ed with a more utopian government in the South Pacific. Man Ray said, “I read all the novels of Sade, I have some rare editions, Juliette for example, and especially Aline and Valcour which is the most important, in my opinion, because it is all the political issues that are dealt with and very little pornography.” This particular painting is the most overtly surreal of the bunch, and is essentially a variation, or combination, of an image he created of a decapitated woman’s head underneath a glass dome for Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution, and an early photograph of a wooden sketching model.
This is the most abstract of these images, with no overt connection to Sade outside of its title, but the French writer’s work would also influence Man Ray’s photography—for which he is primarily remembered—in more subtle ways. While his surreal, photographic experiments and various forms of print work are celebrated, as well as his portraits of muses and friends like Lee Miller, his erotic photography hasn’t received the attention it deserves—possibly because of the sadomasochistic nature of some of it.
Much has already been written about the Surrealist obsession with and use of the female form, which is often seen as misogynistic in nature. It certainly celebrates a symbolic function of womanhood, rather than an attempt to realistically portray women or their experiences. Dave Bate writes, “The female nude stands in for the image of the idealizing of love. She is love personified, the unattainable thing they crave in their ‘imagination.’” Some of Man Ray’s erotic photography represents the contradiction found throughout Surrealism, with the dream of idealized love always at odds with the fixation on violence and destruction. This is exemplified in Nu attaché (Tied Naked) from 1930.
These sadomasochistic experiments have recently been touched on in The Strange World of Willie Seabrook, written by Seabrook’s partner Marjorie Worthington and published by the wonderful Spurl Editions. Seabrook was a writer and an explorer of sorts, and was friends with many in the Surrealist circle. Man Ray photographed some of his sadomasochistic play with various women (including Man Ray’s then-partner and artistic collaborator, Lee Miller). Man Ray spoke of an apparently mundane encounter at Seabrook’s New York apartment: “In the middle of the floor sat a statuesque woman, like an odalisque, quite nude and decorated with strings of pearls, bracelets, and rings. He introduced her as his secretary, but she did not move or speak. He informed me that she was condemned to silence for twenty-four hours.”
Man Ray himself spoke, in his autobiography and throughout his art, of his own tendency towards sadomasochism, though he was not as overtly sadistic as Seabrook. In Please Touch: Dada and Surrealist Objects After the Readymade, Janine A. Mileaf writes, “Man Ray’s autobiography conforms to the contracts of the confession by revealing his sexual proclivities and professing a tendency towards sadomasochism, but his art object exceeds the codified narrative of violent eroticism presented in his text.” My favorite of all his Sadeian works is this early photograph, Prayer, from 1930.
Like Monument à D.A.F. de Sade, it is a simple image that uses the nude female form to suggest depravity, blasphemy, and decadence while actually showing very little. The woman is bent, perhaps kneeling in supplication and prayer, but the implication is that prayer and sexual penetration may be conflated. An truly radical atheist, willing to die for his philosophical convictions (a real possibility in 18th century France), part of Sade’s function as a liberator is in his extreme rejection of religion and conventional morality. These are the central qualities that drew the Surrealists to him and that come through quite powerfully in Man Ray’s work—particularly, for me, in Prayer.
And these works still have the power to shock and offend. A recent example includes a 2014 Musee d’Orsay exhibit on depictions of Sade and the Sadeian in art that caused somewhat of a scandal. La