The Mime
Man Ray American
The Mime belongs to a series of early experimental compositions that anticipate Man Ray’s contributions to the international Dada movement in the late 1910s and the 1920s. While the composition looks deceptively like a collage of cut-and-pasted papers, the artist rendered it entirely in oil paint that he manipulated with a variety of tools. Man Ray used a palette knife to build up the paint, a comb to make the crosshatched lines in fanlike shapes, and a fork to produce the surface in the green form. The overall effect of the composition is deliberately ambiguous, neither mechanical nor organic.
This image cannot be enlarged, viewed at full screen, or downloaded.