Lot 29 : MAN RAY 1890-1976

Man Ray - 1890-1976

Auction Location: United States of America - 2004
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Title:

'BOITE A CONSERVES'

Description:

a unique multi-media assemblage, incorporating 15 photographs, including among others Gertrude Stein, Meret Oppenheim, Elsa Schiaparelli, Juliet Man Ray, Juliet Man Ray with Dorothea Tanning, a Self-Portrait, and an Abstraction inset with a rhinestone, all gelatin silver prints, the image of Schiaparelli signed and inscribed 'Paris' by the photographer in ink on the image, the photographs mounted to 15 individual French matchboxes, affixed in a grid pattern within the bottom half of a 'Kodak Papier Photographique' box, an exhibition label of the Galerie Marion Meyer, Paris, and two international transport labels mounted to the bottom; the top half of the box covered with white contact paper, titled and initialed by the photographer in black marker along one side, recently framed in a stepped-wooden shadow-box frame, the photographs from 1916-50s, the assemblage constructed in the 1960s

Dimensions:

overall size 10 1/8 by 12 1/4 in. (25.7 by 31.1 cm.)

Provenance:

Juliet Man Ray

Galerie Marion Meyer, Paris

Adam J. Boxer, New York

Virginia Green, New York

Private Collection

Acquired by the present collection from the above

Exhibited:

Paris, Galerie Marion Meyer, Assemblages, 1990

Bunkamura Museum of Art, Japan, Man Ray et Ses Amis, 1991, and thereafter to five other Japanese museums through 1992

Published:

Other prints of the individual portraits reproduced in:

Timothy Baum, Man Ray's Paris Portraits: 1921-39 (Washington, 1989), pls. 23 and 51

Jean-Hubert Martin, Man Ray Photographs (New York, 1982), p. 70

Merry Foresta, et al, Perpetual Motif: The Art of Man Ray (New York, 1988), pls. 65, 192, and 206

Janus, Man Ray, The Photographic Image (Woodbury, 1980), p. 42

Notes:

This assemblage of French matchboxes, each mounted with a Man Ray photograph, revolves around the theme of the photographer and women. It is believed that the object was constructed for Man Ray's wife, Juliet, whose portraits, along with self-portraits by the photographer, appear in the composition. As with other Man Ray's objects, the connecting narrative of the whole is elusive and multi-layered. Gender, identity, the passage of time, the act of seeing, and the creation of art, all figure in this highly complex and personal picture museum.

The negatives and prints in the assemblage range widely in date: the earliest negative was made around 1916, while the informal portrait of Juliet dates from the 1950s. Some prints used in the composition are clearly older prints, as evidenced by their silvering, while others are more recent. The assemblage itself was constructed in the early 1960s.

At the time of this writing, the proposed identifications of the individual portraits are as follows:

Top row, left to right:
Meret Oppenheim; unidentified woman's eyes; unidentified eye; Jacqueline Picasso; a woman identified variously as Hakiko or Adrienne Fidelin.

Second row, left to right:
Man Ray self-portrait; woman in spider web; Man Ray self-portrait hand-print; Juliet Man Ray and Dorothea Tanning; man dressed as a woman, with false breasts (possibly Man Ray).

Third row, left to right:
Still photograph from Man Ray's film, Etoile de Mer; Gertrude Stein; detail from Man Ray's mixed media object, De Quoi écrire un poème; Elsa Schiaparelli; Juliet Man Ray.

The composition of the matchboxes relates to Man Ray's earlier photomontage, the Surrealist Chessboard of 1934, which comprised portraits of the photographer's Surrealist colleagues, all male, organized in a similar grid fashion. The title of the lot offered here, Boîte à conserves, possibly takes its cue from Marcel Duchamp's La Boîte en valise [The Box in a Suitcase] (1941). The present assemblage is housed in a French Kodak photographic paper box, the top half covered with white paper. Boîte à conserves can be presented as a single unit in a frame (as shown in the illustration here), or as a three-dimensional object (cf. the frontispiece of the present catalogue).

In the 1960s, Man Ray is known to have fashioned other individual matchboxes with his own photographs and art work. These were used to store chalk, bits of felt, toothpicks, and the like; and they were also sometimes offered as gifts to visitors at the rue Ferou studio, when a light for a cigarette was requested. A selection of these individual matchboxes were offered at Sotheby's London in March 1995 (Man Ray: Paintings, Objects, Photographs. Property from the Estate of Juliet Man Ray, the Man Ray Trust, and the Family of Juliet Man Ray, Sale LN5173, Lot 531).