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Among the other sitters for Man Ray’s lens at this point were the Japanese artist Foujita, in what must be a wig, a broad-jawed Ernest Hemingway trying to be confrontational, James Joyce with his head in his hand and Schoenberg looking like a moody method actor. Here, too, is the famous shot ‘Le Violon d’Ingres’: a nude in a turban with f-holes photogrammed on her back. The suggestion is that she’s there to be played: the Surrealists always were a sexist bunch.
A photograph of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas at home in their apartment with peeling, mottled walls behind the modern masterpieces, implies that the good ladies found a practical use for their Cézannes and Picassos: to cover their damp patches. That’s style. Elsewhere we have Jean Cocteau looking soulful or framing himself like a picture, Duchamp posing naked as Adam, Derain in his motor car and the wonderfully peasant-looking Vlaminck, whose neck is as broad as his head. These mostly small prints feature composers, mad poets, beauties — all the impedimenta of fashionable society. We are even shown Serge Lifar as Romeo, borrowed from the Elton John collection and predictably over-framed in black and silver. Then we move into a new section entitled ‘Paris 1929–37’, which I suspect is what most visitors will have been waiting for: the advent of Lee Miller.
Lee Miller (1907–77) was a remarkable photographer in her own right, and there have been many books and exhibitions in recent years to prove it, but a lot of people still think of her first as the exquisitely beautiful model and muse of Man Ray. Indeed, Man Ray took some of his finest photographs of her, inspired as he was by love as much as by the desire to make a memorable image through technical experimentation. He had already shown himself an innovator with multiple exposures and inventive lighting, but with Lee as his assistant he discovered solarisation (legendarily when she turned on the light in his darkroom after a mouse ran over her foot), a process of reversal where dark appears light and vice versa, and which led to some intensely haunting portraits. There is a particularly celebrated solarised profile of Miller, but for me some of the nudes of her and the less formal snapshots are more affecting. A portrait shot of her looking dewy-eyed published in the surrealist magazine Minotaure in December 1933 is particularly beguiling.
There are many other photos worth mentioning, but viewers will discover these for themselves. The series of the Surrealists, either together or singly, repay study: naughty boy Dalì, Tanguy the sensual loon, the famous heap of artists in strangleholds, Miró with a noose of flex, and the iconic nude of Meret Oppenheim with printing press. In among these black and white images, Man Ray’s first colour portrait in 1933, of Genica Athanasiou, comes as something of a shock, a vulgarity. The works from Hollywood (1940–50) show him struggling a bit, though there are some fine shots of Juliet Browner, whom he married in 1946. Inspiration diminishes, and the last section (Paris 1951–76) is even more disappointing: best to return to the earlier rooms to see again the cream of his achievement.
If you have time, and feel in need of a dose of painting after all this photography, pop upstairs for an excellent mini-display devoted to Patrick Heron’s portraits of T.S. Eliot (until 22 September). There are 11 items here, from drawings to oil paintings, and at least one of the oils (a cubist version of the poet) has never previously been exhibited. Along with the paintings, there’s a beautiful monotype I’d never seen before (from the British Council Collection) and half a dozen drawings including one in blue crayon which intriguingly combines profile and full-face.
I have been a judge on the Lynn Painter-Stainers Prize this year, an award for representational painting now in its eighth year. Founded to promote the skills of draughtsmanship and ‘realism’, it attracts a very wide range of work, and the usual quota of hopefuls who never read the rules but are prepared to pay the entry fees. To give hundreds of paintings the concentration they deserve is draining, but our panel of five was just about equal to the task, consisting of the highly experienced jurors Ken Howard and Andrew Wilton, together with last year’s prize-winner, the tempera artist Antony Williams (about to have a solo show at Messum’s), and that painter of mysterious cityscapes Nina Murdoch.
Without betraying the secrets of the jury room, I shall merely say that we had a very strong short list from which to select an overall prize-winner (Ruth Stage, see page 39) and five runners-up (Robert Dukes, Danny Markey, Jennifer McRae, Cherry Pickles and George Rowlett). The exhibition is at the Mall Galleries, SW1, until 2 March: see if you agree with our choice.
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