The Social World

Author: Suzanna Murawski

  • Man Ray is alluring in the way a psychopath is

    Man Ray is alluring in the way a psychopath is

    Down to his chosen name, Man Ray (born Emmanuel Radnitzky in Philadelphia in 1890) worked hard to squash anything about him you might call human. At least that’s what is suggested by the Met’s exhibition Man Ray: When Objects Dream. The show spans much of his career – he was associated with surrealism and dada, held a day job as a commercial photographer and experimented with almost every medium imaginable – but coheres around his so-called rayographs, also known, in less egotistical fashion, as photograms.

    Many will know this medium from elementary school: place objects on top of a light-sensitive sheet and expose them to light to yield white silhouettes against a dark background. These and the other works on view are weird and alluring in the way that a sleek, beautiful sociopath is.

    The show floats around the artist’s career from about the mid-1910s to the mid-1930s, by which time he had achieved avant-garde stardom. We find mechanistic, brutish paintings of color planes; airbrushed canvases with all the technical shortcomings of a Magritte and little of the charm; cliché-verres of spindly, dancing lines; “primitive” sculptures; a slick chess board; and much more. A mobile of cascading clothes hangers casts a rotating, crystalline shadow on the floor. A pair of 1918-20 photographs titled “L’homme” and “La femme” – an eggbeater and an assemblage including two side-by-side reflectors, respectively – are chuckle-worthy in their anatomical punning but slightly sinister, not least because Man Ray at one point switched their titles. There’s a void at the heart of these works. It’s not that the artist is trying to conceal the artist’s hand; it’s that whatever hand is there isn’t quite human.

    The central room holds most of the rayographs, rectangles of rich black hues hung on black walls. The white negative space takes the shape of combs, cones, eggs, nails, the cubic limits of crystal prisms, even two ghostly banjos, fuzzy with translucent drums and rings of reflective chrome. Also displayed here is one of the exhibition’s several films: “Le retour à la raison” (1923), a scattershot series of reverse silhouettes. Most of the reel was developed using the same method as the rayographs, but the images are interspersed with shots including a headless woman’s nude torso. The film reveals that the pictures sometimes work better when they flash by quickly rather than when they linger. What’s striking about the rayographs is that they look as if they were made by someone who doesn’t quite know what household objects are used for – or who wants to make everyone else forget. Q-tips, matches, a wing bolt attached to a screw – we can no longer recognize them by their utility, let alone imagine picking them up. Each object is hollowed of its purpose; only outline remains. As each object’s human ends are washed away, so too is its essence.

    The exhibition’s insight is in linking the rayographs to the other realms of Man Ray’s oeuvre: the curators, Stephanie D’Alessandro and Stephen C. Pinson, make clear that this was all conceived by the same mind. Exit the rayograph galleries and take a look at the infamous “Cadeau” (1921), a flatiron with a cruel line of tacks glued to its face. Initially, you may see glimmers of humor, play or strange magic. But those soon fade, leaving only the cold glint of alienation. It’s no comfort to read André Breton, the author of the first Surrealist Manifesto, writing that Man Ray treated his human subjects just like his nonhuman ones: “How astonished they would be if I told them they are participants for exactly the same reasons as a quartz gun, a bunch of keys, hoar-frost or fern!”

    Though Breton’s writings recur throughout the show, Man Ray never officially joined the surrealists’ ranks. He also dipped in and out of dada, the iconoclastic movement whose founder, Tristan Tzara, lavished the rayographs with praise, providing the title for the exhibition. The catalog cites Man Ray’s “aversion to anything ‘beyond the control of one man,’ meaning himself.” This could just as well explain the artist’s attempt to treat his human subjects as virtually inanimate. What’s beyond the control of one man if not another man?

    Despite refusing to carry any membership cards, however, Man Ray did photograph the surrealists’ “sleeping fits,” induced trances during which they documented the visions that came to them. He later said of the sessions, in which he declined to participate, “It has never been my object to record my dreams, just the determination to realize them.” The question hangs in the air: what’s the difference? We record our dreams to refer back to them, with the aim to understand the waking world as much as the sleeping one. But to realize a dream is to form the waking world in its mold. If these works are what Man Ray’s dreams look like, that’s not so innocent a wish.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 24, 2025 World edition.

  • Vermeer’s Love Letters is something of a riddle

    Vermeer’s Love Letters is something of a riddle

    Johannes Vermeer (1632-75) is doubtless a blockbuster artist, but the Frick’s exhibition, Vermeer’s Love Letters, is the size of a postage stamp – or, maybe more fittingly, a wax seal. The Frick has three Vermeers of its own, but only one made the cut: “Mistress and Maid” (c. 1664-67). From the 37 known works by the artist, the museum has only borrowed two to bolster the show: “Woman Writing a Letter with her Maid” (c. 1670-72) and “The Love Letter” (c. 1669-70). Each depicts a woman, her maid and at least one letter somewhere in the mix. Though we don’t know exactly what’s written in those papers, it’s fair to say that these discreet works have an air of romance.

    The show’s effect is something of a riddle. Why has the Frick picked these three? Why exclude the collection’s other Vermeers? Are they the same mistresses and maids in each? How can we be sure that these are, in fact, love letters? Installed in one room without fanfare, the paintings become mysteries, enticing and deserving of attention precisely because there are so few.

    The first is “The Love Letter,” the smallest of the bunch. We’re looking through a door, with two walls closing in like a proscenium, everything before the aperture in shadow. Through the opening, we see light washing across the room from an out-of-sight window. The mistress is playing the cittern, or was. Rumpled sheet music sits on dimmed shelves. When we catch her, she’s been interrupted. She turns over her shoulder to see the maid holding a small, wax-sealed paper. She looks apprehensive, surprised. The maid, standing in contrapposto hidden by a lumpy blue skirt, wears a slight smile. She knows what’s going on, even if we don’t. Perhaps hers is a look of approval, perhaps more “I told you so.”

    “Mistress and Maid” hangs in the middle. We’re close to the pair this time, and the background is only a sweep of umber. The mistress, wearing the same dress as in “The Love Letter,” sits in profile, penning a letter. And as in “The Love Letter,” she looks up at the maid, who brings her another note. The mood is calmer here: there isn’t the same wonder in the woman’s eyes this time, nor the knowing excitement in the maid’s.

    In the last painting on show, “Woman Writing a Letter with Her Maid,” the women don’t interact. While the mistress writes with great care, the maid stands behind her at the composition’s center, gazing out of the window. A gentle breeze pushes at one of the curtains. Perhaps she is waiting for her mistress to finish the missive, or she’s standing guard in case a prying mother intrudes on the lady’s privacy. On the floor before the writing desk there’s some debris, striking in this otherwise well-kept interior. An opened letter, a burgundy wax stick and a red wax circle sit next to the feet of a chair, pulled out from under the table, as if in a tizzy, and left that way.

    Without Vermeer’s subtlety, aided by the Frick’s spare curation, how could we puzzle over this work for so long?

    Even if visitors aren’t quite convinced that these are love letters, the catalogue assures us it is so. From the 1650s and the 1670s, the love-letter genre swept Dutch art, and with these works Vermeer jumped on the bandwagon. Often these scenes were painted in pairs – one of a man, one of a woman – but Vermeer’s women stood alone. Without such companion pieces, even more is left to the imagination.

    Perhaps that’s just right for the subject of courtship and love, a domain in which discretion is key and uncertainty is a rite of passage. Around this time, a popular Dutch love-letter manual encouraged young women, in response to a suitor’s forwardness, to remain modest and decline even if they were interested. (The Frick’s catalogue is apologetic about this backwardness.) The paintings are just as reticent. Without Vermeer’s subtlety, aided by the Frick’s spare curation, how could we puzzle over his works for so long?

    As we gaze into these scenes, Vermeer pulls us into a kind of romance. The paintings’ beauty is an invitation to look longer, but the artist must remain coy if we are to fall in love. The concealment of inner life, which these works have mastered, is essential: wishing to know and behold someone in toto involves the feeling that you don’t yet know enough. Give us too much information and an artwork becomes heavy-handed, didactic and overbearing, no matter how technically accomplished it is. By teasing us with letters we can’t read and inner lives we can never divine, Vermeer’s Love Letters makes us into a besotted suitor in the face of these paintings, peering into the window-frame again and again to get a little closer to grasping what the lady is really thinking.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 15, 2025 World edition.