lorer 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. Laurence des Cars, one of the curators, said, “Sade’s influence has been enormous in every sphere of Modernist art. His aim was to destroy every illusion surrounding human sexuality, be it historical, moral or religious, which inspired artists to look at the body in a new way.”