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Lot Essay
Sade, Pas Terminé is an extremely rare, enlarged silver print from the most prolific and potent period of Man Ray’s career. By the 1930s, Man Ray was thriving in Paris, a well-established central figure of Dada and Surrealist circles. His unique Rayographs and collaborations with Kiki de Montparnasse had reverberated throughout the art world. During this period, the tightly knit community of poets, writers, photographers, painters, sculptors, and musicians had mined both the recent and distant past for inspirational precursors to their rebellious activities. The rediscovery and subsequent fascination by the Surrealists with the writings of the Marquis de Sade has been well-explored. His story became the perfect symbol with its complex intersections of desire, transgression, rebellion and freedom that animated avant-garde culture in the early twentieth century.
“By the early thirties, admiration for de Sade was widespread in Surrealist circles. Man Ray was introduced to Sade's work by his neighbor, writer Maurice Heine, who brought the original 1785 manuscript of 120 Days of Sodom to Man Ray's studio to be photographed,” writes Adina Kamien-Kazhdan in the catalogue for Human Equations from 2015.
For André Breton and his circle, Sade was not merely an infamous libertine, but a radical philosopher of unrestrained eroticism and anti-clerical revolt. His writings were read as a revelation of suppressed instincts, a mirror to the hypocrisy of bourgeois morality, and a provocation against religious authority.
Man Ray’s first explicit and public homage to Sade came in 1933 with the creation of Monument à D.A.F. de Sade, using a smaller print of the image on offer here. For that work, Man Ray juxtaposed the image of a nude pair of buttocks—in this case the model is most likely Meret Oppenheim or Lee Miller—with an inverted cruciform drawn in ink, creating a stark interplay of sexuality and blasphemy. Published in Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution (May, 1933), it was immediately legible to Surrealist readers as both a tribute to Sade’s radical sensuality and an iconoclastic assault on religious orthodoxy.
At the same time, he made this enlarged print, ambiguously titling it as though the work of Sade, or perhaps the meaning of this image of the naked female body, is incomplete. Ultimately, the use of the word “unfinished” in the title leaves it open to the interpretation of the viewer—an unrequited love, perhaps, or a blank slate for the projection of one’s own desires.
“...Photography can have an artistic validity equal to that of painting,” wrote his friend and biographer, Roland Penrose.
Man Ray’s obsession with Marquis de Sade embodies the Surrealist desire to use shock, eroticism, and sacrilege as tools of liberation, collapsing distinctions between the erotic object and the sacred symbol. In the mid-to-late 1930s, Man Ray furthered this dialogue through a series of imaginary portraits of Sade. Since no authenticated adult likeness of the Marquis existed, Surrealist artists took liberties in inventing physiognomies that symbolized his spirit rather than sought to capture verisimilitude. Man Ray’s 1936–1938 portraits—paintings and later bronzes—depict Sade as a fleshy, grotesque figure, his features saturated with both corporeality and excess. These images align Sade with the larger Surrealist fascination with monstrous, libidinal bodies, echoing parallel works by Hans Bellmer, Salvador Dalí, and Alberto Giacometti that interrogated desire, cruelty, and objectification.
The trajectory of Monument à D.A.F. de Sade is as significant as the image itself. Following its initial publication in the early 1930s, the photographic work circulated widely within Surrealist journals and was incorporated into the book culture of the movement. In 1935, bookbinder and designer Mary Reynolds employed Sadean motifs, including Man Ray’s imagery, in her elaborate bindings of rare editions of Sade’s works.
With the rediscovery and republication of Les 120 Journées de Sodome in the twentieth century—most significantly through Maurice Heine’s scholarly editions—publishers sought visual strategies to match Sade’s scandalous reputation. Man Ray’s image provided a readymade visual shorthand: erotic, transgressive, and iconoclastic. It was employed in subsequent bindings and most prominently revived for modern editions, including Penguin Classics’ 2016 edition of The 120 Days of Sodom. In this way, a Surrealist work that originated as an intervention into avant-garde discourse migrated into the mainstream literary market, perpetuating the connection between Sade, sexual provocation, and radical freedom.
Man Ray’s engagement with Sade was not unique but emblematic of a broader Surrealist phenomenon. Breton hailed Sade as a precursor to Surrealism, a revolutionary writer who demanded the recognition of desire’s sovereignty. Artists like Dalí produced Sadean scenes of erotic fetishism, while Bellmer’s Doll series fragmented the body into grotesque, fetishized parts, resonating with Sadean dismemberment. Giacometti’s “cruel” objects and Jean Benoît’s ritualistic performances further carried Sade into visual and performative registers, demonstrating the breadth of his influence across media. The Israel Museum and other institutions have since exhibited these works, emphasizing the centrality of Sade in Surrealism’s pantheon of saints and provocateurs.
The Surrealists’ engagement with Sade often intersected with their dialogue with earlier canonical artists. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, whose Grand Odalisque (1814, Musée du Louvre) was already a totem of erotic excess in nineteenth-century art, provided a crucial precedent. Ingres also produced the Odalisque in Grisaille (circa 1824-34, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), reducing the luxuriant odalisque to monochrome tones for the purposes of more accurate black-and-white reproductions. This act of translation from color to grisaille distilled the form into a study of line, flesh, and shadow, emphasizing the sensuality of the body without the distractions of ornament.
For the Surrealists, Ingres’ odalisque embodied the fetishized and elongated erotic body, anticipating their own manipulations of form and desire. By invoking Ingres, the Surrealists could situate their fascination with Sade’s philosophy of unrestrained sexuality within a longer lineage of Western art that had always sought to aestheticize and control the erotic image.
Man Ray’s engagement with the work of Ingres was well-known by this point. His iconic Le Violon d’Ingres—a photograph of Kiki seen from behind, with violin holes projected onto her back in the darkroom—had masterfully interwoven the erotic with word-play and rich gray photographic tones.
The present work, with the middle gray tones heavily emphasized, resulted in a black-and-white photograph that has neither blacks nor whites—a true grisaille version of the image that reads as much like a pencil or charcoal drawing as it does a photograph. No other full print of this image has been located; the print with the inked cross that was reproduced by Breton is now held in the Arturo Schwarz Collection at the Israel Museum. The print on offer here was kept by Man Ray, and then within the family for decades; it was lost and rediscovered within the estate of Man Ray’s niece, Naomi Savage in the early 2000s.
This spare and luscious image perfectly blends many recurring elements— eroticism, the Surrealist’s adoration of the Marquis de Sade, Man Ray’s own fixation on the female buttocks, the grisaille paintings of Ingres, and the ability to reposition the commonplace as fantastical through both cropping and word-play.
The case of Man Ray’s Sade, Pas Terminé, 1933 epitomizes the Surrealists’ dual fascination with Sade: as both philosophical beacon and symbolic provocation. The image’s afterlife, from a 1933 Surrealist photomontage to its twentieth- and twenty-first-century incarnations as a book cover, exemplifies how avant-garde provocations become canonized in cultural memory. Through the repeated reproduction of a single motif—the closely framed buttocks—Sade’s spirit was visually enshrined in Surrealism and beyond. In the end, Man Ray and his contemporaries elevated Sade not only as a literary figure but as an enduring icon of Surrealist rebellion against the constraints of morality, religion, and representation.
“By the early thirties, admiration for de Sade was widespread in Surrealist circles. Man Ray was introduced to Sade's work by his neighbor, writer Maurice Heine, who brought the original 1785 manuscript of 120 Days of Sodom to Man Ray's studio to be photographed,” writes Adina Kamien-Kazhdan in the catalogue for Human Equations from 2015.
For André Breton and his circle, Sade was not merely an infamous libertine, but a radical philosopher of unrestrained eroticism and anti-clerical revolt. His writings were read as a revelation of suppressed instincts, a mirror to the hypocrisy of bourgeois morality, and a provocation against religious authority.
Man Ray’s first explicit and public homage to Sade came in 1933 with the creation of Monument à D.A.F. de Sade, using a smaller print of the image on offer here. For that work, Man Ray juxtaposed the image of a nude pair of buttocks—in this case the model is most likely Meret Oppenheim or Lee Miller—with an inverted cruciform drawn in ink, creating a stark interplay of sexuality and blasphemy. Published in Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution (May, 1933), it was immediately legible to Surrealist readers as both a tribute to Sade’s radical sensuality and an iconoclastic assault on religious orthodoxy.
At the same time, he made this enlarged print, ambiguously titling it as though the work of Sade, or perhaps the meaning of this image of the naked female body, is incomplete. Ultimately, the use of the word “unfinished” in the title leaves it open to the interpretation of the viewer—an unrequited love, perhaps, or a blank slate for the projection of one’s own desires.
“...Photography can have an artistic validity equal to that of painting,” wrote his friend and biographer, Roland Penrose.
Man Ray’s obsession with Marquis de Sade embodies the Surrealist desire to use shock, eroticism, and sacrilege as tools of liberation, collapsing distinctions between the erotic object and the sacred symbol. In the mid-to-late 1930s, Man Ray furthered this dialogue through a series of imaginary portraits of Sade. Since no authenticated adult likeness of the Marquis existed, Surrealist artists took liberties in inventing physiognomies that symbolized his spirit rather than sought to capture verisimilitude. Man Ray’s 1936–1938 portraits—paintings and later bronzes—depict Sade as a fleshy, grotesque figure, his features saturated with both corporeality and excess. These images align Sade with the larger Surrealist fascination with monstrous, libidinal bodies, echoing parallel works by Hans Bellmer, Salvador Dalí, and Alberto Giacometti that interrogated desire, cruelty, and objectification.
The trajectory of Monument à D.A.F. de Sade is as significant as the image itself. Following its initial publication in the early 1930s, the photographic work circulated widely within Surrealist journals and was incorporated into the book culture of the movement. In 1935, bookbinder and designer Mary Reynolds employed Sadean motifs, including Man Ray’s imagery, in her elaborate bindings of rare editions of Sade’s works.
With the rediscovery and republication of Les 120 Journées de Sodome in the twentieth century—most significantly through Maurice Heine’s scholarly editions—publishers sought visual strategies to match Sade’s scandalous reputation. Man Ray’s image provided a readymade visual shorthand: erotic, transgressive, and iconoclastic. It was employed in subsequent bindings and most prominently revived for modern editions, including Penguin Classics’ 2016 edition of The 120 Days of Sodom. In this way, a Surrealist work that originated as an intervention into avant-garde discourse migrated into the mainstream literary market, perpetuating the connection between Sade, sexual provocation, and radical freedom.
Man Ray’s engagement with Sade was not unique but emblematic of a broader Surrealist phenomenon. Breton hailed Sade as a precursor to Surrealism, a revolutionary writer who demanded the recognition of desire’s sovereignty. Artists like Dalí produced Sadean scenes of erotic fetishism, while Bellmer’s Doll series fragmented the body into grotesque, fetishized parts, resonating with Sadean dismemberment. Giacometti’s “cruel” objects and Jean Benoît’s ritualistic performances further carried Sade into visual and performative registers, demonstrating the breadth of his influence across media. The Israel Museum and other institutions have since exhibited these works, emphasizing the centrality of Sade in Surrealism’s pantheon of saints and provocateurs.
The Surrealists’ engagement with Sade often intersected with their dialogue with earlier canonical artists. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, whose Grand Odalisque (1814, Musée du Louvre) was already a totem of erotic excess in nineteenth-century art, provided a crucial precedent. Ingres also produced the Odalisque in Grisaille (circa 1824-34, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), reducing the luxuriant odalisque to monochrome tones for the purposes of more accurate black-and-white reproductions. This act of translation from color to grisaille distilled the form into a study of line, flesh, and shadow, emphasizing the sensuality of the body without the distractions of ornament.
For the Surrealists, Ingres’ odalisque embodied the fetishized and elongated erotic body, anticipating their own manipulations of form and desire. By invoking Ingres, the Surrealists could situate their fascination with Sade’s philosophy of unrestrained sexuality within a longer lineage of Western art that had always sought to aestheticize and control the erotic image.
Man Ray’s engagement with the work of Ingres was well-known by this point. His iconic Le Violon d’Ingres—a photograph of Kiki seen from behind, with violin holes projected onto her back in the darkroom—had masterfully interwoven the erotic with word-play and rich gray photographic tones.
The present work, with the middle gray tones heavily emphasized, resulted in a black-and-white photograph that has neither blacks nor whites—a true grisaille version of the image that reads as much like a pencil or charcoal drawing as it does a photograph. No other full print of this image has been located; the print with the inked cross that was reproduced by Breton is now held in the Arturo Schwarz Collection at the Israel Museum. The print on offer here was kept by Man Ray, and then within the family for decades; it was lost and rediscovered within the estate of Man Ray’s niece, Naomi Savage in the early 2000s.
This spare and luscious image perfectly blends many recurring elements— eroticism, the Surrealist’s adoration of the Marquis de Sade, Man Ray’s own fixation on the female buttocks, the grisaille paintings of Ingres, and the ability to reposition the commonplace as fantastical through both cropping and word-play.
The case of Man Ray’s Sade, Pas Terminé, 1933 epitomizes the Surrealists’ dual fascination with Sade: as both philosophical beacon and symbolic provocation. The image’s afterlife, from a 1933 Surrealist photomontage to its twentieth- and twenty-first-century incarnations as a book cover, exemplifies how avant-garde provocations become canonized in cultural memory. Through the repeated reproduction of a single motif—the closely framed buttocks—Sade’s spirit was visually enshrined in Surrealism and beyond. In the end, Man Ray and his contemporaries elevated Sade not only as a literary figure but as an enduring icon of Surrealist rebellion against the constraints of morality, religion, and representation.