
I am in training, don't kiss me, 1927
A silver gelatin print of striking psychological complexity, "I am in training, don't kiss me" presents Claude Cahun in one of the most celebrated self-portraits of the twentieth century. Photographed in 1927, the image shows Cahun posed in a checkered bodysuit, her head shaved, her expression at once confrontational and inscrutable, balancing on what appears to be a fairground or theatrical prop. The work functions simultaneously as performance, provocation, and self-invention, collapsing the boundaries between sport, spectacle, and gender identity with an ease that feels radical even now. The title, stitched or written across the garment itself, transforms the body into a site of text, instruction, and refusal. Cahun worked in Paris and Jersey in the interwar period, producing a body of self-portraiture that anticipated later developments in feminist and queer art by several decades. This particular image draws on the visual language of the athletic body while thoroughly destabilizing its conventions, situating the self outside any fixed category of sex or role. The work belongs to a sustained practice in which Cahun consistently deployed the photographic medium not to document but to multiply, fragment, and reinvent the self across hundreds of staged compositions made in close collaboration with her partner Marcel Moore. Works by Cahun appear in major institutional collections including the Art Institute of Chicago and the Jersey Heritage Trust, and her critical standing has grown considerably since her rediscovery in the 1980s and 1990s. This signed example, currently on offer at East Gallery at Norwich University of the Arts, represents a rare opportunity to acquire a work of genuine art historical weight from one of Surrealism's most singular and subversive figures.
- Signed
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