Day 338 - Man Ray, Boccioni

 May 5,2023

Galleries 904 through 907 are currently closed (for renovation, as I later learn).  My first impression is that Gallery 908 is all about Cubism, and it contains several Cubist paintings by Picasso, Leger, Braque, and Gris. But as I look around, I think that the central concept uniting the objects on display is the different ways in which abstract artists created forms in  space, whether two-dimensional or three-dimensional.  And while I'm not overly fond of Cubist paintings, several works in the gallery intrigue me.

I won't deviate from my plan of confronting what is for me the most problematic work in each gallery, and this is indisputably a rather small (about 24 inches wide and 16 inches high) 1920 painting by Man Ray.  To create the work, which he entitled "Flying Dutchman,"  Ray applied slashes and daubs of white, black, gray, and tan paint with a palette knife. I suppose the title is meant to evoke the tattered sails of the mythical Wagner ship, condemned to sail on endlessly over time, although the caption says that Ray drew his inspiration from a photograph of a clothesline in the back of a New York City tenement. Whether it's abstract, representational, or some combination, I find the painting surpassingly ugly and depressing.

But I have to admire Ray's creativity. Born Emmanuel Radnitzky, he gave himself a new identity (although Wikipedia tells me that it was actually his brother who changed the family name to Ray to make it less obviously Jewish; "Manny" himself shortened his first name to "Man.") Ray worked in multiple media,  including photography, sculpture, and collage as well as painting. And I very much like his mobile that hangs in a corner of the gallery. Entitled "Obstruction" and first made in 1920 (the piece hanging in the Met was one of 15 reproductions he made in 1961 for an exhibition of kinetic art), the mobile consists of 63 wood coat hangers falling in five  tiers from one hanger at the top. Each hanger is pierced with a hole on either side from which an additional hanger is suspended, so that the first level down has two hangers, the second four hangers, the third eight hangers, the fourth, 16 hangers, and the fifth 32 hangers; the mobile is perhaps six feet wide at its widest point and four feet high from top to bottom.  Balanced and swaying slightly, the piece exemplifies the ingenious use of a quotidian household object.  The caption calls my attention to the shadows the piece casts on the walls behind it and the platform below. I'm abashed to say that I hadn't really noticed these shadows beforehand,  but I suspect these shadows were integral to Ray's conception and to how he wanted viewers to experience the composition.  

I like the mobile very much but can't imagine it in my home - it would take up much of the living room.  My very favorite object in the room is a bronze sculpture by Umberto Boccioni that measures about 24 inches wide and 16 inches high and that I would be delighted to find space for.  Made in 1913, the sculpture is called "Development of a Bottle in Space." While I understand the rationale for this title, the sculpture works better for me as a completely abstract object, notable for its juxtaposition of straight lines and spiraling curves,  of solid forms and hollow spaces.  As I walk around the podium on which the sculpture is mounted,  the work seems to offer countless new perspectives. 

Boccioni, I read, sought to break away from what he regarded as the imprisoning legacy of classical sculpture. As a Futurist, he celebrated the dynamism of the modern world; according to a placard, like other Futurists, Boccioni welcomed World War I, believing that it would sweep away Italy's obsession with the past.  He was killed in 1916 when he was thrown from his horse during a cavalry exercise  (which strikes me as itself an antiquated remnant of the past).  What irony, what a waste.