Claude Cahun

The Photography of Claude Cahun

Born Lucy Renee Mathilde Schwob in October of 1894 to a literary Jewish family in Nantes, Claude Cahun was a French surrealist photographer, sculptor and author. She was the niece of avant-garde symbolist writer Marcel Schwob and the great-niece of historian and Orientalist writer David Léon Cahun.

Cahun adopted the pseudonym Claude Cahun in 1914 for its gender neutrality, Claude being a French name that can be used by any gender with the same spelling and pronunciation. After experiencing antisemitism in the Nantes school system, Claude Cahun attended the private Parsons Mead School in Ashtead, Surrey, and continued her education at the University of Paris, Sorbonne.

Claude Cahun’s father, newspaper publisher Maurice Schwob, divorced his wife after her permanent internment at a psychiatric facility. In 1909, he met the widowed Marie Eugénie Rondet Malberbe and, after a lengthly courtship, married her in 1917. Claude Cahun had met Marie Malberbe’s daughter, Suzanne Alberte Malberbe, previously at school in 1909. They were already years into their lifetime artistic and romantic partnership by the time their parents married.

In 1922, Cahun and Malberbe, now an established designer, illustrator and photographer under the name Marcel Moore, settled in Paris. At their home, they held salon meetings attended by Paris’s intellectuals and artists. As prominent members of the Parisian art world, Cahun and Moore would host such notables as poet and painter Henri Michaux, writer Adrienne Monnier, Surrealist leader and theorist André Breton, and American-born bookseller and publisher Sylvia Beach.

Claude Cahun is known primarily for her highly staged self-portraits and tableaux that incorporated visual surrealistic elements. She began shooting her series of self-portraits at the age of eighteen while studying at the University of Paris. During the 1920s, Cahun’s self-portraits featured her attired in such various guises as an angel, doll, body builder, aviator, vampire and Japanese puppet. Some of these images, which presented a blurring of gender indicators and behaviors, are believed to have been taken with Marcel Moore behind the camera. Cahun and Moore collaborated on many projects and equally shared the credit for their collage work.

In 1925, Cahun published “Heroines”, a series of monologues based upon female fairy tale characters intertwined with witty comparisons to contemporary women. She was active during 1929 in the experimental theater group Le Pateau for which she played Elle in “Barbe-Bleue (Bluebeard)”,and Satan in “Le Mystère d’Adam”. In 1930, Cahun published “Aveux non Avenus (Disavowed Confessions)”, a book of essays and recorded dreams illustrated with photomontages by Marcel Moore.

In 1932, Cahun joined the Association des Écrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires, a coalition of revolutionary artists and writers who eventually mobilized against war and fascism. It was through this group that she met Breton and surrealist writer René Crevel. Cahun participated in a number of surrealist exhibitions, including the London International Surrealist Exhibition at the New Burlington Gallery and the Exposition Surréaliste d’Objets at the Charles Ratton Gallery in Paris, both in 1936.

With the rise of antisemitism in 1937, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore fled Europe and settled on the island of Jersey. After German troops invaded Jersey in 1940, they reverted to their original names and masqueraded themselves as being sisters. For several years, Cahun and Moore heroically risked their lives by producing and distributing anti-Nazi fliers to the German soldiers. Many of the anti-Nazi fliers contained translated snippets of BBC reports on the Nazis’ crimes and insolence: these BBC excerpts were pasted together to create rhythmic poems and harsh critiques. Cahun and Moore would don their best dresses and attend German military events at which they secretly placed their pamphlets in cigarette boxes and in soldier’s pockets or on their chairs.

In 1944, Cahun and Moore were arrested and sentenced to death. Their home and property was confiscated and much of their art was destroyed by the Germans. Cahun and Moore survived, saved by the 1945 liberation of Jersey from German occupation. Cahun’s health, however, never recovered from her treatment in the prison. She died at Saint Helier, Jersey, in December of 1954 at the age of sixty and was buried in St. Brelade’s Church, one of the twelve ancient parish churches on the island. After Cahun’s death, Moore relocated to a smaller home in Jersey. She died by suicide in February of 1972 at the age of seventy-nine. Moore is buried alongside Cahun in St. Brelade’s Church.

Claude Cahun’s work was largely unrecognized until forty years after her death. Her participation with the Parisian Surrealists, predominately male, brought an element of diversity to their creative work through her gender non-conforming photography and writings. Cahun’s work was meant to upset the conventional understanding of photography as a document of reality. Her poetry and writings challenged the prevailing gender roles as well as social and economic boundaries.

Notes: All images, unless noted, are part of the Jersey Heritage Collections of the Bailiwick of Jersey.

An extensive article on Marcel Moore and Claude Cahun, entitled “Marcel Moore, Her Life and Art”, written by the JHT Curator of Art Louise Downie can be found at the Jersey Heritage Organization’s site. This article primarily covers the life of Moore who was a successful illustrator, photographer and fashion designer. The article is located at: https://www.jerseyheritage.org/media/PDF-Heritage-Mag/marcel%20moore.pdf

The November 4th 2020 edition of the online The Art Newspaper has an extract from author Jeffrey H. Jackson’s history book “Paper Bullets” which outlines Cahun and Moore’s artistic campaign against the Germans during World War II. The article is located at: https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2020/11/04/extract-or-how-artist-couple-claude-cahun-and-marcel-moore-resisted-the-nazis-with-their-paper-bullets

Top Insert Image: Claude Cahun, “Autoportrait”, 1927, Gelatin Silver Print, Jersey Heritage Collections

Second Insert Image: Claude Cahun, “Self Portrait with Roger Roussot in Barbe-Bleue (Bluebeard)”, 1929, Gelatin Silver Print, Jersey Heritage Collections

Third Insert Image: Claude Cahun, “Self Portrait”, Date Unknown, Color Crayon and Ink on Paper, Jersey Heritage Collections

Fourth Insert Image: Claude Cahun, “Self Portrait in Orchards”, 1939, Gelatin Silver Print, Jersey Heritage Collections

Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore”, circa 1929-30, Gelatin Silver Print, Jersey Heritage Collections

William Theophilus Brown

The Artwork of William Theophilus Brown

Born at Moline, Illinois in April of 1919, William Theophilus Brown was an American artist who became prominent as a member of the Bay Area Figurative Movement, a group of 1950s and 1960s artists in San Francisco who abandoned Abstract Expressionism and favored a return to figuration in painting.

Theophilus Brown was a member of a family descended from early-American intellectuals. His great-grandfather was friends with writers Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson; Brown’s father was an inventor and chief designer with the John Deere Company in Illinois. At the age of eleven, Brown painted a portrait which his father submitted to a regional art contest juried by the iconic midwestern artist Grant Wood. Brown received a third place award which was presented personally by Wood.

In 1941, Brown received his Bachelor of Arts in music from Yale University where he became lifetime friends with composer and violist Paul Hindemith as well as novelist and poet Eleanore Marie Sarton. Brown was called after his graduation for military service in World War II. After the completion of his military service, Brown took advantage of the G.I. Bill and relocated to Paris where he worked under cubist painters Fernand Leger and Amedeo Ozenfant. In his travels, he met many artists among whom were Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti, Georges Braque, and Willem de Kooning who had a major influence on Brown’s early work. Brown was also acquainted with several composers including John Cage, Samuel Barber and Igor Stravinsky.

In 1950, Theophilus Brown initially relocated to New York where he became deeply immersed in the evolving school of Abstract Expressionism. Over the course of his studies at the University of California, Berkeley, Brown began to develop his own unique voice. He eventually realized that the genre of abstract expressionism was not an ideology he wanted to pursue. Brown graduated with his Master of Fine Arts in 1952. It was in his University of California classes that he met fellow student and painter Paul John Wonner who became his lifelong partner. Wonner earned both his Bachelor and Master of Fine Arts as well as his Master of Library and Information Science at UC Berkeley.

Brown and Wonner shared a studio space in Berkeley at the same building where painters Richard Diebenkorn and Elmer Bischoff had workspaces. These artists got together for drawing sessions and began to incorporate painter David Park’s reintroduction of the human figure into their own works. Collectively, the group became part of the Bay Area Figurative Movement. This movement was a diverse range of artistic practices that united the figurative form with both the formality and vigorous painting techniques of Abstract Expressionism. The exploration of these two movements together created new works in the fields of landscape, portraiture, still life and nude paintings.

In 1956, Theophilus Brown’s paintings of football players, presented as abstracted bodies in motion, appeared in an issue of Life magazine. The paintings caught the attention of Los Angeles gallery owner Felix Landau who began to exhibit Brown’s work. In the following year, Brown’s work was included in the Oakland Museum’s Bay Area Figurative Painting Exhibition. He and Wonner moved to Malibu in the early 1960s and became part of the Southern California art scene. The years in Santa Monica and Malibu were very productive for Brown with works on both canvas and paper of beach scenes that featured mostly male nudes set in carefully crafted abstract landscapes. In these works, he stripped away the detail and focused on shape, form, and light.

Brown taught at the University of California, Davis between 1975 and 1976. His relationship with Wonner endured until the death of Wonner in 2008. A daily painter into his ninth decade, Theophilus Brown died in San Francisco on the eighth of February in 2012 at the age of ninety-two. His papers are housed in the Archives of American Art, a research center of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC. Brown’s work is housed in both private and public collections including Sacramento’s Crocker Museum of Art which has a collection of eighteen-hundred works by Theophilus Brown and Paul Wonner.

Notes: In May of 2020, writer Erin Clark wrote a carefully researched article on Theophilus Brown entitled “The Charmed Life of Theophilus Brown” for the online Artworks magazine. This article is located at: https://artworksmag.com/theophilus-brown/

Matt Gonzalez, a close friend and fellow artist with Theophilus Brown and Paul Wonner, wrote an article in 2011 for The New Fillmore entitled “A Friendship with Theophilus Brown”. This article is available on Art & Politics: The Matt Gonzales Reader located at: https://themattgonzalezreader.com/2011/09/05/theophilus-brown/

The WordPress site Art Matters has an extensive collection of short articles written over a period of years about Paul Wonner and Theophilus Brown. This collection can be found at: https://trgtalk.wordpress.com/category/artists/brown-wm-theophilus/

The Theophilus Movie website contains several video clips of Theophilus Brown and a section to fundraise the production of biographical documentary on Brown’s life and work. The Theophilus site is located at: https:/www.theophilusmovie.com

Second Insert Image: William Theophilus Brown, “Portrait”, 2001, Ink Wash and Gouache on Paper, 35.6 x 27.9 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: William Theophilus Brown, United (Football), 1956, Oil on Paper, 106.7 x 139.7 cm, Kim Eagles-Smith Gallery, Mill Valley, California

Bottom Insert Image: William Theophilus Brown, “Self Portrait”, 1994, Acrylic on Canvas, 30.5 x 30.5 cm, Private Collection

Paul John Wonner

The Artwork of Paul John Wonner

Born in Tucson, Arizona in April of 1920, Paul John Wonner was an American painter who rose to prominence in the 1950s through his association with the Bay Area Figurative Movement. He was best known for his abstract expressionist styled still-life paintings.

After moving to the San Francisco Bay Area, Paul Wonner earned a Bachelor’s degree in 1941 at Oakland’s California College of Arts and Crafts, now the California College of the Arts. During his military service stationed in San Antonio, Texas, he continued his studies and set up a neighborhood studio. In 1946, Wonner was discharged and quickly relocated to New York City to continue his art career. He worked as a commercial designer and attended classes at the Art Student League as well as symposiums at Robert Motherwell’s studio.

In 1950, Wonner returned to his studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He earned his Bachelor of Arts in 1952 and his Master of Arts in 1953. Wonner also earned his Master Degree of Library and Information Science in 1955, a requirement for most professional librarian positions in the United States. After graduation, Paul Wonner worked in the late 1950s as a librarian for University of California, Davis, and as a lecturer during the 1960s at the Otis Art Institute and UC Santa Barbara.

At UC Berkeley in 1950, Paul Wonner met fellow painting student William Theophilus Brown who became his lifelong partner. During their studies at the University of California, Wonner and Brown shared a studio space in Berkeley at the same building as painters Elmer Bischoff and Richard Diebenkorn. Together these artists incorporated the figurative style of David Park’s paintings into their own works. This group became a part of what became known as the Bay Area Figurative Movement. In 1957, Wonner joined eleven other artists for the Oakland Museum of Art’s Contemporary Bay Area Figurative Painting Exhibition.

In the early 1960s, Wonner and Theophilus Brown moved to Malibu where they became part of the Southern California art scene. In 1968, Wonner became a lecturer at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and began to tutor as an artist in different areas of the Los Angeles metropolitan area. In 1976, he and Brown settled in San Francisco, where as an abstract realist, Wonner continued painting his still lifes and later figurative works. A prolific painter, Paul John Wonner died in April of 2008 in San Francisco; he was survived by his partner Theophilus Brown who died in February of 2012.

Interested in art as an adolescent, Wonner’s initial art training began when his parents hired a local California artist to assist him with his drawing amid his secondary school years. Wonner started his painting career during a time when abstract expressionism was at its height. In Berkeley during his association with the Bay Area Figurative Movement, Wonner’s work was similar to the figurative style of many of his fellow artists. However, his work still retained the vigorous brushwork and strong coloring of the abstract expressionists.

Beginning in 1956, Paul Wonner painted a series of works on paper and canvas that depicted multiple male bathers and boys with bouquets. By the end of the 1960s, he had abandoned his loose, figurative style and concentrated on a hyper-realistic form of still-life images. Although Wonner used the the Dutch Baroque still-life tradition as a historical source, he typically incorporated objects from contemporary life in his works.

In the late 1970s, Wonner’s style turned crisp with an emphasis on sharp shadows and bright lighting effects. As he matured in his painting skills, Wonner’s later works portrayed his subjects distinctly separated through the use of surrealistically rendered vacant spaces. In his most recent figurative work, Wonner’s human figures are situated in arrangements and settings that are vaguely allegorical in nature.

Paul Wonner’s paintings and other artworks are housed in both private and public collections all over the United States, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, New York city’s Soloman R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Cocker Museum of Art in Sacramento, California, which has an extensive collection of both Paul Wonner and Theophilus Brown’s work.

Notes: The online Artnet site has an extensive collection of works by Paul Wonner that are available for sale. Images of these works can be found at: https://www.artnet.com/artists/paul-john-wonner/

Scott Shields, the Associate Director and Chief Curator of the Crocker Art Museum, discusses the work of both Paul Wonner and Theophilus Brown at the Heather James Fine Art site. In addition to the video discussion, the site includes many images of Wonner and Brown’s work. The Heather James site is located at: https://www.heatherjames.com/multimedia/wonner-and-brown-scott-shields-interview/

Top Insert Image: Frank J. Thomas, “Paul Wonner”, circa 1950s, Gelatin Silver Print

Second Insert Image: Paul Wonner, “Model and Mirror”, 1964-65, Pencil on Paper, 43.2 x 35.6 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Rose Mandel, “Paul Wonner”, 1954, Gelatin Silver Print

Fourth Insert Image: Paul Wonner, Untitled, Watercolor and Pencil on Paper, 43.2 x 35.6 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Lincoln Yamaguchi, “Richard Diebenkorn, Paul Wonner and Theophilus Brown at Berkeley”, 1955, Gelatin Silver Print