Le Violon d'Ingres

The photograph takes its name from a popular French expression, le violon d'Ingres, which means a hobby, in reference to the fact that the French neoclassical painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres used to play the violin as a pastime when he was not painting. Man Ray admired Ingres's work and he drew inspiration from his painting The Valpinçon Bather (1808) for this photograph.

He had his model and then lover Kiki de Montparnasse pose for him. In a first photograph, Étude pour Le Violon d'Ingres, she is seen of profile, with her face and breasts visible.[3] In the final picture, she is depicted in a similar way to the female model of Ingres, nude and seated, looking slightly to her left, seen from the back and with an oriental inspired turban. Her arms are not visible. After the photograph was developed, he painted on a print the f-holes of a violin onto her back, and had the print rephotographed, creating the present work of art.[4]

The title humorously shows Ray's goal of depicting the model's torso as a musical instrument, and plays with the fact that she was the artist's model and lover at the same time.[5]

Kirsten Hoving Powell stated on the photograph: "Le Violon d'Ingres is a complex photograph that demonstrates Man Ray's long‐standing admiration for Ingres, as well as his desire to mock tradition. Man Ray's distortion and deformation of the model's body engage Surrealist concepts of metamorphosis and formlessness, but they also belong to a larger context of fascination for Ingres's manipulations of anatomy during the interwar period, as seen in the writings of critics such as André Lhote."[6]

An original print of Le Violon d'Ingres set a new record for the most expensive photograph when it sold for $12,400,000, on 14 May 2022, at Christie's New York.[7]

There are prints of the photograph at the Musée National d'Art Moderne, in Paris, and at the J. Paul Getty Museum, in Los Angeles.[8][4]

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