Composition

Author: Marijke Peyser

Man Ray painted two shapes reminiscent of abstract human figures on a small panel in landscape format in muted shades of bluish grey and brown. The reclining figures appear to have a relationship with one another, although this is not obvious from the work’s neutral title. In 1952 the artist made several works with this motif. In another painting, entitled Le P, he again depicted the two reclining figures in a monumental way; this time as silhouettes against a dark background. The canvas is signed, dated and has the address of the painter, 2 rue Férou, on the stretcher.^[1]

Nineteen fifty-one was a turning point for Man Ray. After ten years in California he returned to Paris.^[2] In his house-cum-studio in rue Férou, he concentrated on his great love, painting, although by then he was known primarily for his experiments in photography and sculpture. He celebrated his ‘homecoming’ with a small, very personal canvas, La rue Férou: a man in a beret pulling a cart carrying a veiled object walks down a typical Parisian street.^[3] This object is Man Ray’s assemblage L’énigme d’Isidore Ducasse of 1920; Galleria Schwarz went on to have an edition of ten copies made of it in 1971.

During the first years of his second stay in Paris (1951-57), Man Ray frequently painted canvases with themes that had occupied him previously. Romeo and Juliet (1954) belongs to the Shakespeare series. The painted screen Les vingt jours et nuits de Juliette (1952) was inspired by the novels of the Marquis de Sade (see also Vénus restaurée). Man Ray’s abstract canvases in the Modern Mythology series also date from this period and in terms of composition echo Composition and The P.^[4] The reuse of earlier themes did not worry him. Quite the reverse, as Man Ray said to his biographer Arturo Schwarz: ‘I have never painted a recent picture’.^[5]