters with an extremely dramatic tidal range—one of the most extreme in the world. The island of Jersey is said to double in size at low tide. I suppose you could also say that it halves in size at high tide. Or you could say, more accurately, that it has no fixed size or shape. Like Claude Cahun, this land mass is a continual shapeshifter, always spilling out from itself, and pulling veils up over itself, and calling its own edges into question.
Amelia Groom, In the ARMS of the SEA: CLAUDE CAHUN and MARCEL MOORE at the WATER’S EDGE, 2024.
An essential part of my art practice and process has been to study and research Cahun and Moore’s lives and works in books, catalogues and academic essays.
My Cahun/Moore library
I have been rereading Jennifer L. Shaw’s extensive (and fabulous) 2017 biography, Exist Otherwise: The Life and Works of Claude Cahun, focusing specifically on the chapter titled Spiritual Arms Instead of Firearms: Cahun and Moore on the Isle of Jersey, which describes Cahun and Moore’s lives on Jersey from the late 1930s onward. Around 1936, Cahun started talking about leaving Paris permanently. Her health was fragile and she was, of course, well aware of rising anti-Semitism in France (Cahun’s father was Jewish) and the onslaught of fascism in Germany and beyond. Here Shaw describes Cahun’s thinking during this time:
She began to talk about a ‘physical and primordial need to live in the countryside’, and wanted to leave Paris. It was as if she felt her work there was done. Their ties to the city were finally torn asunder when Moore’s mother (Cahun’s stepmother) finally passed away. In a letter of 1951, Cahun explained that she felt ‘an extreme malaise, the premonition of danger’ at the end of 1936.
Shaw quotes Cahun:
The idea formed in my head, as soon as the death of my stepmother cut the last family tie. We had friends . . . a stable, comfortable, happy life. Suzanne didn’t want to leave: she didn’t like moving and thought that life in the countryside wouldn’t suit me as well as I imagined. . . . I proposed Jersey, knowing full well that I wouldn’t be able to drag her any further.
Claude Cahun in François Leperlier, Claude Cahun: L’Exotisme Intérier (Paris, 2006), pp. 377-80, in Jennifer L. Shaw’s Exist Otherwise, pp. 199 -200.
In 1937, Cahun and Moore moved to Jersey permanently, leaving their high-profile lives in Paris. They reclaimed their given names, Lucy Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe. (I will continue to use the names Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore throughout this blog for consistency). The fact that they were stepsisters also gave them a ‘cover’ in this more provincial setting. With the death of Marcel’s mother, the Malherbe-Schwob family estate was settled, and they inherited enough money to buy a beautiful (and quite large) stone farmhouse, La Rocquaise, located right on St. Brelade’s Bay.
La Rocquaise, the home of Marcel Moore and Claude Cahun, c. 1938.
During these years prior to the German occupation in 1940, Claude and Marcel enjoyed the ocean, their garden and their lovely house full of artworks, books and family furniture. Several friends came from Paris to stay with them. However, as far as the local population was concerned, Cahun and Moore kept mostly to themselves. The islanders saw the ‘sisters’ as eccentric and bourgeois middle-aged women, who walked their cat, Kid, on a leash and sunbathed naked in their garden.
Cahun later wrote:
The illusion of holiday without end, a garden already in flower. It seemed that the only thing left to do was to become familiar with the trees, the birds, the doors, the windows and pulling from the clothing trunk the appropriate article, short or long, to dive into the sun and the sea.
Claude Cahun, ‘Letter à Gastone Ferdière,’ in Écrits, p. 665, in Jennifer L. Shaw’s Exist Otherwise, p. 203.
Untitled, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, 1939.
Cahun is doubled and reversed (again) on the horizon in the image above taken near La Rocquaise. They continued their photographic practice. Below are a few of my favorites from this period:
Untitled (Framed Face), Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, 1938.
Untitled (Lying in the Garden), Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, 1939.
Untitled (the Window), Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, 1938.
Within this seemingly idyllic life on Jersey, Cahun and Moore were well aware of Hitler’s relentless march across Europe. You can read about Cahun and Moore’s life during WWII and after the war in Part Two: Pilgrimage to Jersey (and to Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore) – Occupation and Resistance, Arrest and Jail, After the War in my blog post:
In June of 1940, as German forces advanced through France and the rest of Europe, the British government deemed the Channel Islands indefensible. Consequently, they withdrew all military forces from the islands and disbanded the Royal Militias of Jersey, Guernsey, Alderney and Sark. The British hastily organized evacuations for the citizens of the islands. The evacuations prioritized women and children. Somewhere between 25,000 and 30,000 people were evacuated. About one fifth of the population of Jersey was evacuated, roughly 6,500 citizens. Claude and Marcel decided to stay on Jersey.
On June 28, 1940, the Germans bombed St. Helier Harbor and La Roque Harbor on Jersey and St. Peter Port on Guernsey. The Germans began their occupation of Jersey, Guernsey, Alderney and Sark on June 30 and stayed until liberation in May of 1945.
Occupation and Resistance
German soldiers on the beach from the window of La Rocquaise (with Kid the cat), Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, 1940.
Claude was forty-five and Marcel was forty-seven when the German occupation began in Jersey. Their intent had been to retire to a quiet life on the island. However, with the German military literally at their front and back doors, they could not give up their ideals, sense of justice and humanity and their anti-fascist, anti-Nazi beliefs. Together, they undertook a unique campaign of resistance.
I have been rereading Claire Follain’s well-researched and excellent essay “Lucy Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe: Résistantes” in don’t kiss me: the art of Claude Cahun & Marcel Moore, a major catalogue produced by the Jersey Heritage Trust.
Follain describes some of Cahun and Marcel’s methodologies and their manufacture of anti-Nazi propaganda:
Malherbe utilized her fluency in German language to translate news taken from BBC radio broadcasts. Schwob converted the news to rhyme, conversation or other literary formats. These words were typed or handwritten onto one sheet of paper of approximately A5 or smaller. Over time, the tracts evolved in their style and presentation. Schwob used different colored inks and/or paper when it was available. Malherbe used her graphic art skills to add illustrations to Schwob’s words. Above all the format was altered to maintain interest. Schwob and Malherbe referred to these tracts as ‘unsere Zeitung’ (our newspaper). The intended implication was that these notes were written by an anti-Nazi German officer from within the occupying force. The notes showed evidence of education and were signed ‘der Soldat ohne Namen’ (‘the Soldier with no Name’). The style of language and occasional grammatical error over the years eventually gave the reader the clue (as it did the Geheime Feldpolizei, the Secret Field Police) that the authors were not native German speakers.
Claire Follain in “Lucy Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe: Résistantes,” pp. 84-85, in don’t kiss me: the art of Claude Cahun & Marcel Moore.
Propaganda tract and drawing, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, 1942.
English translation of the German text on the drawing:
I believe in the end the waves Devoured both sailor and boat And that was brought about By Adolf Hitler with his screaming
Most of these tracts and drawings were destroyed by the Germans. The Jersey archive holds some fifty of them. Cahun later recounted that she and Moore had made thousands of these messages over the four-year period, including carbon copies they could produce by the dozen.
Propaganda tract, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore.
English translation of the German text on the tract:
Hitler leads us …
Goebbels speaks for us …
Göring eats for us …
Ley drinks for us …
Himmler? Himmler murders for us …
But nobody dies for us!
Cahun and Moore were surrounded by the German military. Their home was in view of the St. Brelade’s Bay Hotel, which was requisitioned by the Germans for use as a barracks and recreation center for German soldiers. German soldiers were frequently buried in the cemetery on the other side of La Rocquaise. In front of their home, along St. Brelade’s Bay, the Germans used the forced labor of POWs imported from the continent to build heavy fortifications as part of Hitler’s infamous Atlantic Wall.
Claude and Marcel assembled their DIY anti-Nazi propaganda materials in the dead of night in their upstairs bedrooms. They hid their (illegal) radio, their typewriter and all their writing materials in various locked cabinets upstairs. Even their housekeeper, Edna, was unaware of their activities. Cahun and Moore developed various strategies for distribution of their messages, meant for the German soldiers. They would take the bus into St. Helier, armed with shopping bags and ‘disguised’ as the two middle-aged ladies they were. They would place their anti-Nazi propaganda in cafés, on car windshields, and even in soldiers’ pockets. In newsstands and shops, they inserted their leaflets and messages in German magazines and newspapers. As the occupation wore on and tobacco was in short supply, they tucked messages in empty cigarette packets. The tracts often contained the phrase ‘Bitte verbreite,’ meaning ‘Please spread the word.’
Cahun later recounted:
We could not have been less remarkable: no hats; old beige walking shorts called jodhpurs, on the feet rubber boots called Wellingtons; a blouse of cotton or wool shirt, depending on the temperature, a semi-masculine jacket. When out walking or in town, a raincoat on top (a Burberry, thus a large number of pockets for our tracts); a scarf wrapped around the head . . . wool gloves in winter— and the shopping bag (as an alibi). We were peasants—and also daughters and wives of the bourgeoisie of the gentleman farmer type . . . my appearance and Suzanne’s differed little from the look of the majority of inhabitants of the island.
Claude Cahun, ‘Le Muet dans la melée,’ in Écrits, p. 627, in Jennifer L. Shaw’s Exist Otherwise, p. 212.
Cahun and Moore also took advantage of the fact that the cemetery was located beside their home. During the funerals for German soldiers, they would place their messages in German staff cars parked near their house. When Oberleutnant Zepernick was buried in 1943, Lucy and Suzanne waited for nightfall and placed a homemade cross on his grave with the words ‘Für sie ist der Kreig zu Ende,’ or ‘For him the War is Over,’ inscribed in Gothic lettering.
‘Für sie ist der Kreig zu Ende’ design, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, 1943.
Their messages took different forms. I particularly like the design of the typewritten tract below which begins with ‘Gewissensruhige Freiheit,’ or ‘Freedom with a Clear Conscience,’ followed by, “The Soldier Without a Name” works to bring this long-buried treasure to light in a calm and carefree manner, striving to understand and reduce the differences that exist between people.’ And goes on to say, ‘Our revolution should be undertaken by everyone not just one person.’
Tract, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, 1944.
Cahun and Moore’s messages and interventions were intended as incitements for the German soldiers, encouraging them to contemplate their part in an unjust war. The signature ‘der Soldat ohne Namen’ (The Soldier Without a Name) was not just a signature, for Cahun believed that she must take on the persona and thoughts of a German soldier who was resisting the war and occupation from within the ranks of the German military. After the war and occupation ended, Moore photographed Cahun as The Soldier Without a Name.
Cahun as The Soldier Without a Name, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, 1947.
In Exist Otherwise, Jennifer L. Shaw writes:
What I find most striking about Cahun and Moore’s resistance work is that it is so consistent with the ideas and strategies that Cahun had used all throughout her artistic and literary career. Cahun refused to take an ‘us’ versus ‘them’ approach. Rather than seeing all Germans as enemies, she imagined that each individual soldier had the potential to reconsider his actions. She even realized this conviction by inhabiting the position of the enemy in the form of the ‘Soldier Without a Name,’ and spoke from that position, encouraging others to lay down their arms and join the resistance. This strong belief in a person’s ability to challenge and analyze one’s own actions, combined with Cahun’s and Moore’s wit and poetry, formed the basis of their activities. Like Cahun’s previous work, the guiding principles for these resistance activities were anti-hierarchical and anti-authoritarian, aimed at defying binary thinking. (pp. 249-250)
For four long years, Marcel and Claude carried out their extremely risky mission, wholeheartedly and with great conviction, under the severe conditions of the German occupation. They understood the danger into which they had placed themselves and assumed they would be caught at some point. They had pledged to each other to commit suicide when and if caught and had collected large amounts of barbiturates for this purpose. They feared death less than the punishment of deportation to the camps in Continental Europe.
Arrest and Jail
On June 6, 1944, or ‘D-Day,’ the main Allied Forces carried out the largest seaborn invasion in history, landing in Normandy. This attack, in combination with airborne operations, began the liberation of France and Western Europe from the German forces and laid the ground for the victory of the Allied Forces and Germany’s surrender on May 8, 1945.
German military morale on Jersey (and elsewhere) was necessarily at a low point in the summer of 1944. Cahun and Moore kept up their resistance activities. On July 25, 1944, Claude and Marcel had spent the day in St. Helier distributing their anti-war propaganda. They were at home that evening when five German secret police officers, members of the Geheime Feldpoizei (GFP), came to search their house. The GFP officers found the (illegal) radio and the portable typewriter used to create the tracts, as well as some of the materials Cahun and Moore had been distributing earlier that day. Cahun and Moore were arrested and taken to Gloucester Street Prison in St. Helier. They managed to take the barbiturates they had stockpiled. They were both found unconscious in their cells and taken to the hospital. The dosage did not work.
Taken back to prison, Cahun and Moore endured more than nine months of incarceration in Gloucester Street Prison. They were kept in solitary confinement in separate cells. The conditions were difficult. Claude’s health, already fragile, suffered under these conditions. Marcel and Claude still feared the possibility of deportation to the camps more than they feared death by execution for their ‘crimes.’
Cahun and Moore were able to communicate with each other by passing notes through a secret system that the other prisoners had devised. The cells were divided by thick walls with ventilation tunnels connecting the cells. The prisoners were able to send notes through these tunnels attached to strings. This was a coordinated system, which shows the efforts and a certain amount of comradery amongst the inmates. Other materials were shared and passed around such as books, cigarettes and writing materials.
Sketch of the prison cell showing the ventilation ducts, Marcel Moore, 1944.
Cahun and Moore were interrogated by the GFP; they cooperated and provided details of their resistance activities and actions over the four years. As it turned out, the GFP had been collecting their tracts and resistance materials for a long time. However, the GFP did not think that these two middle-aged women were acting alone. The GFP were hoping that, through interrogation, they could identify the resistance organization or group behind these anti-Nazi tracts. Cahun later wrote:
In fact, the Gestapo searched in vain for four years. We had been able to avoid every search. It was so sudden. They would never have believed, despite their informers, that it had anything to do with us. Even with the proof in their hands, they couldn’t believe their eyes. They remained persuaded that we couldn’t have been anything more than accomplices . . . of X. In order to get them to stop interrogating us about our hypothetical affiliations with . . . X, or with the Intelligence Service (!!!), it was necessary to demonstrate to them that we were fully aware of and capable of our . . . ‘crimes.’
Cahun, ‘Le Muet dans la melée,’ p. 631, in Shaw’s Exist Otherwise, p. 226.
Cahun and Moore’s trial was on November 16, 1944. This was the first time that Cahun and Moore had been in the same room for any length of time since their capture in July. If nothing else, they were happy to be together in a warm room in comfortable chairs. The trial took five hours. There were three judges presiding, a prosecutor and a defense lawyer. The trial was conducted mostly in German. At one point Moore stated: ‘The defense is much more bitter against us than the prosecution.’
The GFP had found more incriminating materials at La Rocquaise to use for the trial. In addition to the radio and typewriter, they brought personal papers, anarchist pamphlets, anti-German books written by Cahun’s father and art works that Cahun and Moore had hidden. They also brought a revolver and camera equipment they had found.
During the trial, the court revealed excerpts from the tracts and works of resistance that the ‘Soldier Without a Name’ had produced and the GFP had collected (and which Cahun and Moore had already confessed to producing when interrogated).
After the trial, Cahun composed a testimony of what had taken place. Here she paraphrases what the judge, Oberst Samson, had stated at the trial:
You are francs-tireurs [partisans] … even though you used spiritual arms instead of firearms. It is indeed a more serious crime. With firearms, one knows at once what damage has been done, but with spiritual arms, one cannot tell how far-reaching it may be.
In Claire Follain’s “Lucy Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe: Réistantes,” p. 89, in don’t kiss me: the art of Claude Cahun & Marcel Moore.
Oberst Samson had inadvertently complimented Claude and Marcel by using the term ‘spiritual arms’ to describe their brave and thoughtful resistance activities.
Cahun and Moore were convicted of creating propaganda ‘undermining the morale of the German forces’ and sentenced to death. They refused to sign letters of appeal to reverse their execution order and were sent back to prison. From November 16, 1944 until February 20, 1945, Cahun and Moore lived (in prison) under the threat of their imminent execution (and continued to refuse to make an appeal to their sentence, perhaps still fearing deportation to a camp more than death).
On February 20, 1945 Cahun and Moore were informed that the German High Command had granted a reprieve to their stay of execution. The French consulate and the Jersey bailiff had made appeals on their behalf. From that day until their release on May 8, 1945, Claude and Marcel were reunited (they were overjoyed) and shared a cell in the prison. Once reunited Claude and Marcel shared the secret notes they had both created on whatever materials they could muster (toilet paper, book pages, etc.). They sewed these notes in the lining of a coat which a friend smuggled out of the prison. Cahun later used these notes for the letters and accounts she wrote later to document their lives during the occupation.
Untitled (Cahun biting down on a Luftwaffe insignia), Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, May 1945.
The image above shows Claude Cahun in May of 1945, soon after her release from prison. With her unique sense of humor (and resistance), she bites down on a Luftwaffe insignia that one of the German prisoners had given her.
After the War
For Claude and Marcel, the return to a ‘normal life’ after the war was no small feat. During their incarceration, the Germans had pillaged their home completely, stripping it bare of all furniture and their artwork. The Germans also stole artworks Cahun and Moore had collected, household items, books, clothing, mementos, even locks, keys and electrical wire.
Following the liberation, Cahun and Moore spent months rebuilding their home. They also had to search across the island for belongings that had been taken or given away by the Nazis. The Germans had also burned many of their artworks and resistance works before liberation. They found their French Bible and Cahun’s complete edition of Shakespeare at the Metropole Hotel. They managed to find other valuables and books as well; apparently, their library had been bought by a bookseller and sold to individual buyers across the island. Gradually, they put their lives back together.
Cahun and Moore sunbathing,1945.
Cahun continued to be outspoken about the war and the occupation and felt isolated and alienated from the islanders who had, albeit passively, aided and abetted the Nazis. Cahun worked on several written works (long letters, a memoir, prose) in the late forties and early fifties that recounted her and Moore’s experiences and their resistance during the occupation and their time in jail. She started the memoir titled Le Muet dans la melée,The Mute in the melée,based on her prison notes. She also worked on a text Confidences au Miroir, Confessions at the Mirror, comprised of poetic musings and autobiographical materials.
Cahun’s health had suffered during her imprisonment, and it did not improve afterward. Still, Claude and Marcel managed to create an enjoyable life on the island. They reinitiated their photographic practice together in and around their home. Cahun was again the main subject.
Untitled (Cahun as The Soldier Without a Name), Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, 1947.
Untitled (Cahun walking the cat), Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, 1948
Untitled (Cahun in the cemetery), Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, 1947.
These images, taken during the last period of Cahun’s life, are telling for me. As an older artist, I relate to these images of Cahun. I haven’t suffered war and occupation as Cahun and Moore did, or fragile health as Cahun did. Yet, still, I relate to their often-tender observances of a life/lives (well lived) that happen with age: their joys, tragedies and triumphs. Cahun reappears as the Soldier Without a Name, smoking and grinning sardonically. Cahun walks their new cat, Nike, on a leash barefoot and blindfolded.She holds a blank mask up to her ghostlike figure in the cemetery. All these images feature the cometary as a backdrop (is this again a lingering symbolist strategy?).
I love this series of images below, depicting Cahun walking along the sea wall with St. Brelade’s Bay in the background. She appears almost floating, free, unencumbered. Perhaps an elderly angel?
Untitled (Claude walking along the sea wall), Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, 1947.
Untitled (Claude walking along the sea wall), Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, 1947.
Still, Marcel and Claude kept thinking of Paris, their old friends and a chance for a more stimulating cultural life than the island afforded. In 1953, they traveled to Paris with the intention of reestablishing a life there. They stayed in their old neighborhood and met with old friends. Cahun became ill in Paris, so they had to give up these plans and return to Jersey. In the fall of 1954, Cahun’s health declined further and she was taken to the hospital in St. Helier. She died there on December 8, 1954. Claude was sixty years old. Marcel buried her in the cemetery on St. Brelade’s Bay. Moore later sold ‘the Farm without a Name’ and moved to another house on Jersey. Marcel died by suicide in 1972. She was eighty years old. Marcel is buried beside Claude. Suzanne and Lucy lie in rest together on St. Brelade’s Bay.
Gravestone at St. Brelade’s Parish Church Cometary
There is so much more to Claude and Marcel’s story, and to the details of how their lives and works have been recovered, rediscovered, collected, interpreted and represented.
Wish me luck on my pilgrimage to Jersey. I leave on February 2nd.
As a postscript, I would like to say that the images on these blog posts have been scanned from the various books I have collected about Cahun and Moore. The Jersey Heritage holds many of these images in their archive. I hope to gain permission to obtain high resolution digital copies of some of these images. I also recommend that interested readers get a copy of Jennifer L. Shaw’s biography Exist Otherwise: The Lives and Works of Claude Cahun. Unfortunately, the catalogue produced by the Jersey Heritage Trust, don’t kiss me: the art of Claude Cahun & Marcel Moore, edited by Louise Downie, is out of print. Gen Doy’s Claude Cahun: A Sensual Politics of Photography is also a fabulous resource.
“Don’t Kiss Me I,” Sherry Wiggins and Luís Branco, 2025.
In February, I enacted a performance and embodiment practice with early-twentieth-century French artist Claude Cahun. This practice resulted in a direct transmission from Claude to me through Luís Branco’s magic camera.
Luís and I shot hundreds of images on the French Riviera at La Napoule Art Foundation. In the studio and in and around the beautiful Chateau de la Napoule, we created a body of work in conversation with Claude Cahun and her lifelong photographic practice, much of which was produced with her partner in art and life, Marcel Moore.
Cahun (1894 – 1954), a surrealist intellectual, was a significant, multitalented artist. She was a performance artist, photographer, sculptor and writer. She was also a committed, even jailed, anti-Nazi activist. Cahun was gender ambiguous, a lesbian and a cross-dresser. (I use she/her pronouns for Cahun; the gender-neutral pronouns they/them, while perhaps more appropriate, were not in use during Cahun’s lifetime.) Cahun’s work, in both photography and writing, explores the many masks of selfhood. Cahun encourages us to examine the theater of identity, where we perform and inhabit roles that are imposed upon us as well as roles that we invent. Claude Cahun is my queer superheroine.
Untitled, Claude Cahun (with Marcel Moore), 1927.
The 1927 image of Cahun posing as a body builder (above) is one of my favorites in Cahun’s oeuvre. It plays on all sorts of tropes of identity and performance. The costume in the image is both masculine and feminine: the misplaced nipples and lips on the shirt, the delicate neck scarf and silk waist sash, the “I AM IN TRAINING DON’T KISS ME” message, the enormous dumbbell across her shoulders and the contrapposto stance that would never bear its weight. What is she in training for? The curlicue hair, the hearts on her cheeks and the dishtowels hung as a backdrop. It is all just plain funny and indicative of Cahun’s lifelong pursuit of “dressing up,” a pursuit she accomplished in her everyday life and in theater productions in Paris in the 1920s. For my enactments of this image, assemblage artist Jensina Endresen helped me create my own body-builder costume. My partner, Jamie, constructed the inflatable barbells that I brought with me to France. Et voilà!
“Don’t Kiss Me II,” Sherry Wiggins and Luís Branco, 2025.
“Don’t Kiss Me III,” Sherry Wiggins and Luís Branco, 2025.
On a more serious note…
Untitled, Claude Cahun (with Marcel Moore), 1928.
The photograph above, of Cahun standing beside a mirror, is eerily striking. The mirror doubles her image—the “real” Cahun gazes toward the camera and us, while the mirror image of Cahun looks into the mirror itself and beyond. Cahun’s gaze is deadpan, serious. Her hair is shorn, very butch or masculine—hommasse in French. The jacket and the gesture are also masculine. Cahun was always toying with ideas of self-reflection, self-questioning and gender ambiguity.
“Masculine? Feminine? It depends on the situation. Neuter is the onlygender that always suits me.”
– Claude Cahun, Disavowals, trans. Susan de Muth (Cambridge: MIT Press 2007), 151. Originally in Cahun’s Aveux non Avenus, 1930.
“I’ve been thinking about Claude Cahun I,” Sherry Wiggins and Luís Branco, 2025.
In our triptych “I’ve been thinking about Claude Cahun,” Luís and I did not attempt a direct copy of Cahun’s photograph. Instead of gazing sidelong, as Cahun does, I gaze directly into the mirror. The three photographs depict the process of me “performing” my more butch, more masculine self. I cut my hair short (then later cut it off entirely). In all three images, the water and horizon of the Mediterranean are visible through the windows. I donned a Cahun-inspired checked jacket and a mask. The costume and the setting allude to an art-deco-era past or early Hollywood. I will be showing this triptych in a group exhibition called “Queer Perspectives” at Michael Warren Contemporary in Denver opening July 31st and up through August 30, 2025.
“I’ve been thinking about Claude Cahun II,” Sherry Wiggins and Luís Branco, 2025.
“I’ve been thinking about Claude Cahun III,” Sherry Wiggins and Luís Branco, 2025.
“Que me veux tu?” Claude Cahun (with Marcel Moore), 1929.
The double-headed image of Claude Cahun (above) is one of Cahun’s few titled photographs. “Que me veux tu?”, or “What do you want from me?”, speaks to Cahun’s never-ending existential struggle with and questioning of identity in her life and art
I had my head shaved at the beauty shop in La Napoule. It was kind of liberating. Luís shot a whole series of double exposures of this new hairless and quite androgynous “double me,” creating our own version of “What do you want from me?”
What do you want from me?” Sherry Wiggins and Luís Branco, 2025.
Untitled, Claude Cahun (with Marcel Moore), 1920.
Marcel Moore must have taken this image (above) of Claude in her dandy and gentleman-like attire in the early 1920s in Paris. They were living a life that allowed Cahun to explore her gender ambiguity in full.
“Masked (after Claude Cahun),” Sherry Wiggins and Luís Branco, 2025.
As a Gentleman (after Claude Cahun), Sherry Wiggins and Luís Branco, 2025.
Gilded, Sherry Wiggins and Luís Branco, 2025.
I received a transmission from Claude Cahun during this intense period in France. This last image, which I call “Gilded,” is one of my favorites. This was taken during our last photoshoot at La Napoule. I had applied gold makeup to my face. Cahun’s golden light shines through me.
Claude Cahun Series (mask), black-and-white digital image, Sherry Wiggins and Luís Branco, 2022.
Luís Branco and I shot the above image in a strange and beautiful hotel in Amsterdam in 2022, referencing French artist Claude Cahun’s 1928 masked image below.
Untitled, black-and-white photograph, Claude Cahun (with Marcel Moore), 1928.
I love this image of Cahun, taken by her partner Marcel Moore. Cahun is masked and naked, her gender identity obscured and conflated by the covering of her breasts and her closely cropped hair. Cahun, born Lucy Mathilde Schwob, refused and resisted a prescribed female identity from a young age, as did Moore, who was born Suzanne Malherbe. Despite her gender nonconformity, I will not refer to Cahun (or Moore) as “they” or “them,” as these gender terms were not in use during their lifetime. Cahun had her own take on gender, saying,
“Shuffle the cards. Masculine? Feminine? It depends on the situation. Neuter is the only gender that always suits me.”
– Claude Cahun, Disavowels, trans. Susan de Muth (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 151. From Claude Cahun’s Aveux non Avenus, 1930.
In early February, I will begin a residency at La Napoule Art Foundation in southern France with Luís Branco. There, we will make new performative photographs in direct conversation with Claude Cahun’s portraits and photographs. This residency will offer me further opportunity for some serious play with this complex artist (and lots of costumes and in France to boot!). We are excited to work in the historic Château de la Napoule and the gardens and grounds of the La Napoule Art Foundation on the Côte d’Azur. American sculptor Henry Clew and his wife Marie bought this historic property in 1918 and actively redesigned and restored the château and gardens in the 1920s and 30s. They welcomed other American expatriates and European aristocrats into their home for lavish parties and cultural events. This is the same period of time when Claude Cahun and her partner Marcel Moore were active in the vibrant cultural life of Paris. In 1951 Marie Clew established the property as the La Napoule Art Foundation. The foundation welcomes artists from around the world for artist residencies, exhibitions and other cultural events.
Claude Cahun (1894 – 1954) has been my main muse over the last several years. Cahun’s remarkable self-portraits, with Marcel Moore (1892 – 1972) behind the camera, confirm her courage in exploring the fluidity of identity and gender. These images reveal Cahun in flux—as masculine and feminine, masked and masquerading. The images depict Cahun as a body builder, a buddha, a dandy, a she-devil and in other guises and manifestations.
Cahun and Moore’s collection includes photographs in ordinary settings: in their hometown in Nantes France; in glimpses of their life together in Paris in the twenties; and on Jersey (one of the Channel Islands located between England and France) where they lived before, during and after World War II. Postwar photographs of Cahun demonstrate the toll the war, the occupation of Jersey and her time in jail took on her health. Cahun and Moore both served time for their anti-Nazi activities during World War II. Cahun died in Jersey in 1954. Moore died in 1972.
Cahun and Moore’s photographs have been widely published, exhibited and heralded over the last thirty years. However, it is interesting to me that for Claude and Marcel, this was a private photographic practice. They exhibited very few of their photographs, though they did create remarkable photomontages together with many of these images for Cahun’s seminal 1930s surrealist monograph Aveux non Avenues, which has been translated and published in English as Disavowals.
Untitled, black-and-white photograph, Claude Cahun (with Marcel Moore), 1914.
My Claude / My Medusa, color digital image, Sherry Wiggins and Luís Branco, 2019.
Luís Branco and I shot the above image in the Netherlands at Foundation OBRAS. We were referencing the above black-and-white portrait of Claude Cahun. Here, Cahun rests her head on a pillow, her hair billowing out around her face; she gazes, wide-eyed, directly toward the camera. The image was undoubtedly made in collaboration with Moore when Cahun was eighteen years old.
I was sixty-four when Luís and I reenacted this photograph more than 100 years later. As I lay on the pillow and performed for the camera, I pondered my life alongside Cahun’s—my teens and her teens, my twenties and her twenties, and onward into our thirties, forties, and fifties. Cahun died at the age of sixty. My performative practice with Luís Branco is both serious and playful, kindred to Cahun’s lifelong photographic practice with Marcel Moore. A transmutation occurs between my and Luís’s work and Marcel and Claude’s work. My reaction when I saw our images was, “Oh, my god, I look like Medusa!”
Under Cahun’s influence, I am compelled to delve into the ambiguities of my own identity, to explore definitions of gender and to examine the tropes of selfhood I inhabit. What is masculine and what is feminine? Are gender and sexuality performative? What lurks behind the masks we wear? Below are several of my favorite images of Cahun’s (and Moore’s). These images produced over Cahun’s lifetime and many more will serve as inspirations for my own embodiments and performative photographs.
Untitled, black-and-white photograph, Claude Cahun (with Marcel Moore), 1921.
Untitled, black-and-white photograph, Claude Cahun (with Marcel Moore), 1921.
Untitled, black-and-white photograph, Claude Cahun (with Marcel Moore), 1927.
Untitled, black-and-white photograph, Claude Cahun (with Marcel Moore), 1927.
Cahun’s images as a body builder are some of my favorites. Assemblage artist Jensina Endreson (check out her fabulous work at https://www.bustleworshipdesigns.com/ ) has been helping me with my body-builder costume, complete with a T-shirt like Cahun’s, embroidered with the text, “I’m in training. Don’t kiss me.”
Untitled, black-and-white photograph, Claude Cahun, 1927.
Cahun and Moore were associated with several avant-garde theater groups in Paris in the twenties. The image of Cahun as the Buddha is thought to document her involvement with the theater group Les Amis des Arts Esoteriques. Luís and I reincarnated this Buddha image in Holland in 2022 and some curious images emerged.
Claude Cahun Series (Buddha), color digital image, Sherry Wiggins and Luís Branco, 2022.
Claude Cahun Series (Buddha), color digital image, Sherry Wiggins and Luís Branco, 2022.
Que me veux tu? What do you want from me?, black-and-white photograph, Claude Cahun (with Marcel Moore), 1927.
The composite photo above is one of Cahun’s few images with a title: Que me veux tu? What do you want from me?. The image and title reflect her lifelong questioning of self and identity in words and images.
Untitled, black-and-white photograph, Claude Cahun, 1929.
The image above documents Cahun’s performance as the Devil in a production of the medieval play The Mystery of Adam. I have enlisted seamstress Laura Simmons to make this fabulous art deco costume and Jamie to make the wings. Voilà!
Untitled, black-and-white photograph, Claude Cahun (with Marcel Moore), 1932.
Many of Cahun and Moore’s images, performed in domestic settings, project the idea of serious play, which they regularly enacted in their photographic practice.
Untitled, black-and-white photograph, Claude Cahun (with Marcel Moore), 1938.
Untitled, black-and-white photograph, Claude Cahun (with Marcel Moore), 1938.
Untitled, black-and-white photograph, Claude Cahun (with Marcel Moore), 1939.
These images from the late thirties were taken after Cahun and Moore had moved permanently to Jersey island from Paris.
Untitled, black-and-white photograph, Claude Cahun (with Marcel Moore), May 1945.
The image above was taken days after Cahun and Moore were released from jail in Jersey in May of 1945. Cahun, ever resistant, bites down on the German Luftwaffe insignia. Fifty-one years old at the time, she appears much older. Few photographs have survived from the period during World War II, when Cahun and Moore were living under the occupation on Jersey and actively resisting the war and the occupation in covert actions. They were caught in 1944 and sentenced to death and were in jail for almost a year. Luckily, the war ended, and they were released. During their time in jail, their home was dismantled, their art and book collections stolen, their furniture possessed by the Germans. They lost so much. They gradually put their life and their home back together. Neither Claude nor Marcel ever returned to Paris—Claude’s health problems prohibited it.
Untitled, black-and-white photograph, Claude Cahun (with Marcel Moore), 1947.
“If there is horror, it is for those who speak indifferently of the next war. If there is hate, it is for hateful qualities, not nations. If there is love, it is because this alone kept me alive.” – Claude Cahun
Cahun and Moore’s artworks, photographs, writings, texts and memoirs have been collected and archived in the Jersey Heritage Museum in St. Helier, Jersey.
For more information on Cahun’s life and practice, you can read “A Brief Biography of Claude Cahun” posted on this blog:
Paper Bullets, Jeffrey H. Jackson. Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 2020.
Historian Jeffrey Jackson focuses primarily on Cahun and Moore’s anti-Nazi activities during World War II. He includes lots of interesting details about their life on Jersey island, their activism and imprisonment.
Exist Otherwise: The Life and Works of Claude Cahun, Jennifer L. Shaw. London: Reaktion Books, 2017.
Art Historian Jennifer Shaw has written a comprehensive treatise on Cahun and Moore’s lives and works. This is a great book.
Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, Untitled ( I am in training don’t kiss me), 1927, gelatin silver print ,4 5/8 x 3 ½ inches, Jersey Heritage Collection.
For many of us, French artist Claude Cahun has materialized as a kind of queer superheroine. Cahun first appeared on the world art stage in the early 1990s, nearly forty years after their death, when French scholar François Leperlier introduced Claude Cahun’s written and photographic work in the monograph Claude Cahun: l’écart et la métamorphose. Since this introduction, Cahun has been well examined, republished and widely exhibited. Today, the artist Claude Cahun is lauded as a feminist, performance artist, photographer and Surrealist writer.
Claude Cahun was born Lucy Renee Mathilde Schwob in Nantes, France in 1894. Early in life Schwob identified as androgynous, resisting a gendered life. As a teenager, Lucy met Suzanne Malherbe; they became best friends and would later become life partners. Lucy’s father married Suzanne’s mother, making them stepsiblings as well. By the end of World War I, Schowb identified as Claude Cahun and Malherbe as Marcel Moore. The pair moved to Paris in the early 1920s. Cahun came to be well regarded as a writer, performer and artist even within male-dominated Surrealist circles; Moore was equally acknowledged for their original drawings and illustrations.
Cahun was a prolific writer. Two of their most significant literary works are Héroïnes and Aveux Non Avenus. Héroïnes (Heroines) was first published in 1925 as a series of fifteen short stories and monologues. It remains a radical text that deconstructs gender roles and stereotypes in Western literature with such figures as Cinderella, Salome, Eve, Sappho and Androgyne. Aveux Non Avenus (DISAVOWALS), first published in 1930 as a limited edition artists’ book, takes the form of a literary montage: a compilation of dreams, stories, poems and philosophical musings. In this complex work, Cahun approaches some of their favorite subjects, including love, narcissism, gender and androgyny. Each of the nine chapters begins with a unique photomontage made by Cahun and Moore.
Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, photomontage for the book Aveux non Avenus, 1930, original size for publication,8 7/16 x 6 ½ inches, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Library.
Throughout the many years Cahun and Moore spent together, it is almost certain that Moore was behind the lens— shooting most of the exceptional black and white portraits that Cahun inhabited. These images appear to us as intimate explorations of identity, gender and selfhood. Until the late twentieth century, these groundbreaking photographs remained in relative obscurity, with the exception of their use by Moore and Cahun in the elaborate photomontages produced for the book Aveux Non Avenus.
118mm x 94mm (whole)
107mm x 82mm (image)
also neg
Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, Untitled (reflected in the mirror), c.1928, Jersey Heritage Collection.
THE UNKNOWN HEROINE project is a modern retelling or interpretation of Cahun’s essay “THE ESSENTIAL WIFE or the the Unknown Princess” (one of the fifteen essays in Heroines). The resulting performative photographs can be viewed as a tribute to the work of Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore and to their collaboration.
Please read my blog post about “the limited edition artists’ book-THE UNKNOWN HEROINE, posted April 22, 2021
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