The Rug was painted when Man Ray was developing a complex formalist program that he published in the form of a small booklet in 1916 called A Primer of the New Art of Two Dimensions. There he proposed that all the arts—not only painting, sculpture, and architecture, but also dance, literature, and music—could be unified if their individual modes of expression were reduced to the flat plane. Man Ray was so taken by this theory that when his works were hung in the Daniel Gallery in 1915 (The Rug likely being among them), he insisted that sheets of cheesecloth be stretched between his pictures, so as to give the impression that they—like Renaissance frescoes—were painted directly on the gallery’s flat walls.

Provenance

Exhibitions

New York, Montross Gallery, Exhibition of Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture, 1915, no. 47

Pasadena, California, The Pasadena Art Institute, Retrospective Exhibition, 1913–1944: Paintings, Drawings, Watercolors, Photographs by Man Ray, 1944, no. 8

Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Art Museum, Man Ray, 1963, no. 1

Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Man Ray, 1966, no. 12, illustrated p. 69

Rome, Galleria Il Collezionista d’Arte Contemporanea, Man Ray, opere 1914–1973, 1973, illustrated in color p. 19 

New York, New York Cultural Center, Man Ray: Inventor / Painter / Poet, 1974–75, no. 8

London, Institute of Contemporary Arts, Man Ray, 1975, no. 7

Rome, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Man Ray: L’occhio e il suo doppio: dipinti, collages, disegni, invenzioni fotografiche, oggetti d’affezione, libri, cinema, 1975, no. 17, illustrated (mentioned p. 57)

Turin, Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Man Ray, la costruzione dei sensi, 1995–96, illustrated in color p. 2

Nice, Musée d’Art Moderne et d’Art Contemporain, Man Ray. Rétrospective, 1912–1976, 1997, illustrated in color p. 36

Montclair, New Jersey, Montclair Art Museum; Athens, Georgia Museum of Art and Chicago, Terra Museum of American Art, Conversion to Modernism: The Early Work of Man Ray, 2003–4, no. 119, illustrated in color p. 97 (mentioned p. 96)

New York, Di Donna Galleries, Enigma & Desire: Man Ray Paintings, 2019, illustrated in color p. 65 (mentioned pp. 13-14)

Literature

L. Vinci Masini, Man Ray, Florence, 1974, fig. 2, illustrated in color

R. Penrose, Man Ray, London, 1975, fig. 10, illustrated p. 39 (mentioned p. 37)

K. Anhold Rabbito, ‘Man Ray in Quest of Modernism’ in the Rutgers Art Review, vol. 2, January 1981, fig. 7, illustrated p. 62 (mentioned p. 62)

F.M. Naumann, ‘Man Ray and America: The New York and Ridgefield Years: 1907–1921,’ Ph.D. dissertation, Graduate Center of the City University of New York, 1988, no. 220, illustrated p. 765 (vol. 2, mentioned pp. 171 and 120)

Publications

The entangled figures Man Ray depicted in this painting were likely meant to represent himself and his wife, Adon Lacroix, a Belgian painter and poet whom he had married on May 3, 1914. We know that she played the guitar, but Man Ray may have included this instrument to signify more than his affection for his wife. He possibly intended to allude to the union of painting and music, a theme that many artists who painted in an abstract style evoked in this period, reasoning that if music could be understood and enjoyed without a specific subject, why not painting? The shape of the reclining figure in the foreground is articulated to echo the profile of the distant mountain range, a repetition of form that might have contributed to the painting’s title, The Rug, for the overall effect is not dissimilar to the decorative patterns found in Native American weavings or Persian rugs. Indeed, in having selected this title, Man Ray may have intended a reference to former president Theodore Roosevelt’s review of the Armory Show in 1913, where he infamously compared Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (1912; Philadelphia Museum of Art) to a Navajo rug.

     The Rug was painted when Man Ray was developing a complex formalist program that he published in the form of a small booklet in 1916 called A Primer of the New Art of Two Dimensions. There he proposed that all the arts—not only painting, sculpture, and architecture, but also dance, literature, and music—could be unified if their individual modes of expression were reduced to the flat plane. Man Ray was so taken by this theory that when his works were hung in the Daniel Gallery in 1915 (The Rug likely being among them), he insisted that sheets of cheesecloth be stretched between his pictures, so as to give the impression that they—like Renaissance frescoes—were painted directly on the gallery’s flat walls.