The Rope Dancer Accompanies Herself with Her Shadows

Author: Marijke Peyser

This 1920 photograph references an earlier work by Man Ray with the same title, an aerograph dating from 1918.^[1] In turn the aerograph was based on a monumental oil painting of 1916 with the same title. In the aerograph we can make out the figure of a rope dancer. She balances on a rope between four light sources which create as many shadows. The black, white and light brown colours for the background were airbrushed in. The Rope Dancer Accompanies Herself with Her Shadows formed the break from his Cubist period.

In his autobiography Self Portrait (1963) Man Ray wrote about the history of the development of the picture on which the photograph and the aerograph were based: ‘The subject was a rope dancer I had seen in a vaudeville show. I began by making sketches of various positions of acrobatic forms, each on a different sheet of spectrum-coloured paper. … After several changes in my composition I was less and less satisfied. It looked too decorative and might have served as a curtain for the theatre. Then my eyes turned to the pieces of coloured paper that had fallen to the floor. They made an abstract pattern that might have been the shadows of the dancer or an architectural subject, according to the trend of one’s imagination if he were looking for a representative motive.’^[2]

In April 1916 Man Ray took part in the first exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in New York with this painting. However we do not know how great the visitors’ powers of imagination were. Was it clear that the rope dancer, with her outstretched arms, literally had the ropes, and with them her own shadow, in her hands? After The Rope Dancer there was a period in which Man Ray gave his creativity free rein. He made assemblages, refined his aerographs and broadened his inventiveness in his collages. Not long after that he began to concentrate exclusively on photography.