Beschreibung:

MAN RAY -- BENJAMIN PÉRET AND LOUIS ARAGON (authors) 1929 . [Brussels: Éditions de la Revue Variétés, 1929]. 4° (290 x 199mm). Printed on green paper stock, four photographic plates by Man Ray. (Inner margins and a few others expertly repaired, light sunning in the margins.) FINELY BOUND BY JEAN DE GONET, preserving the original printed wrappers, in limp green metallic paper with blue suede doublures and eye-shaped silver title piece with false eye-lashes, and black quarter-morocco case (original wrappers skilfully backed with tissue, extremities lightly sunned). Provenance : Man Ray and Juliet Man Ray -- Drouot Richelieu, 22 June 1999, lot 193 (noting the Man Ray provenance) -- D. Grandsart-Obsis (exhibition catalogue). Exhibited : 'Surrealism: Desire Unbound', London, Tate Modern, 20 September 2001-1 January 2002, and New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 6 February-12 May 2002. FIRST EDITION, ALMOST CERTAINLY MAN RAY'S COPY OF HIS RARE AND NOTORIOUS EROTIC BOOK, AN APPARENTLY UNIQUE, UNNUMBERED COPY ON GREEN PAPER; exhibited at the Tate Modern and MoMA 'Surrealism: Desire Unbound' and described in the catalogue as 'the only know copy on light green paper' (Mundy 2001, p.336). It was common practice for the Surrealists to print a small number of copies in addition to the stated justification de tirage . These copies, on green paper, would usually be reserved for the author, and sometimes given away as gifts, for instance Paul Eluard's L'Amour la poésie , printed in the same year (Paris, 1929), or Blaise Cendrar's Dix-neuf poémes élastiques (Paris, 1919). 1929 , published with the names of all the contributors, is an extraordinarily audacious work, offering a most revealing side of Man Ray. It is testimony to the nascent Surrealist movement's preoccupation with sex, and was published at the instigation of Péret and Aragon, two pioneers of literary Surrealism, to raise funds for Variétés and its editor Edouard Mesens. Mesens, later the doyen of London's Surrealists, 'was, and remained, as hopeless in business as he was charming in person' (Baxter). Aragon proposed the idea to Man Ray, showing him a sample of the erotic poetry for which he wanted illustrations, and Ray gave him a sheaf of photographs of Kiki and himself. Alice Prin, 'Kiki de Montparnasse', a legendary figure in the Montparnasse of the day, had also been Soutine and Foujita's lover. Pia Enfer 937; John Baxter 'Man Ray Laid Bare' in Tate Magazine , issue 3, 2001; cf. Arturo Schwarz Man Ray: The Rigour of Imagination , 1977, pp.240 and 260.