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拍品专文
Man Ray arrived in France in the summer of 1921, where he was already well-known in artistic circles. His work had been reproduced in Francis Picabia’s magazine, 391, in July 1920. His publications, notably New York Dada, were familiar to the young avant-garde artists and writers who welcomed him to Paris. He soon met the couturier Paul Poiret, and began photographing his models. By Man Ray’s own account, it was while developing these fashion photographs that he discovered the rayograph. After turning on the light in the darkroom, he accidentally placed objects directly on an extra piece of wetted paper in the developing tray: “I turned on the light: before my eyes an image began to form” (quoted in Perpetual Motif, The Art of Man Ray, exh. cat., National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., 1988, p. 29).
Through placing and moving solid or translucent objects across sensitized photo paper, adjusting and moving the angle of lights, and at times immersing objects in the developer during exposure, Man Ray achieved photographic images without using a camera. The rayographs elicited an immediate response from the Dadaists, who saw them as an artistic breakthrough that brought photography on par with the avant-garde paintings of the day. Tristan Tzara heralded these new works, referring to them as Dada photographs. Poiret bought two and Jean Cocteau published one in the April-May 1922 issue of Les Feuilles libres. By the end of May, Man Ray had sold twelve of the pieces, and Vanity Fair published four in their November 1922 issue (fig. 1). These unique, visionary images, hovering between the abstract and the representational, revealed a new way of seeing that delighted the Dada poets who championed Man Ray’s work, and which pointed the way to the dreamlike visions of the Surrealist writers and painters who followed.
In an April 1922 letter to his patron, Ferdinand Howald, Man Ray wrote: “In my new work I feel I have reached the climax of things I have been searching the last ten years—I have never worked as I did this winter, I have freed myself from the sticky medium of paint, and am working directly with light itself. I have found a way of recording it. The subjects were never so near to life itself as in my new work, and never so completely translated to the medium” (quoted ibid., pp. 28-29).
Through placing and moving solid or translucent objects across sensitized photo paper, adjusting and moving the angle of lights, and at times immersing objects in the developer during exposure, Man Ray achieved photographic images without using a camera. The rayographs elicited an immediate response from the Dadaists, who saw them as an artistic breakthrough that brought photography on par with the avant-garde paintings of the day. Tristan Tzara heralded these new works, referring to them as Dada photographs. Poiret bought two and Jean Cocteau published one in the April-May 1922 issue of Les Feuilles libres. By the end of May, Man Ray had sold twelve of the pieces, and Vanity Fair published four in their November 1922 issue (fig. 1). These unique, visionary images, hovering between the abstract and the representational, revealed a new way of seeing that delighted the Dada poets who championed Man Ray’s work, and which pointed the way to the dreamlike visions of the Surrealist writers and painters who followed.
In an April 1922 letter to his patron, Ferdinand Howald, Man Ray wrote: “In my new work I feel I have reached the climax of things I have been searching the last ten years—I have never worked as I did this winter, I have freed myself from the sticky medium of paint, and am working directly with light itself. I have found a way of recording it. The subjects were never so near to life itself as in my new work, and never so completely translated to the medium” (quoted ibid., pp. 28-29).