Claude Cahun's 'Aveux non avenus' Reissued Ahead of Jeu de Paume Retrospective

Claude Cahun's 'Aveux non avenus', a masterful and overlooked prose poem composed between 1919 and 1929, has been reissued. The work, accompanied by the author's photomontages—often derived from self-portraits and featuring dreamlike constructions with eyes, hands, faces, mirrors, and visual labyrinths—is one of the finest contributions to Surrealism. François Leperlier, author of a biography on Cahun and the postface of this edition, is also directing a retrospective on Cahun at the Jeu de Paume in Paris starting May 24. Cahun's photographic oeuvre, innovative from the 1930s, explores mirroring, doubling, self-staging, cross-dressing, and masquerade in a quest for narcissism and sexual freedom, anticipating the work of Pierre Molinier, Urs Lüthi, and Cindy Sherman. The writing of 'Aveux' is arid and proteiform, comprising notes, fragments, narrative snippets, typographic variations, and diary entries, all suffused with a consciousness tormented by the enigma of being, inhabited by monsters and self-destruction, yet luminous.