Man Ray

Much Ado About Nothing, 1949

Oil on canvas
19h x 25 1/16w inches

Estimate: €50,000 - 70,000

Francfort & Bâle, 1979-80, no. 42
Paris, 1989 (ii), n.n.
Santa Monica, 1996-97, p. 102
Madrid, Paris & Berlin, 2007-10, p. 211
Tokyo, 2010, no. 252

Washington, D.C., 2015, p. 77 (publication à paraître)

The canvas is not lined. There is some very minor abrasion to the extreme edges and a tiny hairline scratch near the right edge, but no evidence of retouching under UV light. Overall this work is in excellent original condition.
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In 1940s Hollywood, Man Ray embarked on an ambitious new series of Surrealist paintings that he called Shakespearean Equations. Man Ray based these paintings upon his celebrated series of photographs of three-dimensional mathematical models taken in Paris in 1934-35 (see lot 113): “These were of objects in wood, metal, plaster and wire made to illustrate algebraic equations, which lay in dusty cases at the Poincaré Institute. The formulas accompanying them meant nothing to me, but the forms themselves were as varied and authentic as any in nature. The fact that they were man-made was of added importance to me”.

Titling each painting after a play by Shakespeare, Man Ray created dynamic and intriguing Surrealist compositions, incorporating faithful renderings of the models, presented as symbols or characters juxtaposed to re-enact a scene from a Shakespeare play: “I did not copy [the mathematical models] literally but composed a picture in each case, varying the proportions, adding color, ignoring the mathematical intent and introducing an irrelevant form sometimes, as a butterfly or the leg of a table. When about fifteen were completed, I gave the series the general title: Shakespearean Equations, and for individual identification the title of one of Shakespeare’s plays, quite arbitrarily or the first that occurred to me. … Some saw a symbolical relation between the subject and the title.” (Self Portrait, 1988, pp. 291-92)

In the present composition, Man Ray combines a mathematical wire model in the collection of the Institut Henri Poincaré, Paris, with an elliptical object resembling a vegetable or fruit, the fortuitous meeting of two unlikely objects, set in a perspectival backdrop. Such paintings, forming part of the Shakespearean Equations series from 1948 with three subsequent oils in the ensuing years, challenged Man Ray's audience as they attempted in vain to find direct associations between the painting and the play's plot, but to no avail. This pleased Man Ray, who remarked “...it's just as well!”