Claude Cahun's masterpiece Untitled, according to the archives, is a co-authored work with Marcel Moore.

The partnership of Cahun and Moore (CM) is something greater than the sum of its parts. It seems that in becoming CM, the step-sisters and romantic partners Lucy Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe, their childhood identities, became different kinds of beings altogether, transmogrified by the magic of name change. When you think of it as a "portrait," Untitled slips on an offscreen banana peel and falls into the mythical, identity-obsessed world of the single-genius-artist, usually figured as male—you know, the kind who hurts himself, womanizes, agonizes over some existential battle that is hidden to most of us spiritual civilians, and triumphs through his Final Masterpiece. In her detailed reading of Untitled, art historian Tirza True Latimer says that being more than one person is the greatest threat that CM poses. 

When she was a teen, Schwob's father hired Malherbe's father to treat his daughter's severe medical case, when Schwob was refusing to eat and taking ether. Mr. Schwob had a rough time during the Dreyfus Affair and had told his daughter that he regretted fathering her, which is probably not a good parenting technique. By pure, undistilled, supernatural grace, Lucy Schwob survived this period. CM beckoned to her from another dimension. When Dr. Malherbe died, Schwob's father married Malherbe's widowed mother, and Freud had nothing to say about it. CM, the couple partnership, is the author of Untitled. A book by Latimer reproduces CM's untitled work from thirteen years earlier, showing Schwob, reading L'image de la femme, a book about how to be the correct type of woman. Two years after this photo, Schwob became Cahun.

Like a toasted whole wheat peanut butter sandwich, it might be too much to swallow, but Latimer's theory is right. You can't say this is a simply a self-portrait, but it seems like everyone still does. 

In 2019, Latimer shared her reading of Untitled at the Contemporary Jewish Museum's exhibition "Show Me as I want to Be Seen," curated by the brilliant Natasha Matteson and featuring Cahun biographer Jennifer L. Shaw. Latimer reports finding an old negative in a curator's office, in some box that looked like it might have contained food or some other items detrimental to negatives, which showed a pendant pair for Untitled, a picture of Moore posing by the mirror in the same way. Eureka! Untitled is not a self-portrait, or even a portrait, but a documentation of a performance by the duo.

In 1985, Robert Shapazian, founder of the Gagosian Gallery, donated Untitled to SFMOMA.