


images that haunt us







Scene im Äades
Kain: “Gehört die Schlange nicht der Gattung an, die sich gesonnt hat unter’m Baum des Paradieses?”
Lucifer: “Ei, Deine Mutter Eva muzt, Du fragen, was für ‘ne Art von Schlange sie versucht!”
Scene in Hades
Cain: “Doesn’t the snake belong to the species sunbathed under the tree of paradise?”
Lucifer: “Well, your mother Eva must know, you ask what kind of snake she tries!”
(Lord Byron, “Cain”)



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.


Dominican actress Maria Montez in Cobra Woman, 1944

