The emergence of a sexual counter-culture in the 1920s, marked by the emancipation of women in many countries, was signalled within the avant garde by the self-referential work and increasingly open life-styles of the Gay community, first among artists and photographers like Claude Cahun. Cahun’s amazingly adventurous life with her lifelong partner and step sister Suzanne Malherbe, included associations with the Surrealists Andre Breton and Robert Desnos, and anti-Nazi art-propaganda during WW2 when Claude and Suzanne were living in the Channel Islands, and for which they were imprisoned and sentenced to death. But they survived the war and Claude died in 1954. She is remarkable because of the way her own sexual liberation became the main subject of her art- a prescient pointer to the work of more recent artists and photographers, such as Robert Maplethorpe, and to some extent the writer Jeanette Winterson. The painter Tamara de Lempicka is a contemporary example.
The Julia Secession 