It would appear to be our obsession with beauty has never been greater, but seeking to the past tells a special story. Making Up The Past is a column great women from history and the way they used cosmetics to shape their identities, from ancient queens to modern artists.

For many of human history, cosmetics have been a rarefied luxury. Even when the social mores that shape our understanding of beauty have continually shifted, make-up has at all times served as a method of acquiring and expressing power: walk into any museum all over the world and you will notice women represented as goddesses and saints, empresses and queens. What, then, of the quieter voices? The outsiders and pioneers whose radical understanding of beauty was so ahead of their time that they’ve, sarcastically, been forgotten?

Within the early Eighties, French essayist François Leperlier was researching for a book on the history of the Surrealist movement when he noticed a reputation continuing to crop up in marginalia: Claude Cahun. Even when the name Claude is gender non-specific, it says much of the masculinist spirit of Surrealism that Lerperlier assumed she was male; yet one way or the other, even after discovering she was born a girl, Cahun proved herself to be neither. Each time Leperlier felt he had pinned down this elusive figure, he began to understand that – to paraphrase her creative predecessor Arthur Rimbaud – for Cahun, the self is at all times something other.

Born into an mental Jewish family in Nantes as Lucy Schwob, Claude Cahun was experimenting with gender from her teenage years, using the limited toolkit of a dressing-up box, a make-up drawer and a camera. Her self-portraits date back to the age of 18 when she moved to Paris to review at La Sorbonne and encountered the Surrealist revolution that was sweeping through the Left Bank. Along with his probability discovery, Leperlier had, in reality, found a goldmine that exposed a recent side to the heady creative decadence of Nineteen Thirties Paris: a gender revolutionary of their midst, described by André Breton himself as “one of the vital curious spirits of our time”.

Even by today’s standards, the photographs are striking explorations of the diktats of female beauty and the mutable nature of queer identity. In considered one of her most famous self-portraits, Cahun has painted two hearts on her cheeks and slicked her fringe into two neat curls. But she is greater than only a pierette – or, perhaps, a pierrot – with the words ‘I AM IN TRAINING DON’T KISS ME’ scrawled across her chest. What’s she in training for? To grow to be a person, or to reify her womanhood, or each? Gazing directly down the lens of the camera she creates her own miniature theatre, using make-up to slyly satirise the narrow understanding of gender held by her peers. “Shuffle the cards,” she wrote in her autobiography, Disavowals. “Masculine? Feminine? It is dependent upon the situation.”

Cahun’s obscurity wasn’t only a results of her progressive philosophy of gender, but in addition her extraordinary life story. She fell in love along with her stepsister, Suzanne Malherbe, after their father and mother married; despite attempts to maintain them apart, they fled town in 1937 for the island of Jersey. Malherbe soon recast herself in Cahun’s androgynous mould by adopting the name Marcel Moore, and they’d later launch a resistance movement in the course of the island’s Nazi occupation, convincing German officers an underground network of lots of was operating across the island when it was really just two bohemian artists. While they were eventually discovered by the Nazis in 1944 and sentenced, they managed to flee death due to the abrupt end of the war. One in every of Cahun’s most subversive images is a self-portrait with a Nazi badge between her teeth, shot immediately after her release — yet following this traumatic episode, the 2 women became increasingly reclusive.

“It is barely after many attempts that we will firm up the moulds of our masks,” says Cahun in her autobiography. It’s a sentiment that extends not simply to her broad body of labor, however the many various characters she crafted. The rediscovery of Cahun’s body of labor got here at a time when women Surrealists were being revisited by scholars of art history like Whitney Chadwick and Penelope Rosemont. Despite being kept at arm’s length by the male leaders of the movement, their female counterparts were producing work that was just as subversive and intoxicating: but where Cahun’s female peers used the paintbrush and the chisel to specific their vision, she adopted the traditionally feminine tool of the make-up brush as a direct challenge to the male-dominated world of art.

Using cosmetics to, quite literally, craft a series of masks, Cahun’s chameleonic presence echoes the fraught paradigms of womanhood that feminist writers would pick apart many a long time later. In a famous series of photographs, Cahun captures herself with a shaved head, a male suit and pale make-up that washes out her features to look as an ungendered blank canvas. Project onto that whatever you would like, she seems to say. In others, she ties braids round her head to form a crown, wearing a dress with a corseted front and laying on dark eyeshadow, rosy cheeks and lipstick to be almost comically thick – a creepily adult interpretation on the exaggerated femininity we’re introduced to from childhood with heavily made-up dolls.  

 “What we will take from Cahun isn’t just her radical tackle gender or her political courage, but a reminder of the straightforward pleasure of putting on make-up in the primary place”

We expect the selections any individual makes when putting their appearance together to elucidate to us who they’re. We wish to parse those decisions like psychics mastering the art of cold reading. Cahun’s magic is her unknowability: along with her carousel of masks and make-up, she one way or the other becomes a stranger. Will we ever truly know the true Claude Cahun? Perhaps we should always just be thankful we all know her in any respect: in 1972, upon Malherbe’s death, the majority of their archive was sold for just £21 at auction.

Today, defining ourselves through beauty has grow to be inextricably tied up with social media or performance. It’s easy to forget the facility of make-up to shape our inner lives and open up recent perspectives on ourselves, without the necessity for any audience. What, in spite of everything, is more emotionally seismic than the primary time an adolescent girl, boy or future drag queen is left home alone to try on their sister’s heels or their mother’s mascara, swiftly wiped off before they get home from work? When they appear within the mirror for the primary time, perhaps they see a stranger too – even when it’s a stranger that may soon grow to be an integral a part of who they’re.

It’s these secret encounters with beauty that may be probably the most powerful. What we will take from Cahun isn’t just her radical tackle gender or her political courage, but a reminder of the straightforward pleasure of putting on make-up in the primary place. “Behind the mask is one other mask,” Cahun continues in Disavowals. The applying of paint on the body can reveal a completely recent side of yourself, whether anyone sees you or not. Any true outsider can relate to that.