MAN RAY

Still-life composition with chess set and plaster cast from the series À l'Heure de l'Observatoire - les Amoureux

Details

MAN RAY
Still-life composition with chess set and plaster cast from the series À l'Heure de l'Observatoire - les Amoureux
Gelatin silver print. 1934.
6¼ x 8¾in. (15.8 x 22.2cm.)

Provenance

Property from the Estate of Juliet Man Ray, The Man Ray Trust & The Family of Juliet Man Ray, Sotheby's, London, 22 March 1995, lot 27.

Literature

See: Thames and Hudson, Man Ray Photographs, p. 42; International Center of Photography, Man Ray in Fashion, p. 24; see also Foresta et al., Perpetual Motif: The Art of Man Ray, p. 220, pl. 194; Heiting, Man Ray 1890-1976; Abrams, Man Ray 1890-1976, p. 82; and l'Ecotais and Sayag, Man Ray: La Photographie Á l'Envers, p. 54 for variants.

Exhibited

Man Ray in Fashion: The Harper Bazaar Years, New York, London and Paris, 1990-92, n. n.

Lot Essay

In his studio on the rue Val-de-Grâce, Man Ray made a number of studies incorporating À l'Heure de l'Observatoire - les Amoureux, his celebrated painting, using both live models and inanimate objects. Jane Livingston discusses how "in his great photographs of the 1920s and 1930s, Man Ray succeeded in eroticising his objects, creating enduring poetic incarnations of surrealism's Sadist desire without voilating his own classically grounded modernist aestheticism." (Rosalind Krauss and Jane Livingston, L'Amour Fou: Photography and Surrealism, p. 147.)

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