Lot Essay
In 1948, Man Ray was probably inspired to return to the subject of his earlier monumental Surrealist work The Rope Dancer Accompanies Herself With Her Shadows, 1916, when the Museum of Modern Art requested to borrow it for the 1951 exhibition "Abstract Painting and Sculpture in Americas". Neil Baldwin described the significance of this subject to the artist: "How appropriate to Man Ray is the image of the 'rope dancer', the tightrope walker he had seen in a vaudeville show, so much a metaphor for the young artist who also takes risks with every step, moving farther and farther away from the comforting poles (or polarities) of convention, out to the middle of the wire, where there is nothing to protect him except his wits, no net below to catch him should he fail to keep his balance by continuing to move forward and create. There was more than a bit of exhibitionist in the rope dancer.
Man Ray understood the impulse to play the daredevil in front of a crowd, because that made it all the more delicious to savor" (N. Baldwin, Man Ray, American Artist, New York, 1988, p. 58).
Man Ray understood the impulse to play the daredevil in front of a crowd, because that made it all the more delicious to savor" (N. Baldwin, Man Ray, American Artist, New York, 1988, p. 58).