ST. LOUIS — “Beneath this mask, another mask. I will never be finished removing all these faces.”
The line comes from a photocollage by Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, and it reflects the extraordinary life they built together as romantic and creative partners — a life in which gender and family identity shifted as unpredictably as France’s political upheavals in the 1920s and ’30s. Born Lucy Renee Mathilde Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe, respectively, the two met as teenagers in their hometown of Nantes and fell deeply in love. They later became legal stepsisters when Moore’s widowed mother married Cahun’s divorced father in 1917, a cover that helped conceal their queer relationship and allowed them to live together for the rest of their lives.
After moving to Paris in 1920, they adopted the names Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore and soon became part of the artistic avant-garde. There, they produced Surrealist illustrations, photographs, and collages that wryly dismantled gender stereotypes and archetypes. Their work combined wit, defiance, and visual experimentation in ways that made them stand out within the Paris art world.
These darkly charming black-and-white pieces, most no larger than five by three inches, are at the center of the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis’s exhibition And I Saw New Heavens and a New Earth: The Partnership, Art, and Activism of Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore. Though the checklist is modest, the show carries considerable force, presenting the couple’s varied output as an expression of the queerness inherent in both their relationship and their artistic collaboration.
