Le Violon d'Ingres

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Le Violon d'Ingres (French for Ingres's Violin) is a black and white photograph created by American visual artist Man Ray in 1924. It became one of his most known photographs and of surrealist photography. The picture was first published at the Surrealist magazine Littérature, in June 1924.[1][2]

Analysis[]

The photograph takes his name from a popular French expression, le violon d'Ingres, which means a hobby, in reference to the fact that the French neoclassical painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres used to play violon as a pastime when he wasn't painting. Man Ray admired Ingres work and he drew inspiration from his painting The Valpinçon Bather (1808) for this photograph.

He had his model and then lover Kiki de Montparnasse posing for him. In a first photograph, Étude pour Le Violon d'Ingres, she is seen of profile, with her face and breasts visible.[3] In the final picture, she is depicted in a similar way to the female model of Ingres, nude and seated, looking slightly to her left, seen from the back and with an oriental inspired turban. Her arms aren't visible. After the picture was originally taken, he painted in a print the f-holes of the violin on her back, and had the print rephotographed, creating the present work of art.[4]

The title humorously shows the model's torso as a musical instrument, and plays with the fact that she was the artists model and lover at the same time.[5]

Kirsten Hoving Powell stated on the photograph: "Le Violon d'Ingres is a complex photograph that demonstrates Man Ray's long‐standing admiration for Ingres, as well as his desire to mock tradition. Man Ray's distortion and deformation of the model's body engage Surrealist concepts of metamorphosis and formlessness, but they also belong to a larger context of fascination for Ingres's manipulations of anatomy during the interwar period, as seen in the writings of critics such as André Lhote."[6]

There are prints of the photograph at the Centre Pompidou, in Paris, and at the J. Paul Getty Museum, in Los Angeles.[7][4]

References[]

  1. ^ "Ingre's Violin, 1924 by Man Ray". www.manray.net.
  2. ^ "Man Ray | Le Violon d'Ingres, 1924". LUMAS.
  3. ^ "Etude pour Le Violon d'Ingres". Centre Pompidou.
  4. ^ a b "Le Violon d'Ingres (Ingres's Violin) (Getty Museum)". The J. Paul Getty in Los Angeles.
  5. ^ "Man Ray Artworks & Famous Art". The Art Story.
  6. ^ Powell, Kirsten Hoving (February 9, 2000). "Le Violon d'Ingres: Man Ray's Variations on Ingres, Deformation, Desire and de Sade". Art History. 23 (5): 772–799. doi:10.1111/1467-8365.00243 – via Wiley Online Library.
  7. ^ "Le Violon d'Ingres". Centre Pompidou.
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