“This looks like the kind of work my high school students turn in.”
I was making my way out of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City just before closing when I halted in front of Man Ray’s “Torso.” “Torso” compares well, I thought, with what I see on a daily basis in the margins of looseleaf. Small chess pieces sit in one corner. Drab lines cross the surface like the exposed springs of a mattress. Faint blocks of color erase whatever was there before. But the gold makes me stop. “Torso” glimmers with the same gilded background that coats many religious images and my own paintings. Wait—is this an icon?
The painting hardly resembles anything devotional. Its title doesn’t remotely suggest it either. But the gold makes it feel religious. Down the hall and to the left, the Met’s Byzantine collection houses icons gilded in a similar fashion. Behind every Hodegetria and saint is a similar golden expanse. In those medieval works, gold is not simply a decorative choice but a symbol for divine light, radiance that points to another spiritual dimension. “Torso” shares little with these icons, except for this. Perhaps “Torso” is an icon of the future.
The comparison here might trouble an art historian. Sacred art and Surrealism come from opposite worlds. Iconography veils divinity through stylized forms and symbolic colors. Surrealism uncovers a deeper reality under sensible form. Both seek escape from the world, but for drastically different reasons.
It’s doubtful that Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitzky), a clandestine Jewish artist from the early 20th century, was interested in Christian sacred art. Although some Jewish medieval artwork featured golden backdrops (such as the Golden Haggadah), it is unlikely that Man Ray, a secular artist, would engage with such an ancient, religiously charged symbol. There is nothing to suggest that he was interested in making an icon. But “Torso” seems to combine both traditions in my imagination: gold beneath abstracted figures, hiding meaning in plain sight.
“Torso” is one of a few paintings in the Met’s exhibit, “Man Ray: When Objects Dream.” Most of the exhibit explores Ray’s rayographs, his process of cameraless photography made by placing objects directly onto photosensitive paper. His images are photos without apparatuses, paintings without brushes and artworks without an artist. He removes himself as much as possible from the process, leaving only his pseudonym, Man Ray; a sort of self-erasure to keep his biography from contaminating the work.
Effacement is central to iconography as well. The anonymous medieval artist minimized the trace of the human hand, fearing that too much personal style would obscure divine encounter. Some medieval artworks were revered as acheiropoieta, not made by human hands. Icons and other religious artworks were viewed less as individual expressions, but as events, windows through which the divine is not merely represented but re-presented. Hiding, in both cases, is a prerequisite to the revelation of ultimate reality.
Hiding the punchline
I only stopped by the exhibit to give homage to an odd sewing machine.
Or at least the thought of one. “The Enigma of Isidore Ducasse” is a favorite of mine. I often refer to this piece when teaching my freshmen about Surrealism and the nature of art. The artwork refers to a famous line from the poet, better known as Lautréamont, who described Surrealism, “as beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table.” Man Ray gives that joke three-dimensional form but hides the punchline. The contraption is concealed. A dark green cloth veils the object, held together by thin rope. It’s as if the curators forgot to unpack it for the exhibition. The viewer is denied their role. Ducasse’s dream is not hidden, but withheld. Surrealism, and perhaps all beauty, frustrates our longing for clarity. The imagination must complete the artwork from what the eyes can see.
Medieval artists approached their work with a similar vision. Abstracted figures are not failures of realism but rejections of it in favor of something more. The figures, colors and symbols act like cloths covering the real thing. Gold leaf, especially, does not create illusionistic space; it illuminates space. The gold leaf in “Torso” might have a similar meaning-making function. Lee Miller, one of Man Ray’s friends and collaborators, notes that the gold reflects the light back into the room. The gold shines the light back on the viewer, as Man Ray would use light to create rayographs. The art object now illuminates the person.
Aside from the gold, both the icon and Man Ray’s work invite us to look in new ways. Scribbles reveal more than they conceal, figures carry symbolic weight, and all features of the artwork open space for the imagination to play and for another reality to come alive. Each work is a puzzle for the viewer to piece together. Every artwork is a game of hide-and-seek.
Man Ray loved games, and art seemed to be his favorite. He designed chess sets and invented other board games like “Boardwalk” as art objects. He painted knights, queens and rooks. He had an unusual devotion to these childlike delights. Marcel Duchamp, a champion of Dada art, once defined his friend as a noun that means “de joie, jouer, jouir” (joy, to play, to enjoy). Jean Cocteau, another friend of his, said that Man Ray, “will nourish our minds with those dangerous games it craves.” Art functions the way children play pretend. Sticks become swords, stumps become thrones and the neighbor’s dog becomes a dragon. The artwork is the piece in our game of pretend. The imagination keeps it all together. Yet for the Surrealist, it is through this game that we can access the secrets of reality.
Play in sacred art
“Torso,” like every other work in “Man Ray: When Objects Dream,” invites this game. The obscured doodles of chess pieces suggest this connection between artwork and games. Each part of an artwork is an opening move where the viewer—a misleading term—makes his or her response. And perhaps for those who are religious, it is an important reminder of the need for play when it comes to sacred art. Perhaps this is what Jesus could mean when he says we must be childlike to enter the kingdom of heaven?
“Torso” is not a religious icon in the traditional sense, certainly. And there is no evidence that Man Ray intended a connection with the icon, for whatever that is worth. But at least in my imagination (and isn’t that the point?) it behaves like an icon. It hides so we can seek. It reveals through concealing. It allows us to see into another reality, not with our eyes, but through other means.
For those steeped in Ignatian spirituality, this makes intuitive sense. Ignatian contemplation is synonymous with imaginative contemplation. An encounter with God occurs in the mind of the one who enters into the stories. Scripture does not hand us tidy answers, as if to give us a sneak peek at the answer key to life’s test. It is a book of games, and each scene is an opportunity to play with God. We play our way to understanding.
By engaging with art imaginatively, we can encounter that deeper reality that the Surrealists have always sought in their artwork. Perhaps Christians and Surrealists seek the same thing, the same person. To find God in all things means that the divine is probably hiding here in some form that we would not immediately recognize: a rayograph, a readymade, or a squiggle painting. All we have to do is look for that Ultimate Reality underneath what our eyes can see. “Man Ray: When Objects Dream” is a playground to do just that.
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