Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore shared a magnificent life as both romantic and creative partners, one in which gender proved as mercurial as the political climate of World War II. Marcel Moore, "Title unknown" (c. 1930), exhibition copy of a photographic collage (image courtesy Jersey Heritage Collection)ST. LOUIS — “Beneath this mask, another mask. Born Lucy Renee Mathilde Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe, respectively, the two met as teens in their hometown of Nantes and fell recklessly in love. They then became legal stepsisters when Moore’s widowed mother married Cahun’s divorced father in 1917, a cover for their queer partnership that enabled them to cohabitate the rest of their lives. Moving to Paris in 1920, the pair adopted the pseudonyms Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, and quickly became imbricated in the circles of the artistic avant-garde — producing Surrealist illustrations, photographs, and collages that drolly deconstruct gendered archetypes.