Man Ray - Photographs New York Friday, April 5, 2024 | Phillips

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  • This photograph, taken in Man Ray’s New York City studio at 146 West 8th Street, is an encapsulation of the young artist’s Dada period. Shown are three significant early works. Hung in the window is Danger/Dancer, a large glass and cogwheel composition that Man Ray completed in 1920. On the window ledge to the left is the small cube-shaped sculpture, L’Inquietude, also executed in 1920. To the right is the standing wood, iron, and cork figure, By Itself I, from 1918.

     

    Man Ray gave Danger/Dancer to Surrealist leader André Breton, and it is unclear if the notations on the reverse of this photograph  –  ‘To André Breton' – refer to the gift of the actual piece, or the gift of this print.   

     

    Man Ray, along with Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia, among others, comprised the New York outpost of the Dada movement. Characterized by a brilliant irreverence, the Dadaists sought to reconfigure art – conceptually and in practice – from what had come before. The late teens and early 1920s were an incredibly productive time for Man Ray who worked in a wide variety of media, expanding his repertoire of materials, and paving the way for the work to come in Paris where he and Duchamp moved in 1921. 

     

    This photograph was once in collection of American conservator and collector Gloria de Herrera (1929-1985). De Herrera met Man Ray during his wartime sojourn in Los Angeles. They became friends and she was a frequent subject for his camera. After the war, she followed May Ray and his wife to Paris, where she worked for Henri Matisse and Marcel Duchamp, and became a fixture of the city’s avant-garde artistic circles. After her death, her former employer and longtime friend James Byrnes, once Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of History, Science, and Art, managed her estate along with his wife, and the photograph offered here was in their collection. De Herrera’s extensive papers are now housed at the Getty.

     

     

     
    Read More about the collection

    • Provenance

      Possibly, the photographer to André Breton
      Collection of Gloria de Herrera, Los Angeles
      Collection of James Byrnes, Los Angeles
      Sotheby's, New York, 17 October 2003, lot 215

    • Literature

      Abrams, Man Ray: 1890—1976, p. 249

FIGURE + FORM: PHOTOGRAPHS FROM A PRIVATE COLLECTION

317

Study of Danger/Dancer and Other Works

circa 1920
Gelatin silver print.
4 3/4 x 2 3/4 in. (12.1 x 7 cm)
Inscribed 'To André Breton' in pencil on the reverse.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
$20,000 - 30,000 

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Contact Specialist

Sarah Krueger
Head of Department, Photographs
skrueger@phillips.com
 

Vanessa Hallett
Worldwide Head of Photographs and Chairwoman, Americas
vhallett@phillips.com

Photographs

New York Auction 5 April 2024