Abstract Vision and satisfied passion: Man Ray's mathematical objects

Abstract

Man Ray was hardly an abstract artist. In his paintings, object sculptures, and especially in his photographs, he portrayed things that were recognizably related to the appearance of things in the natural world. An exception is aseries of photographs of three-dimensional mathematical models produced by Man Ray beginning in 1934 and published in Cahiers d'art two years later. In these photographs, Man Ray took as his subject the oddly evocative, dusty models of algebraic equations made of pIaster, metal, wood and wire on view at the Institut Henri Poincare in Paris.2 He displayed the photographs at an exhibition of Surrealist art at the New Burlington Gallery in London in 1936 and at Alfred Barr's ‘Fantastic Art, Dada, and Surrealism’, at the Museum of Modern Art in 1936–37. When Man Ray fled Paris during the German occupation, he took the photographs with him, and he later used them as starting points for aseries of twenty oil paintings, collectively entitled Shakespearean Equations, which he exhibited at the Copley Gallery in Beverly Hills in 1948. In some of the paintings Man Ray simply translated a photograph into paint, while in others he combined mathematical objects from the photographs with naturaiones, such as fruit or insect wings, and placed them in dreamlike settings. But the photographs were much more than mere studies for later paintings. Not only did he exhibit the photographs as independent works, he also mounted a series of thirty-one contact prints of the objects into a small album, dated 1935–1948 on the back cover, with cropping indications, mathematical notes, titles from Shakespeare, and other cryptic notations, perhaps referring to full-size prints made from the negatives (figure 1).3 While it is not known exactly why he kept the contact prints in this special album, clearly the photographs of the Poincare Institute's objects remained important to him.