MAN RAY 1890-1976 Rayograph, 1926 Unique gela

Provenance
From the artist;
ex-collection Arturo Schwarz;
Isaac Lagnado, New York;
with Barry Friedman Ltd. / Houk Friedman, New York;
with Howard Greenberg, New York;
to the present Private Collection

Exhibited
Dada: Photografie und Photomontage, Kestner-Gesellschaft, Hannover, 1979, no. 166;
Museum of Fine Arts at Museum of New Mexico, Santa Fe, 1992;
Man Ray 1912-1971, Galleria Schwarz, Milano, 1971, cat. no. 3547;
Man Ray, Museum Boymans - van Beuningen, Rotterdam. Netherlands,1971-1972

Literature
Haenlein, Dada: Photographie und Photomontage, 1979, p. 236;
l'Ecotais, Man Ray Rayographies, 2002, pl. 175, p. 244;
Thames & Hudson, Man Ray Photographs, 1982, p. 140, pl.162

"Lovely as the fortuitous encounter on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella."
Isidore Ducasse, aka Le Comte de Lautréamont, Les Chants de Maldoror

In his Rayographs, the eponymous body of work Man Ray embarked on in 1921, there are deeper elements of self-identification and autobiographical accord than the mere shadows in these objects imply. While Rayographs are nothing more than photograms, the simplest method of creating photographic images by placing objects on light sensitive paper in a darkroom, exposing and developing them, in Man Ray's hands they took on a diaristic narrative based on a full exploration of the Surrealist lexicon and Dadaist thought. In one sense, they are the most distant cousins of a documentary photograph but in another, they are the truest form of representation. Of course, no one would ever confuse a Rayograph with, say, Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother even though they portray their content more objectively, but that is hardly the point. It is in the associative powers of his subjects that Man Ray was able to weave consistent themes while making art that, first and foremost, radically altered the expectations of what a photograph could and should do. Not everyone who paid attention could grasp the importance of these abstractions however. Lewis Mumford, reviewing Photographs by Man Ray, 1920-1934 for The New Yorker, berated the avant-garde expatriate: "[He] has done almost everything with a camera except use it to take photographs…" (c.f., Foresta, et al.; Perpetual Motif, The Art of Man Ray, p. 35.)

Man Ray employed many elements in the Rayographs essential to his new life in Paris from his arrival in 1921. His pipe, keys and photographic paraphernalia all made appearances in the work. Each object held significance both for what it represented and for what it inferred. In the Rayograph offered here, two themes are as intertwined Q86as the concentric rope and its silhouette, or as the magic of light and chemistry.

Composed from a concentric line of rope or cord, an element often seen in Man Ray's photographs, the shape is also often repeated in all aspects and mediums. Both subject and composition play significant roles and were of major interest to him. Rope, or the idea of ties that bind, appear in even his earliest works. His most important painting of the pre-Paris period was the 1916 canvas, The Rope Dancer Accompanies Herself with Her Shadows. An abstraction of a tightrope walker, —"the precariously balanced figure symbolizing the human struggle for existence" (op. cit., p. 67)—it includes the material not only as a compositional element but a philosophical one as well. In Rope Dancer, Man Ray introduces the lyrical concept of a figure tied to her shadow. Later, particularly in his Rayographs, the shadows themselves become subjects, lending a prescient nature to the 1916 work. Arguably, it is a self-portrait, as Man Ray himself became the rope dancer, tied to his shadows.

In several other works, binding takes on mysterious, sinister and often, sexual implications, belying Dada's fascination with the absurd and the Surrealists' with de Sade, eroticism, Freud and dreams. In The Enigma of Isidore Ducasse, 1920, Man Ray takes the Comte de Lautréamont's sewing machine, wraps it in a blanket and ties it with twine and photographs the assemblage. This is repeated in Enigma II, 1935. In both cases, Duchamp's sculpture, With Hidden Noise 1916, a container of unknown contents, is referenced, illustrating the point that complete knowledge of the work cannot be attained without dstroying the object studied. In Man Ray's case, he disassembled the works, leaving the photographs as the only evidence of their existence. Other images feature nudes in bondage, a plaster cast of the Venus de Milo wrapped in rope, a portrait of Joan Miró grasping at loose cord and Man Ray's suicidal self-portrait with a gun to his head and a noose around his neck, purportedly taken after his affair with Lee Miller dissolved. In all these works, the rope becomes a character equal to or surpassing the sitters, explicitly exhibiting power over the sitters through concealing, binding or ultimately, killing.

The hypnotic appeal of the coiled rope in this work has its precedent in the experiments Man Ray and Duchamp conducted with optical devices beginning in 1920 and continuing into the mid-1930s. There is a direct correlation between the visual effect of Rotative Demisphere of 1925, featuring a spinning hemisphere mounted with a glass dome on which was engraved, Rrose Selavy et moi esquivons les ecchymoses des esquimaux aux mots exquis and the Rayograph that is offered here, dated 1926. Both aim to lure the viewer into a hypnotic state through spirals, where the artist as hypnotist takes control of consciousness. (See lot 241.)

Man Ray's fascination with the theme never abated. Even into the post-War years he executed works of similar nature. Powerful visual devices, the coil, concentric circles, and the spiral were the artist's gateway into the viewer's subconscious. With all that the subject matter implied—restraint and control, a link between the creator and the creation, a purely drawn line, this Rayograph, seemingly benign, is ultimately coercive, spellbinding and dangerous.