Élevage de poussière (Dust Breeding)
This close-up shows a section of Marcel Duchamp’s not yet completed assemblage The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (1915–23; Philadelphia Museum of Art). The composition accentuates the dust and debris that had accumulated on the glass surface of the work in the artist’s studio. Man Ray’s photograph renders Duchamp’s art thrillingly strange, much like the objects that sometimes appear indecipherable in rayographs. When this image was reproduced a few years later in the French magazine Littérature, it was captioned as “a view taken from an airplane.”
Artwork Details
- Title: Élevage de poussière (Dust Breeding)
- Artist: Man Ray (American, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 1890–1976 Paris)
- Date: 1920
- Medium: Gelatin silver print
- Dimensions: 2 13/16 × 4 5/16 in. (7.1 × 11 cm)
- Classification: Photographs
- Credit Line: Bluff Collection, Promised Gift of John A. Pritzker
- Rights and Reproduction: © Man Ray 2015 Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY / ADAGP, Paris 2025
- Curatorial Department: Modern and Contemporary Art
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