Man Ray 1890-1976

Christie's New York, 17 October 1990, Sale 7132, Lot 110

G. Ray Hawkins Gallery, Los Angeles

Acquired by the present collection from the above, early 1990s

Other prints of this image:

James Thrall Soby, publisher, Man Ray Photographs 1920 Paris 1934 (Paris and New York, 1934), pl. 51

Arturo Schwarz, The Rigour of Imagination (New York, 1977),  pl. 433

Emmanuelle de L'Ecotais, et al, Man Ray: Photography and its Double (Centre Georges Pompidou, 1998), p. 144

Janus, Man Ray: The Photographic Image (Woodbury, 1980), pl. 101

Man Ray 1890-1976 (KunstHausWien, 1996), pl. 117

Emmanuelle de L'Ecotais and Katherine Ware, Man Ray (Köln, 2000), p. 95

Rosalind Krauss and Jane Livingston, L'Amour Fou: Photography and Surrealism (Washington: Corcoran Museum of Art, 1985), fig. 233

Jill Quasha, Paris in the Twenties and Thirties (New York, 1986), p. 7

Man Ray originally fashioned the present lot as a New Year's card which he sent, in 1932, to an unidentified friend or client.  Other examples of Man Ray's use of this image on a greeting card are reproduced in Jill Quasha's Paris in the Twenties and Thirties catalogue, and in the catalogue for Sotheby's New York , 12 November 1985, photographs sale (Sale 5383, Lot 270). 

The model in the photograph is Jacqueline Goddard, who met Man Ray in Paris in 1927, when she was sixteen years old.  She fast became one of the photographer’s favorite models.  It is likely that Man Ray made the original exposure for the image offered here with an autochrome, an early color transparency on glass.  Man Ray rarely worked in color, but it is interesting to note that  there is another example of his experimentation with a color process during a later sitting with Goddard, circa 1933.  Sotheby’s New York offered a color photograph, possibly a variant of the carbro process, by Man Ray of Jacqueline Goddard on 18 April 1997 (Sale 6973, Lot 246).