Britain Bucket List, Part 2

June 8, 2021 Patricia Zohn

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Bucket list: Britain 2

I first delved into the Lee Miller archive when producing a film on Picasso. Miller intrigued me-the precocious muse of her father (his infamous shot of her in the bathtub), then of Man Ray, then of art historian and writer Roland Penrose, but also very much her own person--a serious war photographer (she captured Hitler's bunker after his death).

Miller has walked the precarious walk of the muse who was subsumed for a while as just that. As Man Ray's lover and disciple she wasn't recognized for the talent she herself was for a long time. An exhibition on her fashion photography in a new industrial space across from her home in Sussex, Farleys House (which, like the Bloomsbury Charleston House, looks to be a splendid 'worth a detour")shows that she was even able to incorporate the Surrealist 'Rayograph" techniques she had developed with Man in her fashion work for British Vogue. This image Corsetry, from 1942, just one example.

The last Miller show at the Legion of Honor in SF in 2012 was revelatory as well but it was about Man and Miller; this will add to the solo scholarship about this beautiful, alluring woman who was able to transcend that beauty.

Man Ray's wife Juliet's desk in Paris

May 22, 2020 Patricia Zohn

This is the desk of Juliet Man Ray, the former dancer, model and Hollywood hopeful Juliet Browner who married Man (they had met in an LA nightclub) in 1946 in a double wedding with Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning. He was a Jewish boy from South Philly (ne Emanuel Radnitzky), she a Jewish girl from Brooklyn (she is pictured with the violin in the wood frame). On the desk you can see a gold cast of Man Ray's famous lips, a mini one of his irons, and other bibelots of his. I visited with Julie in Paris at their studio where she still lived on the Rue Ferou when I interviewed her for a PBS film about Picasso, she was every bit as theatrical as I had imagined and still carrying a torch for her husband who had died in 1976. They are buried together at the Montparnasse cemetery. Recently, the Gagosian exhibition of his work in San Francisco brought this all back to me.

The mysteries behind Man Ray's Les Mysteres Du Chateau de De

January 29, 2020 Patricia Zohn

In 1929 artist, photographer,filmmaker extraordinaire Man Ray was invited by one of his ardent patrons, the Vicomte de Noailles, and his infamous wife and partner in outlandishness, Marie-Laure, to their Robert Mallet-Stevens designed chateau in Hyeres, in the South of France, to shoot the house and its varying, dynamic collections as well as “make some of shots of his guests disporting themselves in the gymnasium and swimming pool,” according to Man Ray. As with many Surrealists who favored automatic writing, Man Ray favored a kind of automatic filmmaking. He looked upon film as another tool in his poetic, playful bag of tricks innovated with light but he had grown disenchanted as reality in the form of sound had begun to impose itself on the medium: improvisation was his preferred metier. Nevertheless, the Vicomte assured the artist that the film would be a documentary for their private viewing pleasure only, so Man Ray made an exception for the wealthy and generous man. Reminded of a Mallarme poem, “A throw of the Dice can Never do Away with Chance”, Man Ray decided to make, ‘chance’ the theme of the film. He brought with him two pairs of dice and six pairs of silk stockings which he intended to “pull over the heads of any persons that appeared in the film to help create mystery and anonymity.” Things being what they were at the Chateau, that is to say, already capricious with the beau mode in attendance, the film did not follow a neatly proscribed narrative.

Man Ray began shooting when he left Paris. Two men throw the dice, and leave for the south, arriving at the angular chateau—which is as much a character as anyone in the film. A couple throws the dice and decides to stay, then just as enigmatically to leave after another toss. Man Ray captured the right angles of the Mallet-Stevens modernist house, the painting archives, and eventually the frolicking guests shrouded in stockings and striped bathing suits as if in a phantasm. (Indoor gyms and exercise were all the rage in the late twenties; somehow the late nights and flamboyance had found a counterweight). The Vicomtesse appears in an underwater sequence with oranges in the glass-covered pool, a surreal Esther Williams; a stocking almost actually choked the Vicomte.

Les Mysteres du Chateau de De film also contains negative images akin to his signature Rayographs. This film was his last complete film. (By way of reference, the same year, Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou was released).

The Gagosian Gallery in San Francisco has a very engaging show with good quality prints of Les Mysteres and two other films and numerous objets and stills drawn from the films as well as a short history of the house, now the Villa Noailles, an artists retreat. In a time when most films are literal-minded, these instead make the viewer a participant who is obliged to connect the dots—and the dice.

Image courtesy Gagosian Gallery