Le Coeur de Pic.
Deharme, Lise and Claude Cahun. Le Coeur de Pic. Paris: Librairie José Corti, 1937.
4to.; illustrated throughout with black-and-white photographs; leaves very lightly tanned; printed color pictorial boards, red cloth over green; minor shelf wear to red cloth, mainly at top and bottom edges. In a specially made slipcase.
First edition.
An unusual children’s book created by two of the most prominent female Surrealist artists of the 1920s and ’30s, author Lise Deharme and photographer Claude Cahun, whose work is especially notable due the relative lack of women within that artistic genre.
The twenty photographs Cahun created to couple with Deharme’s poetry are compositions of miniature worlds that elevate ordinary objects into a mysterious and extraordinary world of the imagination. Featuring dolls, fragments of dolls, dolls’ house furniture, flowers, leaves, seeds and such humble domestic objects as forks, spoons, scissors and reels of cotton, they were created in a variety of settings both indoors and out. Powerfully symbolist in flavor, a result of the influence of Symbolist poetry on the young Cahun, whose uncle Maurice Schwob was a symbolist novelist and poet, they combine a child’s ability to invest life in inanimate forms with an intensely poetic sensibility. A tiny doll’s hand, severed from its body, appears in many of Cahun’s photographs for Le Coeur de Pic, and the recurring image of the hand is not inappropriate for work involving “the lady of the gloves,” as Deharme (née Anne-Marie Hirz) was known in 1930s. Hostess of a celebrated literary and artistic salon in Paris, and the muse of the Surrealist movement, Deharme was featured as Lise Meyer, “la femme aux gants bleu ciel” in Breton’s 1928 novel Nadja.
Cahun, born Lucy Renee Mathilde Schwob, began making photographic self-portraits as early as 1912, when she was 18 years old, and around 1919 settled on the pseudonym Claude Cahun, intentionally selecting a sexually ambiguous name that would more accurately reflect her aesthetic explorations of gender, identity, and sexuality. Her androgynous self-portraits of the 1920s display a revolutionary way of thinking and creating, experimenting with her audience’s understanding of photography as a documentation of reality.
Starting in the 1930s, though, Cahun produced a body of work relating to the Surrealist object. Cahun met André Breton after joining the Association des Ecrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires in 1932, and also became friends with Salvador Dalí and Man Ray, among others. She contributed three objects to the Exposition surréaliste d’objets at Galerie Charles Ratton in Paris in May 1936 and wrote a text, “Prenez garde aux objets domestiques” (“Beware of Household Objects”) for the special issue of the magazine Cahiers d’Art published to accompany the exhibition.
In 1937 Cahun and her partner, Suzanne Malherbe, settled in Jersey, and following the fall of France and the German occupation of Jersey and the other Channel Islands, they became active as resistance workers and propagandists, working extensively in producing anti-German fliers. In 1944 they were arrested and sentenced to death, but the sentences were never carried out. However, Cahun's health never recovered from her treatment in jail, and she died in 1954.
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