The Ettore Molinario Collection has unveiled its seventeenth artistic dialogue, featuring two groundbreaking self-portraits that span nearly a century of identity exploration through photography. The exhibition brings together works by French surrealist photographer Claude Cahun and British contemporary artist Gillian Wearing, demonstrating how themes of identity and self-representation have evolved from the early 20th century to the new millennium.
Claude Cahun's 1927 self-portrait, created when the artist was thirty-three years old, features a striking composition with two cats that serve as extensions of the artist's own complex identity. One cat lies on the ground, its eye mirroring the mysterious, instinctive gaze of the artist, while the other rests in the hands of Cahun, who appears to both caress and restrain the feline in an ambiguous gesture that suggests control over breath and life itself.
The photograph captures Cahun at a pivotal moment in both personal and artistic development. By 1927, the artist had already met and fallen in love with Suzanne Malherbe, known by the pseudonym Marcel Moore, who would become a lifelong partner. Cahun had also undergone a series of name changes that reflected a fluid approach to gender identity, transforming from the original feminine name Lucy Renée Mathilde Schowb to the masculine Daniel Douglas, then to Claude Courlis, and finally settling on Claude Cahun—a name that embodies gender fluidity in French while honoring maternal heritage through the grandmother's surname.
According to collector Ettore Molinario, this metamorphosis of names represents "a new birth without natural father and mother or gender definition." The vertical composition of the self-portrait mirrors the vertical progression of three names, three sexual identities, and three generations, revealing what Molinario describes as "that overlapping of masks, genres, codes of men and animals, memories, essentially appearances, which form our ego."
The significance of this particular self-portrait is underscored by its provenance as an intimate gift. Claude Cahun presented the work to poet Robert Desnos, who subsequently offered it to Youki Foujita, his muse and lover, before it eventually entered the Molinario collection. François Leperlier, recognized as the foremost scholar of Cahun's work, has characterized the artist's approach as a search for "inner exoticism"—an individual, intimate, and narcissistic examination of one's own identity.
Cahun's artistic philosophy combined elements of surrealism, anarchy, baroque exhibitionism, and the sublimation of the obscene, all filtered through a lens of dandyism and self-worship influenced by philosopher Max Stirner's writings. The artist once wrote, "The happiest moment of my life? The dream, imagining being Other." However, this private dialogue with identity coexisted with concrete political action, as Cahun and Malherbe later engaged in resistance activities against Nazi occupation on the island of Jersey, where they had relocated in 1937.
Eighty years later, in 2017, British artist Gillian Wearing created her own dialogue with Cahun's legacy. Wearing, a prominent member of the Young British Artists movement and winner of the 1997 Turner Prize, joined the lineage of artists influenced by Cahun's pioneering work, alongside Pierre Molinier, Gina Pane, Urs Lüthi, and Cindy Sherman. Wearing's homage took the form of literally becoming Claude Cahun through photographic transformation.
The juxtaposition of these two works reveals a fundamental shift in artistic approach across the decades. While Cahun's vertical exploration delved into the unconscious depths of personal identity, Wearing's interpretation operates on what Molinario calls "the horizontal of our history"—a contemporary engagement with quotation and reference that exists outside the ego. This represents a move from internal psychological exploration to external cultural commentary.
Despite embodying Claude Cahun visually, Wearing brings her own explicitly feminist perspective to the dialogue. Her work addresses the masks that women have historically worn to fulfill roles created by male imagination, using the visual language of identity transformation to defend and advocate for women's experiences. This contemporary feminist lens adds another layer to the ongoing conversation about identity, performance, and authenticity in art.
The exhibition demonstrates how artistic dialogues can transcend time, with each generation of artists building upon and reinterpreting the innovations of their predecessors. The pairing of Cahun and Wearing illustrates the enduring relevance of questions about identity, gender, and self-representation, showing how these themes continue to resonate in contemporary art and society. As Molinario notes in his reflection on the collection, "Almost a century separates these images, but everything speaks to the present."
