Jennifer L. Shaw’s Reading Claude Cahun’s Disavowals joins a group of recent publications on the female Surrealist artist Claude Cahun. However, this study is the first in-depth look at Cahun’s signature book, Aveux non avenus, written in the 1920s and published in 1930 in Paris. It appeared in English in 2008 as Disavowals: or, Cancelled Confessions, although the English title misses the double subtleties and punning play of “confessions” and “unconfessed” (trans. Susan de Muth, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008). Shaw calls the book “Cahun’s manifesto” and argues convincingly that the artist saw it as an activist text that battled both post-World War I conservative French culture and her quite privileged circle in the Parisian avant-garde. Shaw suggests that Disavowals’s model of “‘other morals’ and ‘other loves’” (33) has relevance both for the interwar era and for today. Cahun’s still-relevant themes include “gender-bending, cross-dressing, questioning sexuality and self, rearranging family and romantic roles” (1–2). Although Disavowals was not widely known between the wars, Shaw makes clear that it should be seen alongside André Breton’s Nadja (1928) and L’Amour fou (1937) and Max Ernst’s La femme 100 têtes (1929) as a seminal Surrealist text. Certainly it rivals their sophistication of literary and visual commentary, and it was and remains a corrective to the heterosexual, masculinist, and misogynist commentaries of 1920s Surrealism.

Claude Cahun (1894–1964) was born Lucy Renée Mathilde Schwob, to a wealthy Jewish literary family. Her father published a Republican newspaper, Le Phare de la Loire, and her uncle Marcel Schwob was a renowned Symbolist poet and the founder of the literary journal Mercure de France. Cahun adopted the gender-neutral name Claude as a young woman when writing for Mercure de France, and the surname, Cahun, of the maternal grandmother who raised her. Family friends included such prominent literary figures as André Gide and Oscar Wilde (12). Her adult life in Paris shows that she moved freely in the center of Parisian culture, and her circle includes figures such as Breton, Georges Bataille, Sylvia Beach, Jacques Lacan, Paul Valéry, Salvador Dalí, Natalie Barney, and Gertrude Stein (23). Shaw presents Cahun’s volume as an informed comment on—and deliberate address to—this literary world; in other words, this is no outsider’s rant.

Disavowals consists of ten photomontages and ten chapters of Cahun’s texts written between 1919 and 1929. In an edition of five hundred, this art book was published in 1930 by the Éditions du Carrefour (publishers of Ernst’s La femme 100 têtes), and advertising specifically drew parallels to Ernst’s books (17). The text includes private letters, poems, and diary entries as well as Cahun’s previously published essays in literary journals such as Mercure de France. The book’s ten photomontages were a collaboration—constructed according to Cahun’s directions by the artist’s stepsister and lover, Marcel Moore (born Suzanne Malherbe). The plates prominently feature multiple images of Cahun, but “transform and recombine Cahun’s face and body in a manner that problematizes any easy reading of Cahun’s self” (19). The faceplate for chapter 3, for instance, features five flipped and doubled images of Cahun’s bald head, flanked on both sides by two upside-down statues of Venus de Milo in a composition that manipulates the imagery of playing cards. In a typical example of her sophisticated intertextual reading, Shaw argues that the book’s title itself can be a play on the words “denying Venus”: “Veux non à Venus” (105).

Disavowals is ostensibly autobiographical, but simultaneously disassembles such a notion. As Shaw suggests, it demands an activist reading that “disrupts conventions about sexuality, society, and authorship” (4). She presents Cahun’s book as a “palimpsest that gives us a new perspective on interwar debates about art, classicism, gender and sexuality” (7), and she argues that fully understanding the comments Cahun made about her own moment in interwar France enrich its relevance for us today.

Reading Claude Cahun’s Disavowals is one of several recent monographs: François Leperlier’s two biographies, Claude Cahun: L’écart et la metamorphose: essai (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1992) and Claude Cahun: L’exotism intérieur (Paris: Fayard, 2006), and Gen Doy’s Claude Cahun: A Sensual Politics of Photography (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007). Previous writings have emphasized Cahun’s feminist and anti-authorial voice, and treated her as a cult classic. Cahun’s work emerged from the shadows to prominence in the 1980s, a parallel progression to the academic development of queer theory, feminist studies, and interest in Roland Barthes’s “death of the author.” Leperlier’s biographies and the publication of Cahun’s writings, as well as the English translation of Disavowals, assisted her rehabilitation, and a veritable cottage industry of postmodern critics and writers have incorporated Cahun’s work into their feminist critiques of heterosexual and masculinist literary and visual avant-gardes. Early examples include Hal Foster, who drew parallels to Cindy Sherman (“L’Amour Faux,” Art in America 74, no. 1 [January 1986]: 116–29) and Abigail Solomon-Godeau and Honor Lasalle, who drew links to Judith Butler’s theories of performative subjectivity (“Surrealist Confession: Claude Cahun’s Photomontages,” Afterimage 19, no. 8 [March 1992]: 10–13).

Shaw approaches Cahun’s book less through its postmodern and queer aspects, and more in reference to Paris between the wars, French literary culture, Dada and Surrealism, male homosexuality, and “gender, sexuality, aesthetics and subjectivity” (33). Expanding on both feminist and historical contextual approaches, she explores Cahun’s analysis not only of lesbian but also of male homosexual gender anxieties after World War I. Amy Lyford’s Surrealist Masculinities: Gender Anxiety and the Aesthetics of Post–World War I Reconstruction in France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007) addresses these same issues in the work of Cahun’s male colleagues, with their deep psychic scars and overturned gender roles after the devastating war.

Shaw shows that Cahun’s book challenges the question of authorship on several levels—by combining intimate letters with published works, by problematizing and double-gendering the photographic self-image of the artist herself, and by constructing a work that challenges authorship and autobiography. Even the photomontages present a conundrum; the plates are “composed by Moore following the author’s designs” (19), and it remains unclear how collaborative they were. For instance, in pointing out that the frontispiece image (the only one with a signature) is signed not by “Cahun” but by “Moore” (19), Shaw reads the photomontages as active collaborations with Moore—an alternative to singular artistic production. She argues that “Cahun was exploring the idea of collaborative practice as it might offer an alternative to dominant paradigms of both artistic creativity and human subjectivity” (19). Shaw cites the artist herself when she says, “My lover will not be the subject of my drama; s/he will be my collaborator” (33).

Shaw addresses two specific contexts for Cahun’s book. First, she investigates the historical references (beyond the commonly discussed lesbian context), ranging widely from Victor Hugo and Charles Baudelaire to Sigmund Freud and Havelock Ellis (5). She analyzes Cahun’s critiques of Symbolism, Surrealism, and psychiatry. Shaw acknowledges that creating this sort of historical guidebook runs contrary to what Cahun would have wished, but argues that this context is essential for a twenty-first-century reading. Second, she studies the fragmentary, disjunctive nature of the book and its intertextuality—“among texts, among images, and between texts and images” (21). As a study of intertextuality, Shaw’s study takes its place among literature about photomontage (with nods to Hannah Höch’s and Raoul Hausmann’s disjunctive, political photomontages) and text/image relationships within Surrealism. In many ways, in its meticulous historical unpacking of the photomontages and its concentration on alternative views of interwar women, Shaw’s book seems parallel to Maud Lavin’s Cut with a Kitchen Knife: The Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Höch (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). Shaw, however, analyzes Cahun’s entire book, text and image alike, which distinguishes her approach from Lavin’s concentration on Höch’s single images.

Shaw places Disavowals as a reaction to the post-World War I “rappel à l’ordre” with its cultural conservatism. Cahun offers an active alternative to the period’s “conservative heterosexual roles” (31)—fragmenting and inverting the traditional relationship between male artist and female subject, and simultaneously creates a critique of the male Surrealist circle dominated by Breton. Shaw’s chapters follow the progress, more or less, of Cahun’s book, offering deep readings of their visual and textual strategies. Themes include Cahun’s deconstructions of heterosexual romantic life with the use of children’s literature, her participation in Pierre Albert-Birot’s avant-garde theater, Le Plateau (46), and the artist’s translation of Ellis’s sexology writings, especially “La femme dans la société” (58). Shaw’s analysis of one photomontage argues that all of its imagery relates to notions of love—including a youthful portrait of her uncle Marcel Schwob, children’s images, multiple views of Cahun’s head, and a cropped perspective of Michelangelo’s David with a fig leaf. Shaw also examines the Narcissus theme, which Cahun calls “neo-narcissism,” or a path forward (32, 74). She argues that Cahun tried to update the Narcissus theme of the Symbolist writers she admired, such as Rémy de Gourmont and Gide (for Cahun, both Narcissus and Echo are female) (79). However, Shaw argues that Cahun’s fragmented, disjunctive photomontages also critique the conventional notion of classical masculine beauty that exemplifies the interwar “return to order.” In addition, she writes of Cahun and Moore’s critique of conventional femininity, pairing their alternative models with Lacan’s psychoanalytic theories. Although she does not suggest that Cahun knew of Lacan’s “mirror phase,” which was not published till 1949, she argues that they “occupied the same cultural milieu” (143), with Cahun framing the mirror as an alternative view about self and image, in opposition to Lacan who sees no way out (144). For example, in her photomontages and text, instead of Narcissus, Cahun engages an image of Auriga (the Greek bronze charioteer) but genders her as female. Finally, Shaw analyzes Cahun’s affinities with Dada and Surrealist games such as cadavre exquis drawings. For example, one photomontage includes gloves, chess boards, and playing cards, with direct references to Breton’s symbolic use of chess and dream imagery. Unlike Breton, however, Cahun blurs the divisions between male and female and between illusion and truth (177).

Shaw’s complicated reading of Cahun as male/female, author/subject, and collaborator/artist is richly nuanced and expands on the current literature. Her most important contribution, however, is to photographic book scholarship itself. In the past decade, this has become an important field of study, with overviews by Martin Parr and Gerry Badger (The Photobook: A History, New York: Phaidon, vols. 1–3, 2004, 2006, 2014), Andrew Roth (The Book of 101 Books: Seminal Photographic Books of the Twentieth Century, New York, PPP Editions, 2001), and others. A deep reading of individual photographic books is more rare, including Alan Trachtenberg’s discussion of Walker Evans’s American Photographs (1962) in Reading American Photographs: Images As History—Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989) and Sarah Greenough’s engagement with Robert Frank’s sequencing in Looking In: Robert Frank’s The Americans (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 2009). Unlike earlier Cahun scholars who repeatedly discuss a handful of images, Shaw’s is a truly intertextual reading. She gives a rich reading of each photomontage and relates it to Cahun’s own texts. Working through all the chapters, she argues that Disavowals must be read as a complete work, not a series of pictorial examples. Shaw’s book, with its detailed and meticulous contextualized readings of both the photomontages and texts in Disavowals, will be a major addition to the slim list of in-depth studies of photographic books.