Aveux non Avenus by Cahun, Claude - 1930

Paris: Editions du Carrefour, 1930. First edition. 237 pp. Original publisher's wrappers. Spine a little browned and creased, overall bright and fresh, an excellent copy.

One of 370 copies on vélin pur-fil, of a total edition of 500 copies. Illustrated with ten full page heliogravures of photo montages by Cahun and her partner Marcel Moore (Suzanne Malherbe). Preface by Pierre Mac Orlan. Jennifer Shaw writes of the book in her biography of Cahun, "... she was not interested in creating a hermetic exploration of her own self. She was interested in undermining conventional wisdoms, in making people think differently so that they would live differently: a formidable and ambitious project.... She searches for new ways to redefine relationships between self and other, masculine and feminine, art and the everyday, the ideal and the particular."

Claude Cahun (1894-1954), named Lucy Schwob at birth, embraced gender fluidity and ambiguity decades before the advent of queer theory; as she wrote in Aveux non Avenus, "Masculine? Feminine? It depends on the situation. Neuter is the only gender that always suits me." Her theme was both the construction and deconstruction of sexual identity, using her body and image as a projection surface. With her partner in art and life, Marcel Moore (Suzanne Malherbe), she blazed a path of both confrontation and challenge, explorations of beauty and gender and sexuality, within her writings and particularly her photographs. Little published during her lifetime, Aveux non Avenus is her major work,
a landmark not only in Surrealism but also in feminist and LGBTQ+ studies.

Roth, The Book of 101 Books, pp. 62-63. Lederman & Yatskevich, What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women, p. 64. Mundy, ed. Surrealism: Desire Unbound, pp. 186-196. Downie, ed. Don't Kiss Me: The Art of Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, pp. 33-38. Shaw, Exist Otherwise, pp. 100-101, passim.