Untitled (Mannequin with Cone and Sphere)

The tabletop still life seems an unlikely subject for modernist photographers, but during the 1920s and 1930s many artists were drawn to the enigmatic aspects of found objects and their potential as subjects for the camera. Beginning in 1926, when this photograph was taken, and continuing for more than forty years, Man Ray made a series of images based on a pair of male and female mannequins he dubbed "Mr. and Mrs. Woodman." This assemblage of an uncannily realistic figurine lounging between a large white cone and sphere would have appealed to Man Ray's interest in relating art to science and mathematics. The unlikely combination of lifelike mannequin and out-of-scale geometric forms is an ideal Surrealist juxtaposition, of the type his friend Marcel Duchamp described as "the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella."