MAN RAY (1890 1976) Lampshade

Sale 2135 - Lot 59

Price Realized: $ 31,200

?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price

Estimate: $ 18,000 - $ 22,000

MAN RAY (1890-1976)
Lampshade. Toned silver print on a trimmed carte postale, 5x3 1/2 inches (12.7x8.9 cm.), with a Société Anonyme hand stamp and various notations on verso. 1920

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Additional Details

From a private American collection; to the present owner in 2005.

Established in April 1920 by Katherine Dreier and artists Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, the Société Anonyme promoted contemporary art to American audiences by organizing exhibitions, concerts, dance performances, and lectures. From their efforts, a collection was built that was transferred to Yale in 1941.

Emmanuel Radnitzky, better known as Man Ray, made considerable contributions to the modern art movement. He worked with a variety of different media and predominantly referred to himself as a painter. But Man Ray's experimentation in the avant-garde style of photography and his recognition as a portrait and fashion photographer made his images distinct and unique.

Throughout his life, he used a multitude of materials and techniques. When he first explored the camera, in 1920, he was captivated by the machine. This photograph demonstrates Man Ray's early ability to render abstract form. The subject, divested of its material aspects, shares the rhythm of its surroundings and merges with them in a symbiotic relationship. There is only the suggestion of an element or object, and in Man Ray's signature style, it is glamorously rendered in the emerging modernist idiom.

Man Ray's original "Lampshade" was a paper object hung from a metal stand. According to Sellf-Portait, Man Ray, the sculpture was to be part of an exhibit at the Societe Anonyme's galleries. The morning of the opening Dreier, Duchamp and Man Ray visited the galleries only to discover that an eager janitor had crumpled up the paper wrapping and "removed it with the other rubbish." Man Ray promptly went to a tinsmith and "traced the pattern on a sheet of metal, which he cut out, twisting the metal into a spiral form." He then applied a flat white paint to finish the work in time for the vernissage. The sculpture was purchased by Dreier and is now in the Collection of the Societe Anonyme at Yale University Art Gallery. Man Ray continued to create replicas of the artwork into the 1950s.

Variants appear in:
Perpetual Motif, The Art of Man Ray, 81

Man Ray (Los Angeles Museum of Art), unpaginated.