Cathy's Art Diary

Interesting book talk at Charleston Farmhouse as part of the Charleston Festival by Rupert Thomson on his novel about the artists Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore. Thomson began by reading a passage from the book then outlined the story of this remarkable couple. The women, having met in the 1909, took on masculine names and were later to become step-sisters. They are best known for the photographs of Cahun they collaborated to take. He talked about their place in the art scene of 1920s Paris, the people they met there and their political activism. He then went on to their life and resistance activity in occupied Jersey. In discussion with art historian Frances Spalding, they discussed how he approached the novel and why he chose to write in the voice of Moore. I had read and enjoyed the novel as ‘homework’ for the festival so was fascinating to hear more about how it was constructed and the decisions he’s made when writing it. 

Strange but compelling exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery of curated by contemporary artist, Gillian Wearing, to showcase the work of early 20th century artist Claude Cahun and her own response to it. The wonderful discovery for me was the work of Cahun who was born Lucy Schwab and fell in love at school in England with Suzanne Malherbe, later called Marcel Moore when they both took gender neutral names. Cahun specialised in staging photographs of herself which not taken for display but as an ongoing dialogue with herself. I was fascinated by their years in occupied Jersey during the war where they wrote propaganda leaflets until they were arrested and sentence to death. I loved the photos of Cahun dancing on a wall on the Liberation of Jersey. Cahun used masks in a number of her photographs as well as staging scenarios to take pictures of. Wearing highlighted her own work which does this. It was interesting to see a series of the masks she had used and see how th...