- Elevage de Poussière, New York
- Dust Breeding
Sheet: 7 11/16 x 10 in. (19.6 x 25.4 cm)
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A collaboration between two voraciously innovative artists and friends, this photograph was made on a visit by Man Ray to Marcel Duchamp’s studio. Duchamp had been in Paris for a number of months, leaving the sheet of glass that was his opus, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915–23), lying on sawhorses to accumulate dust. After the photograph was made, Duchamp cleaned the surface of the artwork, leaving a section covered with dust that he permanently affixed to the glass. The exposure lasted over an hour in the dim light of the studio, slowly rendering the texture of the various and uncertain materials in exquisite detail. Man Ray cropped the negative on a portion of the glass appearing “like some strange landscape from a bird’s-eye view,” emphasizing spatial uncertainty.
Taken in the studio but almost anti-studio in nature, the image hovers somewhere between artwork in its own right and a document of a stage of creation in a masterpiece of ambiguity. The ultimate expression of no real subject, it speaks to an ambivalence toward the hand of the artist in the act of creation, on the part of the two artists largely responsible for the spread of Dadaism and Surrealism in New York and the development of the readymade art object.
ProvenanceAtelier Man Ray, Paris; [Galerie Octant, Paris]; purchased by Manfred Heiting, April 24, 1987.
Exhibition History"Man Ray," Kunsthaus Wien, Vienna, 1996.
"The Surreal House," Barbican Centre, London, June 10–September 19, 2010.
"Utopia/Dystopia: Construction and Destruction in Photography and Collage," Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, March 11–June 10, 2012.
"A Handful of Dust: From the Cosmic to the Domestic," Ryerson Image Centre, Toronto, January 22–April 5, 2020.
Inscriptions, Signatures and Marks
in pencil right of stamp " 1/8 "
Cataloguing data may change with further research.
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