The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Man Ray · a single photograph made in Paris in 1924 · gelatin silver · a nude woman seen from behind, seated, her head wrapped in a turban, two f-holes added by hand to her back · reproduced in the review Littérature, Paris, June 1924 · the reference print in the Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris · the work scored is the image as Man Ray made it in 1924; the prints of the period are its carriers, and no single print is the work
Mode
Altered studio photograph; a Dada pun on the academic nude, made at the moment Surrealism was named
Mythos
The woman’s body as stringed instrument, built in two marks; the odalisque cited from Ingres and not made anew
Phase
One pose, photographed and marked by hand; made and published in Paris in 1924
Presentation
A gelatin silver photograph of one figure; two marks added by hand; a title of three words; no single print the work
Register
Wit over beauty: pleasure in a curve, a laugh at the marks, unease at what the laugh admits
Scale
One back, from the turban to the hips, two marks and a title
Governing Proposition
In Paris in 1924 Man Ray photographed the back of Kiki de Montparnasse as Ingres had painted his bathers, seated, turbaned, the arms held forward out of sight, and then added two f-holes by hand, so that the back became the body of a violin. The title, an idiom for a hobby, completes the pun. The wager of the image is that two marks on a photograph of a real body can turn a woman into a thing to be played, and that the turn can be made without spending any of the beauty it takes from Ingres.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Man Ray, born Emmanuel Radnitzky (1890 to 1976), made Le Violon d’Ingres in Paris in 1924. It is a photograph, a gelatin silver print of a nude woman seen from behind, seated, her head wrapped in a turban, on whose back two f-holes, the sound holes of a violin or a cello, have been added by hand, so that the back reads as the body of a stringed instrument. It was reproduced in the review Littérature in Paris in June 1924. The work scored is the image as Man Ray made it that year. The prints of the period are its carriers and no single print is the work; the print in the Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris, is taken as the reference. The print sold in New York in May 2022, and later prints and reproductions, are context and are not scored.
There is one figure, there are two added marks, and there is a title of three words. The back is lit by a soft, frontal light and modelled in one long, continuous curve from the turban to the hips, and the head turns slightly. The arms are held forward, out of sight, so that from shoulder to hip no limb breaks the outline. On the lower back, above the hips, the two f-holes stand symmetrically, drawn with an instrument’s curve and proportion and placed where its sound holes would sit relative to its waist. The model is Alice Prin, known as Kiki de Montparnasse, Man Ray’s companion in those years.
The title is a French idiom: un violon d’Ingres is a hobby, a pastime pursued beside one’s real work, after the painter Ingres, who played the violin. It carries two jokes, that the painter’s hobby was the nude, and that this woman is the photographer’s. The parts are few, and each bears load. Remove the f-holes and a fine studio nude after Ingres remains, an homage and nothing more. Remove the turban and the citation weakens to a generic back. Remove the hidden arms and the outline breaks, since a violin has no arms. Remove the title and the second joke goes. Only the photograph beneath the marks yields: its light and tonality are good but could be other without loss, and its pose is borrowed rather than compelled.
Movement II
The image is an open citation of Ingres’s turbaned nudes seen from behind, above all La Baigneuse Valpinçon of 1808 and the bather at the centre of Le Bain turc of 1862, both in the Louvre. The turban is what makes the body Ingres’s before it is Man Ray’s instrument; the back, the absent face and the slight turn of the head complete the quotation. Ingres’s smooth, painted flesh is here lent the weight of the real by a lens. A painted pose is borrowed by photography and given a body that was there, before the camera.
Two patterns come with the citation. The first is old: the guitar and the violin are shaped and named like bodies, with a waist, shoulders and a neck, and the muse’s lyre stands behind them. The second is the odalisque, the woman of the harem seen from behind and offered to an absent master, carried here by the turban. The work builds the first rather than evoking it. The two f-holes make the analogy literal, load-bearing and visible, and turn the muse into the instrument itself, while the back stays a particular woman’s. But the myth is built by one stroke and stays a conceit: the pattern is made visible, not deepened, and the odalisque is cited from Ingres rather than made anew.
Before the image the first response is pleasure in the curve, then a laugh at the marks, then unease at what the laugh admits. The elevation is of one kind, beauty more than transport. The tonal range is narrow and warm, and the skin has the smooth, sculptural finish of Ingres’s own surfaces. The laugh lowers the height, by design: the wit is the work’s point, and it holds the image at the level of delight. There is no terror here, no grandeur and no second rise, one quiet summit of form met once and turned by the joke. The height is the borrowed height of Ingres’s flesh, and the image spends it on the pun.
Movement III
The marks are written on a photograph, and they sit neither on the skin nor wholly off it. A drawing of a woman with f-holes would be a cartoon and would know nothing about the real. What this work knows depends on the photograph’s claim that this body was there before a lens; the marks sit on that claim, so that one surface holds two orders of reality, the recorded body and the written sign, and a real body is made a thing by a mark. How the marks were made is not settled. One account has them painted on a print that was then photographed again, so that they lie in the final print as part of its surface; accounts differ as to which surviving prints carry hand painting directly. The question is left open here, and the image is scored. Held below the top of its axis because what the form knows travels nearly whole in reproduction and in description: the form is the instrument, but a small one.
The making is exact. The light is soft and frontal and models the back without hard shadow. The pose hides the arms and closes the torso into one silhouette. The turban and the turn of the head are placed to cite Ingres precisely. The two f-holes are drawn with the right curve and proportion, set where an instrument’s sound holes sit, and integrated with the print so that they read as part of it and not as graffiti on it. Each of these decisions bears load. What holds the making in the low eights is range: one figure, one light, one operation, and a pose taken from a painting. Beside the density of Ingres’s own making, or the invention of Man Ray’s rayographs, the command is fine but narrow.
Take the two most distant elements, the photographed flesh, the least made thing in the image, and the marks drawn by hand, the most made. One law holds them: the conversion of a body into an instrument, of a person into a thing to be played. The hidden arms, the closed outline, the smoothness of the skin, the turban that makes the woman Ingres’s model, the marks, and the title that names her a hobby all make the same move, and nothing in the image breaks it. Even the borrowed beauty serves the law, since an instrument must be beautiful to be wanted. But the territory is one back, two marks and a title, and the range between flesh and sign, photograph and painting, love and ownership, is real and small.
Movement IV
The inheritance is double. One side is the academic and salon nude, in painting and in the art photography of the turn of the century, with Ingres as its model. The other is the Dada practice of altering and captioning images. The departure is to take a straight, beautiful studio nude, the most conventional subject of art photography, and deface it by hand with two signs that turn it into a pun, while keeping its beauty intact. The photograph stays seductive, and the marks make the seduction visible. Neither Pictorialist softness nor Berlin photomontage did quite this. The stake was modest. Man Ray earned his living by portraits and fashion work; Dada had already made the defaced masterpiece familiar, in Duchamp’s moustached Mona Lisa, L.H.O.O.Q., of 1919; and the image went to a review run by friends. A clever swerve, at small risk.
It appeared in Littérature in June 1924, the year Surrealism was named; the first manifesto came later that year. In the field of avant-garde photography in Paris, its force is a single, condensed demonstration that a photograph could be a Surrealist object, a real body turned into a sign by a mark and a title. It did not reorganise the medium. Man Ray’s rayographs, made from 1922, and his later solarisations did more to change what photography could do, and the defaced image was Duchamp’s move before it was his. Its reach is wide and particular, as an emblem: it stands in every account of Surrealist photography and of the nude in modern art, and it has been quoted and pastiched in photography, advertising and fashion for a century. That reach is citation more than redirection. No line of practice starts from it.
This is what holds the work below Tier IV. Its survival is near the widest its age allows, and its making, its necessity and its form stand above 8.0; but the axes of consequence stand lower, and its elevation lower still. Its disclosure is compromised by the pleasure it takes, its archetype a conceit made visible, its swerve clever at small risk, and its reach an emblem’s. Against La Grande Odalisque (8.2), the source of its citation, it stands level on the archetype and below on every other axis: the photograph borrows the pose and the flesh and adds a pun, and the pun does not outweigh the painting’s invention and making. The Treachery of Images (8.1), an image and a word set against each other in the same decade, stands above it by a point or more on the disclosure, the swerve and the pressure on tradition, and below it on elevation, archetype, survival and making. Fountain (8.0), Duchamp’s, stands above it by wide margins on the swerve and on the pressure on tradition.
Movement V
The back is Kiki’s, a real woman, known by name in the Paris of her day, and the image holds affection and ownership in one. What it brings into the open can be stated: the classical nude, Ingres’s odalisque above all, is an object of the artist’s pleasure, an instrument he plays, and the history of the nude is a history of possession; and a photograph of a real body can be written on, and the writing changes what the body is. Two marks state this with a candour no essay of 1924 matched. But the work enacts what it discloses, and is ambivalent about it. It is a lover’s joke, affectionate and proprietary, and the critique of objectification is drawn out of it by later viewers more than held against itself in the image. The disclosure is real and sharp, of a condition the work also indulges.
A century of return has read it as a Dada joke, as a Surrealist emblem of desire, as homage to Ingres, as an index of Man Ray’s relation with Kiki, and, from the 1970s, as a central case in feminist accounts of the female body as object, possession and instrument of male pleasure. Untitled Film Stills (8.2), the later photographic critique of the constructed female image of which this work is a standing case, stands above it on the disclosure, the swerve, the depth of return and the reach, as it should. In 2022 a print sold at auction in New York as the most expensive photograph sold there, and a further literature on photography and the market followed. That fame is presence, not proof. The image itself is soon read: the curve, the marks and the pun are taken in at once, and what keeps the well open is chiefly the argument over what the joke admits. It is whole after 102 years, in its period prints and in a national collection, and in public circulation since its first reproduction.
The orders it holds are few and held in one image: the body and eros; art and its history, in Ingres and the nude; music, in the instrument and the hobby; the relation of artist and model, love and possession, the private life of two people in Montparnasse; and the image as a medium, in the mark on the photograph. One stroke touches all of them. No labour is shown but the model’s, no state, no history beyond art’s own, no natural order, no sacred, no family, and no world outside the studio. Notorious (7.7), with its woman used as an instrument by the men who love her, stands a tenth below. The figure describes the form: one back, two marks and a title, and a woman named by its title as a pastime.
Act III · The Twelve
The parts are few, and the subtractive test is short. Remove the two f-holes and what remains is a fine studio nude after Ingres, an homage and nothing more: the pun goes, and with it the work. Remove the turban and the citation of La Baigneuse Valpinçon weakens to a generic back; the turban makes the body Ingres’s before it is the photographer’s instrument. Remove the hidden arms and the outline breaks, since a violin has no arms. Remove the title and the second joke goes, the one that names this woman the photographer’s pastime. Each part bears load and nothing idles. What yields is the photograph beneath the marks: the light and tonality are good but could be other without loss, and the pose is borrowed, not compelled by the image’s own argument.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Something can be stated. The classical nude, Ingres’s odalisque above all, is an object of the artist’s pleasure, an instrument he plays, and the history of the nude is a history of possession: two marks on a back state it with a candour no essay of 1924 matched. And a photograph of a real body can be written on, and the writing changes what the body is: the woman becomes a thing to be played and owned. What holds the axis is that the work enacts what it discloses and is ambivalent about it. It is a lover’s joke, affectionate and proprietary, and the critique is drawn out of it by later viewers more than held against itself in the image. The disclosure is real and sharp, of a condition the work also indulges.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The elevation is of one kind, and it is beauty more than transport. The back is lit softly and modelled in one long, continuous curve from the turban to the hips; the tonal range is narrow and warm, and the skin has the smooth, sculptural finish of Ingres’s own surfaces. The first response is pleasure in that curve, then a laugh at the marks, then unease at what the laugh admits. The laugh lowers the height: the wit is the point, and it holds the image at the level of delight. There is no terror, no grandeur and no repeated rise, only one quiet summit of form, met once and turned by the joke. The height is present throughout, but it is the borrowed height of Ingres’s flesh, and the image spends it on the pun.
Score: 7.2 / 10
The analogy of the woman’s body and the stringed instrument is old: the guitar and the violin are shaped and named like bodies, with a waist, shoulders and a neck, and the muse’s lyre stands behind them. The odalisque, the woman of the harem seen from behind and offered to an absent master, is a second pattern, carried here by Ingres’s turban. The work builds the first rather than evoking it: the two f-holes make the analogy literal, load-bearing and visible, and turn the muse into the instrument itself. The particular stays particular, the back of a real woman known by name in the Paris of her day. What holds the axis is that the myth is built by one stroke and stays a conceit: the pattern is made visible, not deepened, and the odalisque is cited from Ingres rather than made anew.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The inheritance is double: the academic and salon nude, in painting and in the art photography of the turn of the century, with Ingres as its model; and the Dada practice of altering and captioning images. The departure is to take a straight, beautiful studio nude, the most conventional subject of art photography, and deface it by hand with two signs that turn it into a pun, while keeping its beauty intact. The photograph stays seductive, and the marks make the seduction visible. Neither Pictorialist softness nor Berlin photomontage did quite this. The stake was modest: Man Ray earned his living by portraits and fashion work, Dada had made the defaced masterpiece familiar in Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q. of 1919, and the image went to a friends’ review. A clever swerve at small risk.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Another form would change what the work knows. As a drawing it would be a caricature: a sketch of a woman with f-holes is a cartoon, and knows nothing about the real. What this work knows depends on the photograph’s claim that this body was there before a lens, a particular woman; the marks sit on that claim, neither on the skin nor wholly off it, so that one surface holds two orders of reality, the recorded body and the written sign. That ambiguity is the work’s knowledge: the body is real, and a mark makes it a thing. The citation of Ingres works because photography can borrow a painted pose and lend it the weight of flesh. Held below the top because the knowledge travels nearly whole in reproduction and in description; the form is the instrument, but a small one.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Evidence over promise: a century of return. The image has sustained readings as a Dada joke, as a Surrealist emblem of desire, as homage to Ingres, as an index of Man Ray’s relation with Kiki, and, from the 1970s, as a central case in feminist accounts of the female body as object, possession and instrument of male pleasure; the title’s idiom adds a reading in which the woman is the artist’s pastime. Its sale at auction in 2022, as the most expensive photograph sold there, has drawn a further literature on photography and the market. Return to the image itself yields less: the curve, the marks and the pun are taken in at once, and what keeps the well open is chiefly the argument over what the joke admits. Deep in its debate, shallower in its object: often returned to, and soon read.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The field is avant-garde photography in Paris in the 1920s, and the image was published at once, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is a single, condensed demonstration that a photograph could be a Surrealist object, a real body turned into a sign by a mark and a title, in the year Surrealism was named, the first manifesto following later in 1924. It does not reorganise the medium: Man Ray’s own rayographs, from 1922, and his later solarisations did more to change what photography could do, and the defaced image was Duchamp’s move. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the image stands in every account of Surrealist photography and of the nude in modern art, feminist critique took it as a standard case, and it has been quoted and pastiched in photography, advertising and fashion for a century; but that reach is citation more than redirection, and no line of practice starts from it.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at 102 years, inside the span of seventy years to two centuries, whose usual figure is 9.0 to 9.1. Form: whole. The image survives in prints of the period, its reference print is in a national collection in Paris, and its reproduction in Littérature in 1924 put it in public circulation from the first. Presence: continuous and wide, through the Surrealist literature, the exhibitions of Man Ray’s work and the histories of photography, to the sale of 2022; but much of that late fame is price, and price is presence, not proof. Fabric: gelatin silver on paper is stable when kept. The uncertainty over how many period prints exist and which carry hand painting is a small charge on the record, not on the form. The upper end of the usual figure, short of the widest.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Judged as command of studio photography and of the altered print. The making is exact: a soft, frontal light that models the back without hard shadow; a pose that hides the arms and closes the torso into one silhouette; the turban and the slight turn of the head placed to cite Ingres precisely; and two f-holes drawn with the right curve and proportion and set exactly where an instrument’s sound holes sit relative to its waist, so integrated with the print that they read as part of it and not as graffiti on it. These decisions bear load. What holds the axis is range: one figure, one light, one operation, and a pose taken from a painting. Beside the density of Ingres’s own making, or the invention of the rayographs, the command is fine but narrow.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the photographed flesh, the least made thing in the image, and the marks drawn by hand, the most made. They obey one law, the conversion of a body into an instrument, of a person into a thing to be played. The hidden arms, the closed outline, the smoothness of the skin, the turban that makes the woman Ingres’s model, the marks, and the title that names her a hobby all make the same move, and nothing in the image breaks it. Even the borrowed beauty serves the law, since an instrument must be beautiful to be wanted. Held because narrowness is not coherence: the territory is one back, two marks and a title, and the range between its farthest elements, flesh and sign, photograph and painting, love and ownership, is real but small.
Score: 8.1 / 10
The orders held are few, and held in one image: the body and eros, in Kiki’s back; art and its history, in Ingres and the nude, and music, in the instrument and the hobby; the relation of artist and model, love and possession, the private life of two people in Montparnasse, carried by the title’s idiom; and the image as a medium, in the mark on the photograph. They are integrated: one stroke touches all of them. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent, which is nearly everything else: no labour but the model’s, no state, no history beyond art’s own, no natural order, no sacred, no family, no world outside the studio. The figure describes the form, a single photograph of one body, a little above the floor because maker and model are held as well as body and art.
Score: 6.2 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.1, then The Made at 8.3, then The Inevitable and The Living Form at 8.2. An image whole in its period prints, its reference print in a national collection and its presence continuous since its reproduction in 1924; a making exact in light, in pose and in the placing of two marks; a work of few parts in which each bears load; and a form that sets a written sign on the photograph’s claim to a real body.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.2: the body, art and its history, music, maker and model and the image as medium are held in one stroke; labour, the state, history, nature, the sacred and the world outside the studio are absent. Next above it, The Sublime at 7.2: beauty of one kind, Ingres’s borrowed flesh, met once and lowered by the wit that is the point. Then The Unconcealment, The Archetypal Deep and The Bottomless Well at 7.6: a disclosure of the nude as possession that the work also indulges, an old analogy made literal and left a conceit, and a debate deeper than its object.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.2 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.2, The Made at 8.3, The Inner Law at 8.1, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on four of five: The Imperishable at 9.1 clears the bar of 8.5, but The Swerve at 7.8, Pressure on Tradition at 7.8, The Unconcealment at 7.6 and The Archetypal Deep at 7.6 fall short of it. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Sublime, 7.2, below 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.2. Three of the five summit conditions are met. The twelve sum to 93.7, an average of 7.81 that displays 7.8. The work stands where its aggregate places it: in the band of Tier III, short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins and of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the photograph Man Ray made in Paris in 1924 and of its reception: well as an image, in its title and its source in Ingres, its model, the reference print and the sale of 2022; thinly in its printing history, so that where a judgment turns on the making or the survival of particular prints it is held more loosely. The work scored is the image as Man Ray made it in 1924, a gelatin silver photograph; the prints of the period are its carriers, and no single print is the work. The print in the Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris, is taken as the reference print. The reproduction in Littérature in June 1924, the print sold in New York in May 2022, and later prints and reproductions are context and evidence, and are not scored. No words are quoted: the title and its idiom are given. How the f-holes were made is stated as open, since accounts differ. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the dimensions of the reference print and of other prints, the number of the issue of Littérature that carried the image, whether the marks were painted on a print that was then photographed again, which surviving prints carry hand painting, how many prints of the period exist, whether a cloth lies across the lower body, the years of Man Ray’s relation with Kiki beyond the 1920s, and the price of the 2022 sale.