Category: Man Ray, Emmanuel Radnitzky

Érotique Voilée, 1933

Man Ray :: Érotique Voilée (Veiled Eroticism), 1933, gelatin silver print. Inscribed ‘Meret Oppenheim dans l’atelier de Marcoussis, 15 rue Hégesippe-Moreau’ in ink (on the verso). | src Christie’s

Bronia Perlmutter by Man Ray

Man Ray :: Untitled. Brogna Perlmutter (Bronia Perlmutter), Paris, 1924 | src NGA [National Gallery of Australia]

On December 1924 Francis Picabia asked Bronia to participate in a production, Ciné Sketch, that he and René Clair were putting on after the ballet on New Year’s Eve. Bronia agreed, and she and Marcel Duchamp appeared nude—Duchamp did have a strategically placed fig leaf—in a living tabloid of Lucas Cranach’s Adam and Eve, which Man Ray photographed. This photograph most probably belongs to that series.

La prière by Man Ray, 1930

Man Ray :: La prière | The prayer, 1930. Ferrotyped gelatin silver print, printed ca. 1960
Signed, dated and numbered ‘0/8’ in ink (recto); signed and annotated ‘original’ in pencil (verso) | src Christie’s

Adam et Eve; tableau vivant

Man Ray :: Ciné-Sketch; Adam and Eve (Marcel Duchamp and Bronia Perlmutter), 1924. Gelatin silver print, on carte postale, printed in the 1930s. | src Christie’s & Philadelphia Museum of Art (Philamuseum)

In 1924 Francis Picabia asked Bronia to participate in a production, Ciné Sketch, that he and René Clair were putting on after the Relache ballet on New Year’s Eve. Bronia agreed, and she and Marcel Duchamp appeared nude —Duchamp did have a strategically placed fig leaf— in a living tabloid of Lucas Cranach’s Adam and Eve, which Man Ray photographed.

Ciné Sketch (1924) was a theatrical diversion conceived by Francis Picabia and René Clair, in which Marcel Duchamp and the Jewish-Polish model Bronia Perlmutter mime the figures of Adam and Eve in a tableau vivant of the Temptation after a painting by Cranach. Ciné-Sketch was performed only once, at the conclusion of Relache (by Ballets Suédois) at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées on New Year’s Eve 1924.

Terrain Brûlé ~ Terrain Vague

Eugène Cuvelier :: Près de la Caverne, Terrain Brûlé, early 1860s. Salted paper print from paper negative. | The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Eugène Cuvelier ~ Près de la Caverne, Terrain Brûlé, early 1860s. Salted paper print from paper negative. | The Metropolitan Museum

“An atypical work for the naturalistically inclined Cuvelier, this highly Romantic image of two people sitting below the skeletons of burned pine trees and looking into the featureless distance like the contemplative figures in the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, was no doubt a response to the startling sight of the charred landscape.” [quoted from The Met]

Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitzky) ~ Le Terrain Vague, 1932. Gelatin silver print | src MoMA

“Life is merely a fracas on an unmapped terrain, and the universe a geometry stricken with epilepsy”

― Emil Cioran; A Short History of Decay (1949)

Nancy Cunard & surrealist friends

Man Ray ~ Nancy Cunard and Tristan Tzara at the costume ball of count de Beaumont, 1924 | src flickr
Man Ray ~ Nancy Cunard and Tristan Tzara at the costume ball of count de Beaumont, 1924
Curtis Moffat (1887-1949) ~ Nancy Cunard and Louis Aragon, 1926 | src lefigaro