In Ingres’s La Grande Odalisque, 1814, a lounging woman’s absurdly elongated lumbar was lampooned by critics for its anatomical illogic. So severely has the artist taffy tugged his subject’s backbone, medical scholars have since estimated that she has been given at least five additional vertebrae – a malformation that would, in reality, result in profound physical paralysis. Rather than enhancing sexuality, these interventions mistune their subjects’ bodies. In Man Ray’s photograph, the positioning of the f-holes conceptually impair Kiki’s capacity for sound. They silence her.
‘Teasing emblem of love and control’
Nor does it stop there. These blemishes are also marks of enslavement. At the time Man Ray created his work in 1924, f-holes were very much in the air. Once associated chiefly with elite orchestral instruments, their meaning had begun to widen. Modern mandolins had already been equipped with sound holes and the year before Man Ray made Le Violon d’Ingres, Gibson released its L-5 archtop guitar, the first mass-market instrument of its kind to utilise the f-hole, giving the instrument the volume and resonance necessary for performance in dance halls and jazz clubs. Suddenly, f-holes were not simply shorthand for projection and power, they were emblems of commodified culture and mass-produced sound. Tattooed onto Kiki’s back, they brand her and turn her into a thing that is bought and sold.
Paradoxically, however, they also deepen the meaning of the photo, enriching its range of cultural resonance. The violin has long carried occult overtones in art, music and literature – from Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Triumph of Death, 1562, in which death plays a fiddle, to Niccolò Paganini’s unreal violin virtuosity, which sparked rumours of a Faustian pact. The connection between the violin and the world we cannot see was well known to Man Ray’s contemporaries. A decade before Le Violon d’Ingres, Marcel Proust famously likened the experience of hearing a violin “to listening to a captive genie, struggling in the darkness… like a pure and supernatural being that unfolds its invisible message as it goes by”. By merging Kiki’s shape with that of a violin, Man Ray taps into an intriguing tradition of grasping after the ungraspable.
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In Man Ray’s imagination, images such as Le Violin d’Ingres were constructed as talismans that could conjure unseen spirits. The so-called “rayograph” technique to which the Met’s exhibition is devoted – conceived by the artist as an immaterial spin on material X-rays – was profoundly ritualistic. To create them, the artist sought to sidestep the soulless machinery of the camera by placing objects directly onto light-sensitive paper, a process he believed could access hidden energies and dimensions beyond human perception.
