Man Ray

solarized, ferrotyped, the photographer's '31bis, Rue Campagne Premiére, Paris XIVe' studio stamp (Manford M6) and inscribed 'A Herman Schrijver, en amité et concordance' and signed 'Charlotte Wolff' in ink and with reduction notations in pencil on the reverse, 1932

Robert Mann Gallery, New York, 1996

Washington, National Museum of American Art, Perpetual Motif: The Art of Man Ray, December 1988 - February 1989, and traveling thereafter to:

Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art, March - May 1989

Houston, The Menil Collection, June - September 1989

Philadelphia Museum of Art, October 1989 - January 1990

Jean-Hubert Martin, Man Ray: Photographs (Thames and Hudson, 1982), p. 240

This ferrotyped print is on single-weight paper. When examined in raking light, several creases can be seen in the print's glossy surface, none of which breaks the emulsion. There is minor wear on the corners and edges. The number '154' is stamped lightly on the reverse.
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This photograph shows the noted doctor Charlotte Wolff, a specialist in the study of the human hand.  As a Jew, and as a lesbian who preferred to dress in men's clothing, Wolff experienced an increasing lack of freedoms in Germany in the early 1930s, and relocated to Paris.  There she encountered Aldous Huxley who introduced her to the city's vibrant artistic and literary circles.  Her 1936 book, Studies in Handreading, was illustrated with handprints of such luminaries as Huxley, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Maurice Ravel, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, George Bernard Shaw, and Man Ray himself.  The inscription on the reverse of this print indicates that it was given by Dr. Wolff to Herman Schrijver, a Dutch-born interior decorator working in Brighton, England, whose book, Decoration for the Home, was published in 1939.