By any standards, Suzanne Malherbe and Lucie Schwob were exceptional individuals. Better known by their gender-neutral artistic names Marcel Moore and Claude Cahun, the pair met as teens at the turn of the last century in the French city of Nantes. They were immediately and resolutely besotted, and when Moore’s widowed mother married Cahun’s divorced father, their status as step-siblings provided a convenient cover for their blossoming romance.
In Paris of the 1920s the pair became involved in the founding of the surrealist movement, although they struggled to gain recognition for their own work, both then and throughout their lifetimes. Cahun became a writer and prolific photographer and was known for their striking, androgynous self-portraits, while Moore was better known as a graphic illustrator.
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