Claude Cahun

Born in Nantes on October 25th, 1894. It was named after Lucy Renée Mathilde Schwob, but over the years, turned into Claude Cahun, expressed through his poems and photographs inspired by untamed sensibility and intimate nature directed to claim the sexual identities.

Claude belonged to the surrealist movement and Baudelaire had a strong inspiration for the search of a personal myth. To say the experts, his work is not intended to provoke or spectacle, but to declare itself an exploration of a work composed largely of self-portraits.

He was very fond of theater, from which he draws a genuine passion for the staging of both itself and other objects. Its facilities are precursors of contemporary photographers like Alain Flescher or artists like Christian Boltanski.

His autobiography through the image gives an important role in sexual identity: Cahun wanted to be part of a third gender indeterminate, on the border between homosexuality, bisexuality and androgyny. When not photographing herself, becomes their lenses on their male or female portraits to make them full of tenderness: Suzanne Malherbe, Sylvia Beach, Henri Michaux, Robert Desnos.

As for his poems, they have an impressive effect on the visual side and constitute a very original, unique, but it had a very restricted distribution.

Claude Cahun created a discrete and sensitive work, little known in his time because of their independence and freedom, but also by its multidisciplinary character (was both a writer, woman of the theater, artist, and photographer). These characteristics have become a figure claimed by a group of personalities that includes artists, fashion designers, advocates of women's emancipation, and supporters of the blurring of genres, among others.

The permanence of Claude Cahun in second place in the world of artistic creation was by choice, which is not prevented him from participating actively in the liberation struggles of the customs, social progress against Nazism. Because of reprisals, some of his work was lost because of his arrest by the Gestapo in 1944 and then sentenced to death but escaped punishment before the sentence was executed. Claude died on December 8th, 1954, in Saint Helier, Jersey, UK.

Today's most prestigious cultural institutions in the world as the National Museum of Modern Art in Paris, the Institute of Contemporary Arts and Tate Modern in London, the Gray Art Gallery in New York, among others, have exhibitions devoted to his work.

More information:
http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Cahun