Man Ray

The artist

Lucien Treillard, Paris, gifted from the above

Gagosian Gallery, New York

Man Ray (Milan, 1998), p. 165

Man Ray (Milan: Museo d'Arte Moderna Città de Lugano, 2011), p. 219

With its ambiguous juxtaposition of two mannequins seen against—and through—a field of translucent black-and-white bands, the present image resists an obvious narrative. Instead, it possesses that enigmatic Surreality of which Man Ray was a master. Mannequins played an important role in Man Ray's work from the early 1920s into the final decade of his life, appearing in photographs, Rayographs, paintings, drawings, and editions. His famous image of a seated mannequin posed between a sphere and cone appeared in the June 1926 issue of the journal La Revolution Surréaliste, and was reproduced again as the cover illustration for the slim catalogue accompanying Man Ray's 1962 photographic retrospective at the Paris National Library. Mannequins appear in several Rayographs made in the 1920s and 1930s. Later in life, Man Ray would return once again to working with mannequins with his portfolio Resurrection of the Mannequins (1966), and the reissue of his earlier, risqué, mannequin tableaux, Mr. and Mrs. Woodman (1970). Laterally-reversed after an original Rayograph from 1925 or 1926, the present photograph was made in the early 1970s as part of a small, unnumbered edition.