The following essays were written by Francis M. Naumann and Gail Stavitsky for the illustrated catalogue Conversion to Modernism -- The Early Work of Man Ray, ISBN 0-8135-3147-0, which accompanied a February 16 - August 3, 2003 exhibition at The Montclair Art Museum. The essays are reprinted with permission of the Montclair Art Museum and without illustrations. If you have questions or comments regarding the essays, or wish to purchase a copy of the catalogue, please contact the Montclair Art Museum directly through either this phone number or web address:
"Conversion to Modernism"
by Francis M. Naumann
CHAPTER FOUR
New Words for New Images: Adon Lacroix and the Modern Poetry Movement (1913: Part 2)
It was not long after his move to Ridgefield that Man Ray discovered he could demonstrate his commitment to modern art not only through painting but also through poetry. His first published poem, "Travail," appeared in the fall 1913 issue of The Modern School, the magazine published by the Ferrer Center.[1] Here, we find the artist/author attempting to convey a sense of life's inevitable fatigue, generated, as he sees it, by nature's endless and tiring cycle of day followed by night:
While the subject of this poem is essentially romantic, its lack of conventional rhythm and rhyme displays at least a rudimentary awareness of the more advanced developments in modern poetry. Indeed, it was through Man Ray's association with a number of young and restless poets (or vers librists, as they later became known) - writers who either resided in Ridgefield or visited the colony on weekends - that Man Ray was introduced to the possibility of publishing his writings, an avenue of literary expression he continued to explore through the course of his life. In an article about the artists and writers living in Ridgefield, a journalist reported upon their shared literary and artistic interests. "Whatever protest and ridicule may be directed against the vers librists," she wrote, "they have aroused almost as much discussion as the Cubist and Post-Impressionist artists. With a colony of their own and a printing press running merrily to the tune of the new rhythms, no doubt the reading public will soon have ample opportunity to taste their wares in larger and larger quantities."[2]
During the summer of 1913, Man Ray, Kreymborg, and Adolf Wolff - who often visited the artists' colony - decided that their somewhat removed residency in Grantwood would be the ideal location from which to launch a new magazine devoted to their combined literary and artistic interests. Perhaps more than the others, Kreymborg was keenly aware of the fact that the more established journals had consistently refused to publish the poetry and prose of the younger, more experimental writers. After some deliberation the artists agreed to call their new magazine The Glebe, a title meant to evoke the more poetic usage of the term: as a synonym for the land or the soil.[3] Man Ray envisioned himself as art director, while Wolff volunteered to handle technical details concerning the actual printing of the magazine.
According to Man Ray's recollections, the sculptor arranged to have a friend's printing press shipped out to Grantwood, with the intention of installing it in the shack that Kreymborg, Man Ray, and Halpert shared. A few weeks later, however, when the cumbersome apparatus arrived, they discovered that it had been severely damaged in transport. As a result, they were forced to enlist the services of a local printer, and by September the inaugural issue - devoted entirely to a presentation of Wolff's poetry and bearing on its cover Man Ray's circular design for the name of the review (fig. 62) - finally appeared. Through Kreymborg's efforts, all subsequent issues of this short-lived periodical would be published by the firm of Albert and Charles Boni, well-known promoters of vanguard literature and proprietors of the Washington Square Bookshop in Manhattan.[4]
Beyond supplying a design for its cover, Man Ray would not make any further contributions to The Glebe. Instead, he continued to experiment with the notion of releasing his own work independently, by means of a self-styled limited edition series of publications, which he individually designed, hand-lettered, and printed manually at his own expense. According to Kreymborg, it was at the time when they first engaged in discussions about the formation of a new magazine that Man Ray began to issue these limited edition publications. "In the absence of [a printing press for The Glebe]," Kreymborg recalled, Man Ray "had started to print by hand, stray, curious documents with a delicacy of line and a feeling for spatial values akin to the papyrus of an ancient era." His first publication of this type, probably entitled "The Bum," was so ephemeral in nature that it quickly disappeared without a trace.[5]
In the very period when Man Ray engaged in these publishing activities, he entered into the most productive phase of his career as a painter, executing an impressive series of landscapes depicting the town of Ridgefield and its environs in ever new and adventurous ways (figs. 63-72).
RIDGEFIELD LANDSCAPES OF 1913
It was probably soon after the winter snows thawed that Man Ray began a series of ten vibrant watercolor studies based on the densely foliated areas near the cottage he shared with Halpert (figs. 63, 64). In these works, he allowed the white of the paper to show through and interact freely with the surrounding areas of color, recalling, again, the watercolor technique of Cezanne. Not only has he emulated a restrained method of paint application, but the close range and viewing angle selected for these images also seem to have been inspired by the precedent of this famous French painter. Unlike Cezanne, however, Man Ray applies his colors rapidly, in a staccato-like pattern, more with the intention of creating a bright and impressive image than of remaining faithful to the natural coloration and structure of the motif.
In one of these watercolors (fig. 64), Man Ray has selected the scene of a dense forest interior, a jumble of rocks in the lower portion of the composition set against a thicket of crisscrossing tree limbs in the upper background. The watercolor pigment was naturally absorbed into the fabric of the paper and accurately captured the quality of light filtering through the branches of trees overhead. Even when Man Ray took out his oil paints - if the canvas he was working on was comparatively small in scale - qualities inherent to the watercolor technique continued to be present, so much so that in reproduction (figs. 65, 66) some of these landscapes appear to have been painted in the more translucent and luminous medium.
In a rendition of the cottage Man Ray shared with Halpert (fig. 65), portions of raw canvas are contrasted against a colorful display of bed sheets and blankets hanging on the line to dry. A number of views of the distant countryside virtually radiate with energy, the foreground foliage in one so electric in execution that the canvas almost appears to vibrate (fig. 66). When Man Ray painted these landscapes, he was often joined by Halpert, who continued to make excursions out to Ridgefield on weekends to paint. He recalls, for example, rising early one Sunday in June and working with Halpert until noon, an experience that caused him to realize that he was indeed now living in a true artists' colony.[6]
The influence of Halpert can still be detected in a number of landscapes from this period, particularly those that emphasize a reduction and simplification of form and, to an even greater extent, those in which the contours of form are deliberately reinforced by means of heavy dark lines (figs. 67-72). Although the precise order in which these landscapes were painted was not recorded, knowing the direction in which Man Ray's work would soon develop, it is logical to place them in a sequence that reflects their increasingly modernist vision.
The first image shows the town of Ridgefield from a distance (fig. 67), its block-like, geometric houses emerging from dense foliage along the expanse of a steep hill facing the viewer, its horizontal summit capped by a large brick building with a bell tower clearly visible in a photograph of the town taken in this period (fig. 44). A more closely focused view of another brick building in Ridgefield is flanked by tall, slender trees and punctuated by a thick black vertical pole running through the center of the composition (fig. 68). This unusual element may have been meant to represent either a wireless telegraph pole or the mast of an otherwise unseen sailing ship moored in the harbor and located somewhere below the framing edge of the image.[7]
The first painting in this sequence was called Rooftops Ridgefield because of a prominent building seen from above in the lower central foreground of the composition. This same rooftop with chimney - but viewed from a different angle - reappears as an anchoring element at the base of Jersey Landscape (fig. 69), where the town and its buildings are replaced by an uninhabited rural environment, a field on a hill divided by a row of trees set against distant hills receding from view in the far background. Another view of the same terrain features two farmhouses (fig. 70), behind which unfolds the view of a fertile river valley. A freight train travels parallel to a thin blue streak that runs horizontally through the center of the composition, probably meant to represent the Hackensack River, which the journalist had said flows through the valley "like a silver thread in a blue haze."[8]
The bright colors of this landscape suggest a certain familiarity with paintings by the Fauves, not only artists like Matisse (whose work, as we have already discussed, clearly influenced Man Ray) but also a number of the lesser-known painters - Maurice de Vlaminck, Georges Braque, André Derain, and Raoul Dufy, all of whom were represented in the Armory Show.[9] There are, however, no earlier painters - neither Fauve nor Cubist - who reduced the components of their landscapes so severely as Man Ray. In one painting of this period, the hills of Ridgefield are rendered as little more than a series of dark, undulating horizontal lines (fig. 71). A rectangular rooftop seen in elevation from the side is visible in the immediate foreground, while the engine of a train emerges from behind it on the far left. A slice of the river is visible on the bottom right; behind it appears a series of factories and warehouses whose broad expanse is repeated in the delineation of gently rolling hills. This same horizontal pattern repeats itself to the top of the image, concluding with mountains in the far distance, their profile echoing the shape of a cloud overhead.
It is these mountains - and these mountains alone - that serve as the sole subject of a long horizontal landscape from 1913 that is so unusual in format as to suggest that it may have been cut from the top of a larger painting (fig. 72). Whenever Man Ray decided that a particular detail of a finished work was not painted to his satisfaction, or that part of an image was superfluous to the composition as a whole, he simply excised and discarded it, preserving only the portion he considered worthwhile. The result in this case is to have salvaged the fragmented view of a mountainous terrain that is so thoroughly devoid of life that (like the later paintings of Georgia O'Keeffe) its plastic or formal components are thrown dramatically into focus, precisely the direction in which Man Ray's art would soon evolve.
It was in the summer of 1913 - around the time when the landscapes reproduced here were painted - that Man Ray met a person who would change the course of his life, a young poet from Belgium by the name of Adon Lacroix.
ADON LACROIX
The isolation and detachment of the Ridgefield community was interrupted by occasional visits by friends from the city. On one eventful summer afternoon - to be precise, on August 27, 1913 - several friends from the Ferrer Center stopped by, among them the sculptor Adolf Wolff and his companion, Adon Lacroix.[10] Wolff and Lacroix had recently moved to New York from Belgium. Although they were living together and had a child, they were not married; in the true anarchist tradition, they were free spirits, open to whatever amorous opportunities presented themselves. The encounter could not have come at a better time for Man Ray. He found Lacroix beautiful, and her French accent was more than he could resist. Upon learning that her living situation in New York was strained - as his had been when he shared a studio with Wolff a year earlier - Man Ray invited her to live with him in Ridgefield. To his surprise and delight she accepted, stayed that night, and, a few days later, moved in with her seven-year-old daughter, Esther.
Like Man Ray, Adon Lacroix was both a painter and poet. Her father was a wealthy Belgian manufacturer, but he had fourteen children, of whom Adon was the youngest. It was in her teenage years that she decided to become an artist, and it was while taking classes in Brussels that she met Wolff, who was a few years her senior and by then already committed to a career in sculpture. Shortly after the birth of their daughter, they moved to America, and both their finances and romance began to deteriorate. For Lacroix, Man Ray's invitation solved many problems. Not only would she be provided with welcome relief from her strained relationship with Wolff, but the remote and idyllic community of Ridgefield would be the perfect place to paint and write, the very activities in which Man Ray was already intensely engaged.
As Man Ray's relationship with Lacroix intensified, the small shack he shared with Halpert created an increasingly awkward living situation, so the couple began to look for another house to rent on the property nearby. They soon found a small but charming cottage, with three or four rooms and a gabled roof that added to the fairy-tale existence Man Ray had earlier dreamed about. Moreover, there was a small but well-lit attic room that would serve perfectly as Man Ray's studio. They moved in immediately, and it was in these new surroundings that the young lovers engaged in an artistic collaboration that was probably more rewarding than either one of them could have imagined.
Adon Lacroix painted landscapes and wrote poetry, while Man Ray directed his attention to her for inspiration. Almost immediately, she became the sole focus of his artistic vision. With his box camera, he took many photographs of her, and, over the next two years, she served as his model for numerous drawings and paintings (figs. 75-78). In one snapshot, she plays the guitar and poses in a flowered dress before one of his paintings (fig. 73); in another, they sit together in a doorway - she wearing a black dress and long beaded necklace, he in a white shirt and smoking a corncob pipe - both looking off into the distance, as if oblivious to the purview of a camera (fig. 74). Man Ray liked the one of Lacroix playing the guitar so much that he took the negative to a local photo shop and arranged for it to be enlarged (he had not yet set up a darkroom of his own). Finally, his adolescent fantasies came true when she willingly disrobed and served as his nude model for a series of sketches and paintings (figs. 75, 76).
For the most part, these drawings and paintings are similar in approach and style to works that Man Ray made while attending classes at the Ferrer Center (see figs. 23-27). But at least two paintings of Adon Lacroix from 1913 are more consciously stylized (figs. 77, 78); that is to say, her likeness is not recorded with the sole intention of displaying technical virtuosity, but the subject's naturally sharp and angular features have been artificially enhanced, so as to serve as integral components of the painting's overall formal structure.
In the first of these portraits (fig. 77), the predominantly vertical format of the painting is clearly reflected in various background elements, a formal reading that is supported by the bold overhead view given to the table on the lower right. A cloth covering decorated with intersecting horizontal and vertical lines that form a rose-colored pattern provides no indication of perspectival recession (a characteristic also reflected in the blue stripes of her dress). But the detail in this painting that reveals Man Ray's allegiance to the vocabulary of modern art comes in the form of a single diagonal line in the upper right quadrant of the painting. Rather than leave this area blank (which it likely was in the original scene), Man Ray has articulated the space by means of a sharp planar division - painted yellow on one side to pick up the coloration of the background, gray on the other, to reflect the surrounding space - a line that would have no rationale for its existence outside of the realm of Cubist painting.
Man Ray also captured Adon - or Donna, as he later called her in his autobiography - asleep (fig. 78). He recorded her entirely in sharp lemon-yellow tones, the product, he later explained, of an accident. Apparently, the picture had been painted while Lacroix was sleeping, with only faint illumination provided by an oil lamp. Under these conditions, Man Ray had mistaken his tube of yellow for white, accounting for the overall yellow tonality of the picture.[11] He was so pleased with the results, however, that he took the painting to Stieglitz, who said he was not making purchases at the time but recommended Man Ray take the picture to Mitchell Kennerley, a wealthy publisher who was known to have collected modern paintings. Without hesitation, Kennerley wrote out a check for one hundred and fifty dollars, resulting in Man Ray's first major sale. [12]
"My mind was in a turmoil," Man Ray wrote of his thoughts in this period, "the turmoil of a seed that has been planted in fertile ground, ready to break through."[13] The break came in the form of an epiphany that he experienced in September 1913 on the final afternoon of a three-day camping trip to Harriman State Park on the New York-New Jersey border. The poet Alanson Hartpence and his wife, as well as another couple, accompanied Man Ray and Adon Lacroix on the trip. (A snapshot of Lacroix seated on a rock [fig. 79], cane in hand and wearing a sun hat, may very well have been taken during it.) While discussing future art projects with Hartpence, Man Ray declared that he would no longer seek inspiration directly from nature. "In fact," he declared, "I had decided that sitting in front of the subject might be a hindrance to really creative work." Instead, he announced, upon his return he would paint a series of "imaginary landscapes" based on his recollection of scenes and events that had occurred during the course of the excursion. From that moment onward, he decided, for inspiration he would "turn more and more to man-made sources."[14]
True to his word, upon his return to Ridgefield, Man Ray took out his box of watercolors and executed several "imaginary landscapes" based on memories of his camping trip. One records a tree-covered terrain where the artist and his friends had hiked one afternoon (fig. 80), the colors applied with a freedom and spontaneity that confirm his decision to abandon a direct observation of nature. In the isolation of his studio, the artist was free to invent, so trees and houses within the landscape are changed at will. As a result, colors are often exaggerated, shapes distorted, whatever was necessary to make the image more dynamic and visually appealing (fig. 81).
This was precisely the direction in which Man Ray's paintings rapidly evolved, a stylistic transformation especially evident in two Cubist landscapes of the period that portray houses along the side of a hill in Ridgefield (figs. 82, 83). In his autobiography, Man Ray describes the view from his cottage in a way that sounds like a description of these two paintings. "The whole valley lay before us," he recalls, "with distant blue hills - a continual source of inspiration for landscape work. The hill opposite was dotted with detached simple houses in different tints. I made several studies of the village of Ridgefield."[15]
In the first of these studies (fig. 82), the houses on the hillside are reduced to a series of simple block-like shapes, with little tonal gradation or diminution of scale, virtually eliminating all cues for depth perception and perspective. Despite these spatial distortions, we can see that Man Ray has retained the same brick building at the top of the hill that he had faithfully recorded in an earlier view of Ridgefield (fig. 67), while casting both landscapes in a predominantly Cubist style. When Man Ray showed these paintings to Hartpence, the poet thought that his friend was simply experiencing a "brainstorm" provoked by what he had seen earlier at the Armory Show. To an extent, Hartpence was right, for these paintings closely match the style of landscapes by Roger de la Fresnaye that were included in the Armory Show, as well as several paintings by Francis Picabia.[16]
Even though specific comparisons such as these can be made, Man Ray's Cubist compositions differ in one telling respect from the French paintings he had seen at the Armory Show, and that is in their vibrant use of color. "The winter of 1913-14 passed uneventfully," Man Ray later recalled of his activities in this period. "I started a series of larger canvases, composition of slightly Cubistic figures, yet very colorful, in contrast to the almost monochromatic Cubistic paintings I had seen at the international show in the Armory."[17] Indeed, it is the use of bright colors in these landscapes that most clearly separates them from sources in French Cubism.
Two semi-abstract watercolors from this same period (figs. 84, 85) -images that seem to have been inspired by some sort of organic motif - can be distinguished from the work of Man Ray's European and American colleagues by their exceptionally bright coloration.
The artist must have had works like these in mind when he explained that "by the end of the year I had completed my series of romantic expressionistic paintings of figures in the woods."[18] Although no specific figures can be detected in these images, they certainly fit the description of being both "romantic" and "expressionistic." The first of these two watercolors resembles the general format of Picasso's The Reservoir at Horta de Ebro (Museum of Modern Art, New York), a 1909 painting that was not shown in the Armory Show but was reproduced in a special issue of Camera Work devoted to Picasso and his work.[19] The Picasso appeared in black and white, so perhaps Man Ray felt perfectly free to add whatever colors he wanted, just as he had when coloring the drawing of a battleship he made as a child.
Man Ray's affections for Adon Lacroix are apparent in virtually everything he did. Even after he decided not to work directly from nature, he continued to use her as a source of inspiration. Although it was no longer necessary for her to serve as his model, he continued to make paintings and drawings of her, his ever-present artistic muse. To demonstrate how radically his artistic vision had changed, however, we need only compare the naturalism of his earlier ink drawing of Lacroix (fig. 75) with a more highly stylized rendition of her seated on a chair (fig. 86). Clearly the latter image did not require a long posing session but was a product of the artist's fertile imagination.
An even more dramatic example of his feelings for Adon Lacroix can be found in a watercolor of himself and her entitled Double Portrait (fig. 87), where the artist has depicted their respective facial features - eyes, nose, mouth - in a way that serves to emphasize their physical similarities. When he attempted to capture this same effect on canvas, however, he failed (fig. 88), possibly because the features of Lacroix were rendered too simply, almost cartoon-like in comparison with his own. It may have been this reasoning that caused him to excise this detail from the larger canvas and call the salvaged portion Dual Portrait (fig. 89). In technique, the remaining portion of this image is surprisingly close to the later paintings of Picasso, where frontal and profile features are often combined and overlap. It may have been a painting like Dual Portrait that Kreymborg had in mind when, in the mid-1920s, he noted that Man Ray's work was derivative of Picasso's: "Man was already a remarkably inventive and assimilative individual," he recalled. "In his quiet, smiling fashion, he not only applied the theories of Picasso to the problems of his own fastidious ego, but had begun to play with other media of expression."[21]
Of course, the similarity between this picture and Picasso's later work is almost certainly coincidental, for this particular painting by Man Ray would remain unknown until some years after his death. (Ironically, the picture was stolen from the artist's estate in 1982 and has never been recovered).[21] Rather, Dual Portrait represents Man Ray's efforts to graphically illustrate the emotional and intellectual rapport he experienced with Adon Lacroix, his most intimate companion and collaborator in these years and a woman who would inspire his creative production for some time to come.
Notes:
1. Man Ray, "Travail," Modern School 5 (Autumn 1913), pp. 20-21. The depressing tone of this poem is uncharacteristic of writings produced after his meeting with Adon Lacroix in the summer of 1913 (discussed below).
2. Margaret Johns, "Free Footed Verse Is Danced in Ridgefield, New Jersey," New York Tribune, July 25, 1915, sec. 3, p. 2. It is curious that this journalist does not mention Man Ray by name, for he ran his own printing press and, by the time this article appeared, had already issued several publications of his and Adon Lacroix's writings (figs. 99, 132). On the vers librists, see also Alfred Kreymborg, "Vers Libre and Vers Librists," Morning Telegraph, August 8, 1915, p. 50.
3. According to Kreymborg, Man Ray accepted the term "with gusto," but Halpert disliked the word because of its religious connotation (see Alfred Kreymborg, Troubadour: An Autobiography [New York: Liveright, 1925], p. 202).
4. Kreymborg mistakenly implies that once the printing press had broken, the Bonis took over publication of The Glebe from its very first issue (ibid., p. 210). This error is repeated in the standard source on the history of the little magazine: (Frederick J. Hoffman, Charles Allen, and Carolyn F. Ulrick, The Little Magazine: A History and Bibliography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946), p. 46. The most current and reliable source of information on The Glebe is provided by Jay Bochrer in American Literary Magazines: The Twentieth Century, Edward E. Chielens, ed. (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1992), pp. 135-139.
5. On the last page of Adonism, a booklet of poems published in 1914 (fig. 99), Man Ray wrote: "Publisher of 'The Bum' and other original papers." Kreymborg is quoted from Troubadour, p. 202.
6. SP, p.32.
7. The alternate title by which this work is known today - A Tree Grows in Brooklyn - was suggested by Man Ray himself when he saw the painting on display in his exhibition at the Princeton Art Museum in 1963 (the comment was recalled by his niece Naomi Savage). A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is the title of a novel by Betty Smith published in 1943 (which in 1945 was made into a popular movie by Elia Kazan).
8. See n. 2 above.
9. See William H. Gerdts, "The American Fauves, 1907-1918," in The Color of Modernism: The American Fauves, Hollis Taggart Galleries, New York, April 29-July 26, 1997, pp. 5-22.
10. Man Ray provided the exact date of his meeting with Adon Lacroix in a brief statement that he provided for the editors of Minotaure 3/4 (October-December 1933), p. 112.
11. This is how Man Ray explained the creation of this painting in his autobiography (SP, pp. 39-40), but when he filled out a questionnaire for the Whitney Museum in March of 1957, he wrote of this painting: "Living in the country near Ridgefield, N.J., this picture was painted (1913) at night by the light of an oil lamp which accounts for the dominance of yellow in the face. However, this should not be considered accidental, and I have used the same colors in later portraits painted in normal daylight! The stylization of the face is an obvious attempt to break away from academic drawing" (Artists' Files, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York). Despite Man Ray's explanation of how this painting came into being, it may have been based on the photograph of a woman sleeping that appeared in the local newspapers; a copy of this unidentified clipping is attached to the verso of the painting (opposite).
12. From 1910 through 1916, Mitchell Kennerley was publisher of the magazine The Forum. His identity was not provided by Man Ray in his account of this sale (SP, p. 40), though he supplied the publisher's name in the Whitney questionnaire referred to in the previous note. For a recent biography of this publisher, see Matthew Bruccoli, The Fortunes of Mitchell Kennerley (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986).
13. SP, p. 44; this remark can be attributed to Man Ray's description of his state of mind in the fall of 1913, for his account continues: "I seethed with projects to paint; I must find more time to myself. There were so many immediate distractions: my job, chopping and storing wood for the approaching winter, getting warm clothes." The "approaching winter" was later identified as that of 1913-1914 (p. 45).
14. Ibid., SP, p. 54. I originally believed, based on the sequence of events related in Man Ray's autobiography, that this important camping trip took place in the fall of 1914, a conclusion that was reported in nearly all of my published writings on the artist (see especially Naumann, "Man Ray, 1908-1921: From an Art in Two Dimensions to the Higher Dimension of Ideas," in Perpetual Motif The Art of Man Ray [Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art; New York: Abbeville Press, 1988], pp. 50-87, and Naumann, "Man Ray's Early Paintings, 1913-1916: Theory and Practice in the Art of Two Dimensions," Artforum 20, no. 9 [May 1982], pp. 37-46). My conclusions changed when I examined a watercolor that Man Ray made during this trip (fig. 80), which is inscribed on its verso "September 1913."
15. SP, p. 42.
16. I have in mind paintings such as Paysage, No. 2 of 1911 (Herbert and Nannette Rothschild Collection) and Landscape (Paysage, No. 1) of 1912 (Philadelphia Museum of Art), both of which were included in the Armory Show. Paul Wescher was the first to suggest that The Village is best compared to paintings by Roger de la Fresnaye ("Man Ray as Painter," Magazine of Art 46 [January 1953], p. 32). But Wescher cited as an example only de la Fresnaye's well-known Conquest of the Air, a painting that Man Ray could not have known at this time (the definitive version of this work is now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; for its exhibition history and provenance, see Germain Seligman, Roger de la Fresnaye [Greenwich: New York Graphic Society, 1969], cat. no. 137, p. 156). For a list of the works by de la Fresnaye exhibited in the Armory Show, see Milton W. Brown, The Story of the Armory Show (Greenwich: New York Graphic Society, 1963), p. 259.
17. SP, p.45.
18. Ibid., p. 55.
19. In this period the painting was in the collection of Leo and Gertrude Stein in Paris; when reproduced in the Picasso/Matisse issue of Camera Work (August 1912), it was identified only by the caption "Spanish Village."
20. Kreymborg, Troubadour, p. 201.
21. When I was compiling information for my dissertation on Man Ray, his widow, Juliet, told me that this painting was never returned from the Man Ray exhibition held at the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1981. This painting, however, does not appear among the works listed as having been shown in this exhibition (see Jean-Hubert Martin, ed., Man Ray, Centre Georges Pompidou, December 10, 1981 - April 12, 1982).
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