‘Painting is directed by the heart through the eye. Photography is directed by the mind through the eye. But desire and love for the subject direct both mediums. One cannot replace the other’ – Man Ray

Man Ray had fled war-torn Europe during the summer of 1940, returning to America with just a single suitcase filled with a selection of Rayographs, drawings and watercolours, while the rest of his work remained in Paris. Settling in Hollywood the following year, the artist entered a period of intense creativity as he began to reflect upon his career to date, revisiting and reworking earlier compositions and subjects from his oeuvre. As he explained, it was here in California that he ‘could now concentrate on the long-range project of re-establishing myself as a painter. There was plenty to do. Besides the reconstruction of apparently lost works, I had sketches and notes for new ones which I hadn’t had time to realise in Paris’ (quoted in R. Penrose, Man Ray, London 1975, p. 149). Dating from 1940-1945, Acrobat appears to fall into this final category of innovative works, and reveals the direction of Man Ray’s thoughts at the height of his Hollywood years, as he returned to his explorations of pure geometric form as a means of expression. As with many of his abstract compositions of these years, Man Ray takes as his starting point a figurative motif, in this case the architecture of the human figure, seated on a slightly tilting surface, with their knees pulled up towards their chest. Reducing the figure to a series of flat planes, each filled with bright hues of colour, Man Ray explores a complex interplay of two- and three-dimensional form, figuration and abstraction, revealing the continued influence of Cubism and Orphism on his painterly vocabulary.

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Andrew Strauss and Timothy Baum of the Man Ray Expertise Committee have confirmed the authenticity of this work and that it will be included in the Catalogue of Paintings of Man Ray, currently in preparation.