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Lot Essay
Francis Picabia: "The Machine has become more than a mere adjunct of human life. It is really a part of human life - perhaps its very soul" (cited in French Artists Spur on an American Art, New York Tribune, 24 October 1915).
Formerly in the collection of Theo and Nelly Van Doesburg, Narcissus is a rare and early semi-abstract oil painting that Man Ray made in 1917. Dating from a period when the artist was just beginning to play a key role in the development of New York's avant-garde, it is a work that reflects the influence of his associates Picabia and Duchamp's mechanomorphic pictures as well as that of more mainstream modern cubist abstraction.
Among the last paintings that Man Ray would make for several years, Narcissus is an abstracted portrait of a Narcissus flower in a pot that has been rendered with all the cool unemotional precision of an engineer's drawing. The deliberate contrast of romantic/poetic subject matter with the objective dispassion and precision of mechanical drawing is an ironic device that Man Ray had also used shortly before in the painting Rope Dancer now in the Museum of Modern Art. Like this painting Man Ray's ironic choice of subject and title echoes Duchamp and Picabia's current practice of infusing the machine with a romantic sensibility and sometimes endowing it with a sex life. Executed on an inverted bread board Narcissus is also to some extent an "assisted ready-made" - one that anticipates Man Ray's later objets and reflects works like In Advance of the Broken Arm - the snow shovel that Duchamp had exhibited at the Bourgeois Galleries in 1916.
Despite its ironic references and its proto-Dadaist qualities, however, Man Ray's main preoccupation in this work has been with the aesthetics of formal abstraction. As he later explained about his paintings from this period; "the creative force and expressiveness of painting reside materially in the colour and texture of the pigment, in the possibilities of form, invention and organisation, and in the flat plane on which these elements are brought to play. The artist is concerned solely with linking these absolute qualities directly to his wit, imagination and experience, without the go-between of a 'subject'" (Man Ray, Self-Portrait, 1963, pp. 49 & 55).
Formerly in the collection of Theo and Nelly Van Doesburg, Narcissus is a rare and early semi-abstract oil painting that Man Ray made in 1917. Dating from a period when the artist was just beginning to play a key role in the development of New York's avant-garde, it is a work that reflects the influence of his associates Picabia and Duchamp's mechanomorphic pictures as well as that of more mainstream modern cubist abstraction.
Among the last paintings that Man Ray would make for several years, Narcissus is an abstracted portrait of a Narcissus flower in a pot that has been rendered with all the cool unemotional precision of an engineer's drawing. The deliberate contrast of romantic/poetic subject matter with the objective dispassion and precision of mechanical drawing is an ironic device that Man Ray had also used shortly before in the painting Rope Dancer now in the Museum of Modern Art. Like this painting Man Ray's ironic choice of subject and title echoes Duchamp and Picabia's current practice of infusing the machine with a romantic sensibility and sometimes endowing it with a sex life. Executed on an inverted bread board Narcissus is also to some extent an "assisted ready-made" - one that anticipates Man Ray's later objets and reflects works like In Advance of the Broken Arm - the snow shovel that Duchamp had exhibited at the Bourgeois Galleries in 1916.
Despite its ironic references and its proto-Dadaist qualities, however, Man Ray's main preoccupation in this work has been with the aesthetics of formal abstraction. As he later explained about his paintings from this period; "the creative force and expressiveness of painting reside materially in the colour and texture of the pigment, in the possibilities of form, invention and organisation, and in the flat plane on which these elements are brought to play. The artist is concerned solely with linking these absolute qualities directly to his wit, imagination and experience, without the go-between of a 'subject'" (Man Ray, Self-Portrait, 1963, pp. 49 & 55).