ABSTRACT
The fracture between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a break opened wider by World War I, brought profound changes in European culture and in the aesthetics of its photography and fine art. The largely European surrealist movement of the early twenty-first century rejects eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Western ideals of beauty. Man Ray, arguably the best-known surrealist photographer, was inspired by the work of Eugene Atget, a Parisian photographer who did not see himself as belonging to any artistic movement and who created many of his images to sell to painters to aid their work. The autoportrait showing Claude Cahun dressed as a doll and splayed on the shelf of an enormous wardrobe exemplifies her photographic explorations of herself as a chameleon, a wearer of masks. Rosalind Krauss has written persuasively about the role of Jewish identity in Cahun's oeuvre and life. The putative femininity of Lee Miller's and Cahun's work inheres more in its reception than its aesthetics.
