It’s a scorching July day in Baltimore, but here in the back offices of the Baltimore Museum of Art, where climate control is practically a religion, the air is cool, crisp, and smells of ozone. My elbows are resting on a chilled black slab of a table. Propped in front of me on a table-top easel is a tiny mutilated photograph worth about a million dollars, give or take.
The subject of the image, made in 1929 by the Surrealist Man Ray, is a nude woman sprawled dreamily on her back, her left arm raised and her right hand resting on her breast as if she’s swearing an oath in her sleep. Her fingernails glint like metal slivers. One of her legs is bent at the knee and slightly raised, a pose at odds with the overall impression that she’s asleep, or perhaps even dead. The photograph has been partially solarized, a darkroom technique that has produced a silvery aura below her head and torso that looks suspiciously like blood.
Even so, it’s a sensual image, a classical presentation of a woman as an object of desire, the kind of nude you might find on an antique Parisian postcard, unashamed and replete with body hair. But there are surprising depths to this piece. There’s a strong maternal aspect to it, a sense of the body as a means of nourishment and security — a candid portrait of an exhausted mother, perhaps. And then there’s the fact that the artist has removed the lower third of the photograph with scissors. Everything below the silvery outline of her flesh has been excised with disturbing precision.
Also disturbingly precise is the title of the work, “Le primat de la matière sur la pensée;” in other words, “The primacy of matter over thought.” But are we really meant to interpret this voluptuous nude, an image bordering on the pornographic, as a high-minded meditation on Cartesian duality? After all, this is Man Ray, a master provocateur who found his artistic voice in the Dada movement. The title could be an ironic trick, one of those clever — or not so clever — juxtapositions that were the stock and trade of the Surrealists, who saw as their mission “resolving the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality.”
Was Man Ray’s intent truly philosophical, an exploration of the imperatives of the flesh versus a life of the mind? Or is this an artistic manifesto, a declaration of war on the bourgeois tradition of the nude by way of a pair of scissors? Or perhaps simply a lusty, worshipful portrait, a pure expression of the artist’s desire for his model, who, in this case, happened to be a Surrealist colleague, the artist Méret Oppenheim?
All of the above?
When the archivist who retrieved it for me, a nice young fellow in lime green pants, asked, “So your interest in this piece is…what exactly?”, I told him I planned to write a column about it. I said I wanted the close description to come from the photograph itself, rather than a digital version on the Web. That answer seemed to satisfy him — and it was true.
But what I didn’t say was that this image has haunted me since I first saw it in 1986, enlarged to billboard size and plastered on the tubular walls of the London Underground.
I was nineteen years old, in the first month of a junior year abroad. One evening, I found myself on the northbound platform of the Leicester Square station, angling for a spot on the battered wood rail that passed for a bench…and there she was, advertising a Surrealism exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, floating magisterially ten feet above the tracks, a gorgeous brunette with Modigliani eyes, unfazed by the comings and goings of the screeching trains of the Piccadilly Line.
It was a lonely time in my life, and as embarrassing as it is to say it now, the sight of her nakedness eased my comings and goings. My favorite stations were the ones where you could catch a glimpse of her through the windows as the train ground to a halt. Some commuters went to great lengths to avoid looking at her. They thought of themselves as scandalized, but I saw something else in their averted eyes: resentment of their own thwarted curiosity.
Apparently, my own curiosity will not be thwarted. I started out to write a column about the 100th anniversary of the shot that started the First World War, and how Dada, and its step-child, Surrealism, can be understood as responses to the bewildering carnage of that conflict. But instead it seems I’ve written about falling in love with a nude woman on a subway poster.
Thank you, Man Ray. Point taken.
