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.
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