Les Mannequins - Résurrection des mannequins

First edition, one of 37 numbered copies, ours one of a few hors commerce copies for collaborators and friends, signed by Man Ray on the justification. 15 photographs on watermarked vélin Montgolfier mounted on guards, each bearing Man Ray’s printed studio stamp (“Épreuve originale atelier Man Ray Paris”). The copy exceptionally contains the original subscription prospectus and an invitation to the book launch exhibition opening night organised by Simone Loliée.

Publisher’s binding by the renowned bookbinder Mercher, bearing his signature in the negative of the photographic paper on each endpaper and pastedown, flat black shagreen spine, title, author and date stamped in gilt lengthwise, photographic boards with gilt background after an original composition by Man Ray specially designed for this work, original wrappers preserved, black paper slipcase.

Illustrated with 15 original photographic prints of the mannequins photographed by Man Ray at the 1938 International Exhibition of Surrealism.  The mannequins had been transformed by Man Ray himself, Salvador Dalí, Oscar Dominguez, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Espinoza, Maurice Henry, Marcel Jean, Léo Malet, André Masson, Sonia Mossé, Joan Miró, Wolfgang Paalen, Kurt Seligmann and Yves Tanguy. They were presented within a Surrealist staging by Marcel Duchamp and lighting designed by Man Ray himself.

During the 1930s, the European Surrealists had a fetishistic interest in simulated woman-female mannequins that they transformed into playful, sculptural works of art. In 1938, Man Ray photographed a series of their work at the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme presented in the unsettling half-light of the Galerie des Beaux-Arts on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Visitors walking down a corridor on the “Rue Surréaliste” saw a series of dressmakers’ mannequins, inhabitants of a dreamlike Paris scantily clad or adorned with a jumble of incongruous objects and flanked by street signs bearing highly symbolic names: some real, such as the Rue des Vieilles Lanternes where Gérard de Nerval took his own life, or the Rue Vivienne where Lautréamont once lived, alongside invented ones such as the Rue aux Lèvres, the Rue de Tous-les-Diables and the Rue de la Transfusion-de-Sang. 

The installations of this first international Parisian Surrealist exhibition organised by André Breton and Éluard marked a decisive moment in the history of the movement. For the first time, the event dispensed with a straightforward retrospective of individual artists in favour of a series of phantasmagorical stagings, live performances and ephemeral artworks, prefiguring the modern concepts of “installation” and “happening”. Nearly 3,000 visitors are said to have thronged to this 1938 Paris exhibition by the light of electric torches: “One has the feeling of leaning over certain exhumed walls, and of being the first to decipher their signs.” (Jean Fraysse, Le Figaro littéraire, 29 January 1938).

From Hausmann’s sculpture and de Chirico’s paintings to the works of Hans Bellmer, the mannequin had long occupied a central place in the Dada and Surrealist artistic vocabulary, and was cited in Breton’s 1924 Manifeste. These “woman-objects” staged in the spirit of the Musée Grévin offered infinite possibilities for the transformation of the body and the exploration of the unconscious.

Some have remained enduringly celebrated, such as Le Bâillon vert à bouche de pensée, André Masson’s mannequin enclosed in a birdcage, or Duchamp’s, considered the only “three-dimensional” version of his alter ego Rrose Sélavy, taking the form of a man cross-dressed as a woman in the style of Claude Cahun. The mannequin of lesbian artist Sonia Mossé — friend of Artaud and photographed by Man Ray with Nusch — is her only known artwork and the sole mannequin in the installation created by a woman artist. Man Ray had incorporated into his own mannequin the crystal tears seen on his celebrated portrait Les Larmes [The Tears] (1932-1933) and later “resurrected” (in the words of the portfolio’s title) these vanished figures he had photographed nearly thirty years ago.  Man Ray also designed the binding and persuaded the great surrealist printer Guy Lévis Mano to design and print the pages. The series begins by a descriptive text which underscores the eminently erotic and sadomasochistic character of this collective installation:

“In 1938 nineteen nude young women were kidnapped from the windows of the large stores and subjected to the frenzy of the Surrealists who immediately deemed it their duty to violate them, each in his own original and inimitable manner but without any consideration whatsoever for the feelings of the victims who nevertheless submitted with charming goodwill to the homage and outrage that were inflicted on them, with the result that they aroused the excitement of a certain Man Ray who undid and took out his equipment and recorded the orgy.”

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A rare and emblematic series of photographs by Man Ray — appointed “master of the lights” of the exhibition — bringing Surrealist objects out of the shadows and challenging the very notion of the artwork as a lasting object thus opening the way to the concept of ephemeral installations.

“Standing in a row, like suits of armour, women (dream-captures) wait beneath an indecent light. These human figures floated through our memories. One of them, who bears a strange resemblance to the bride from Great Expectations, Dickens’s novel, sheltered beneath a tattered and fragile veil (touch it with a finger and it would crumble to dust), is wreathed in the mystery of recluses in mouldering apartments. On her head, wings spread wide, a night bird keeps watch. Mushrooms have crept up her legs. Somewhere, shutters are heard slamming.” (Jean Fraysse, ibid.).