Self-portrait of Man Ray (from Carl Van Vechten - Van Vechten Collection at Library of Congress (1934))

Man Ray (Philadelphia, 1890 – Paris, 1976), photographer and artist, visited the Poincaré Institute in Paris, together with Max Ernst (1891 – 1976), painter and sculptor, between 1934 and 1936. In that Institute, a series of mathematical models were kept, models that the surrealist artist Man Ray portrayed in about 30 photos, thinking that they convey an “aspect également troublant pour le profane”. In his autobiography, Man Ray talks about his experience in this way: “Among the pictures that I brought from France, there were some that I took in the 30s as the basis for some paintings that I never accomplished. They represented objects made with wood, metals, chalk and wireframe, kept in old dusty boxes at the Poincaré Institute, made with the aim to represent algebraic equations. The formulas that went with each one of those models meant nothing to me, but the shapes of the objects were as various and authentic as the ones of any natural objects. To my eyes, the fact that they were made by a human being and that they couldn’t be considered as abstract artefacts as Breton feared the first time I showed them to him, added more importance to them. All the abstract art seems to me like a series of fragments, enlargements of nature’s or art’s details, meanwhile, these objects were complete microcosms. When I was painting them I wasn’t copying them exactly. Instead, every time I composed a painting, I modified the proportions, adjusted the colours, ignoring the mathematical intent and sometimes introducing a shape like a butterfly or the leg of a table. I prepared about 15 of them and I named the series “The Shakespearean Equations”; then, I gave each painted symbol the title of one of Shakespeare’s comedies, the first one that came to my mind. For example, in the last one of the series called “All’s Well that Ends Well”, someone wanted to see a symbolic relation between the subject and the title. These paintings were shown in a personal exhibition at Copley’s Gallery. The title of the exhibition catalogue, “To Be Continued Unnoticed”, was prophetic: no critics talked about my demonstration that went unobserved even to the eyes of the collectors, except for the few who knew me personally. Al Lewin bought the “The Taming of the Shrew” and the Weschers bought another painting that I created just for them, almost a second thought, without Shakespearean title." (Man Ray, Self-portrait, Milan 1998, pp. 299-300) Man Ray’s experience with mathematical models doesn’t end with pictures, as from 1948 to 1954 he created a series of paintings, reunited under the title of “Shakespearean Equations”. Then, aspiring to a better recognition of its artistic talent, which he actually obtained thanks to this series, the artist tried to minimize the importance of their photographic source..