Mime
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.
Artwork Details
- Title: Mime
- Artist: Man Ray (American, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 1890–1976 Paris)
- Date: 1916
- Medium: Oil on paperboard
- Dimensions: 24 3/16 × 18 3/16 in. (61.4 × 46.2 cm)
- Classification: Paintings
- Credit Line: Gift of Everett B. Birch, 1982
- Object Number: 1982.333
- Rights and Reproduction: © 2025 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
- Curatorial Department: Modern and Contemporary Art
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