at Sean Kelly TEFAF New York 2026, Stand 330
Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp - TEFAF NY 2026
Man Ray (American, b. Philadelphia 1890, d. Paris 1976) and Marcel Duchamp (French-American, b. Blainville-Crevon 1887, d. Neuilly-sur-Scene 1968)
Head-Image
![Man Ray & Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp Behind the "Rotary Glass Plates", photographed by Man Ray, 1920 / printed in 1961
gelatin silver print postcard
paper: 5 7/8 x 3 7/8 inches (14.8 x 9.8 cm)
framed: 18 x 16 inches (45.7 x 40.6 cm)
(MD-85)
 
Provenance:
The artist.
Collection of Arturo Schwarz.
Solar y Llach, Barcelona.
Private Collection, New York (aquired from the above 11/19/2012).
 
 
Exhibitions:
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Marcel Duchamp, April 12, 2026 – January 31, 2027 [not exact edition].
Museum MMK Für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Marcel Duchamp, April 2, 2022–October 3, 2022.*
Bildmuseet, Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden, Dada is Dada, November 17, 2017–May 20, 2018.
Museo Arqueologico, Murcia, Spain, Marcel Duchamp. "Don't Forget", October 10, 2013–January 12, 2014.*
Sean Kelly, New York, Marcel Duchamp - Man Ray: Fifty Years of Alchemy, January 28–March 4, 2000.*
Fundació Caixa Girona, Girona, ES, Man Ray. Luces y sueños, April 7–May 21, 2006. (Traveled to: MUVIM, Valencia, ES, October 18, 2006–January 2, 2007;
Fundacíon Carlos de Amberes, Madrid, January 12–February 25, 2007; Fundación Caixa Tarragona, March 2–May 13, 2007.)
Unless otherwise noted (*) the above refers to the image and not the exactedition.
 
Literature:
Affron, Matthew, Michelle Kuo, and Ann Temkin. Marcel Duchamp. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2026. p. 142. [not exact edition].
Täljedal, Brita, ed. Dada is Dada. Umeå, Sweden: Bildmuseet, Umeå University, 2021. p. 132.
Parcerisas, Pilar, ed. Marcel Duchamp. "Don't Forget". Murcia, Spain: Museo Arqueológico de Murcia, 2013. p.37.*
Parcerisas, Pilar, ed. Man Ray. Luces y Suenos, Girona: Fundacio Caixa Girona, 2006, p.63.*
Schwarz, Arturo, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, Thames & Hudson, New York, NY, 1997, p. 683.
Unless otherwise noted (*) the above refers to the image and not the exact edition.](https://static-assets.artlogic.net/w_1800,h_1000,c_limit/exhibit-e/5eb484edfaa83729438b4567/b5b382512b180eb2d6b28409b8cc2bab.jpeg)
![Man Ray & Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp Behind the "Rotary Glass Plates", photographed by Man Ray, 1920 / printed in 1961
gelatin silver print postcard
paper: 5 7/8 x 3 7/8 inches (14.8 x 9.8 cm)
framed: 18 x 16 inches (45.7 x 40.6 cm)
(MD-85)
 
Provenance:
The artist.
Collection of Arturo Schwarz.
Solar y Llach, Barcelona.
Private Collection, New York (aquired from the above 11/19/2012).
 
 
Exhibitions:
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Marcel Duchamp, April 12, 2026 – January 31, 2027 [not exact edition].
Museum MMK Für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Marcel Duchamp, April 2, 2022–October 3, 2022.*
Bildmuseet, Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden, Dada is Dada, November 17, 2017–May 20, 2018.
Museo Arqueologico, Murcia, Spain, Marcel Duchamp. "Don't Forget", October 10, 2013–January 12, 2014.*
Sean Kelly, New York, Marcel Duchamp - Man Ray: Fifty Years of Alchemy, January 28–March 4, 2000.*
Fundació Caixa Girona, Girona, ES, Man Ray. Luces y sueños, April 7–May 21, 2006. (Traveled to: MUVIM, Valencia, ES, October 18, 2006–January 2, 2007;
Fundacíon Carlos de Amberes, Madrid, January 12–February 25, 2007; Fundación Caixa Tarragona, March 2–May 13, 2007.)
Unless otherwise noted (*) the above refers to the image and not the exactedition.
 
Literature:
Affron, Matthew, Michelle Kuo, and Ann Temkin. Marcel Duchamp. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2026. p. 142. [not exact edition].
Täljedal, Brita, ed. Dada is Dada. Umeå, Sweden: Bildmuseet, Umeå University, 2021. p. 132.
Parcerisas, Pilar, ed. Marcel Duchamp. "Don't Forget". Murcia, Spain: Museo Arqueológico de Murcia, 2013. p.37.*
Parcerisas, Pilar, ed. Man Ray. Luces y Suenos, Girona: Fundacio Caixa Girona, 2006, p.63.*
Schwarz, Arturo, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, Thames & Hudson, New York, NY, 1997, p. 683.
Unless otherwise noted (*) the above refers to the image and not the exact edition.](https://static-assets.artlogic.net/w_647,h_647,c_limit/exhibit-e/5eb484edfaa83729438b4567/b5b382512b180eb2d6b28409b8cc2bab.jpeg)
Man Ray & Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp Behind the "Rotary Glass Plates", photographed by Man Ray, 1920 / printed in 1961
gelatin silver print postcard
paper: 5 7/8 x 3 7/8 inches (14.8 x 9.8 cm)
framed: 18 x 16 inches (45.7 x 40.6 cm)
(MD-85)
Provenance:
The artist.
Collection of Arturo Schwarz.
Solar y Llach, Barcelona.
Private Collection, New York (aquired from the above 11/19/2012).
Exhibitions:
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Marcel Duchamp, April 12, 2026 – January 31, 2027 [not exact edition].
Museum MMK Für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Marcel Duchamp, April 2, 2022–October 3, 2022.*
Bildmuseet, Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden, Dada is Dada, November 17, 2017–May 20, 2018.
Museo Arqueologico, Murcia, Spain, Marcel Duchamp. "Don't Forget", October 10, 2013–January 12, 2014.*
Sean Kelly, New York, Marcel Duchamp - Man Ray: Fifty Years of Alchemy, January 28–March 4, 2000.*
Fundació Caixa Girona, Girona, ES, Man Ray. Luces y sueños, April 7–May 21, 2006. (Traveled to: MUVIM, Valencia, ES, October 18, 2006–January 2, 2007;
Fundacíon Carlos de Amberes, Madrid, January 12–February 25, 2007; Fundación Caixa Tarragona, March 2–May 13, 2007.)
Unless otherwise noted (*) the above refers to the image and not the exactedition.
Literature:
Affron, Matthew, Michelle Kuo, and Ann Temkin. Marcel Duchamp. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2026. p. 142. [not exact edition].
Täljedal, Brita, ed. Dada is Dada. Umeå, Sweden: Bildmuseet, Umeå University, 2021. p. 132.
Parcerisas, Pilar, ed. Marcel Duchamp. "Don't Forget". Murcia, Spain: Museo Arqueológico de Murcia, 2013. p.37.*
Parcerisas, Pilar, ed. Man Ray. Luces y Suenos, Girona: Fundacio Caixa Girona, 2006, p.63.*
Schwarz, Arturo, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, Thames & Hudson, New York, NY, 1997, p. 683.
Unless otherwise noted (*) the above refers to the image and not the exact edition.
Installation view of the exhibition Marcel Duchamp, Museum of Modern Art, April 12, 2026–January 31, 2027. IN2617.49.
Photograph by Jonathan Dorado.
Marcel Duchamp’s Rotary Glass Plates (Precision Optics), 1920, seen in this photograph by his friend and frequent collaborator Man Ray, consists of five painted glass discs mounted on a motor. When activated, the rotating elements generate the illusion of concentric circles on a single plane. Both object and experiment, the work represents Duchamp’s first constructed machine and advanced his ambition to collapse the boundary between art and idea, reflecting his sustained interest in optics, mathematics, and perception. As Michele Kuo, Chief Curator at Large and Publisher at MoMA notes, “Duchamp was fascinated by what he called precision optics, basically how certain mechanical devices that were being invented at the time — the microscope, the X-ray — were also creating new ways of seeing the world.”
Man Ray’s 1920 photograph shows Duchamp in his New York studio, positioned behind the device as a reflection in a mirror, where he appears both as observer and as orchestrator of its effects. The mirror—a potent artistic material and symbolically charged object for both Duchamp and Man Ray—underscores their shared interest in optics and perception. This photograph attempts to preserve the fleeting visual experience produced by the spinning plates and emerged from their collaborative experiments with filming and photographing Rotary Glass Plates. During one session, a glass plate shattered, narrowly missing Man Ray and nearly causing a fatal injury.
In addition to this image, the two artists produced stereoscopic photographs and attempted a stereoscopic (three-dimensional) film by mounting two cameras side by side, though the film footage was ultimately lost in development. This portrait, one of two versions, one taken from a slightly different angle and another later reproduced as a postcard by the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, was likely made in the course of these experiments. Another example of this image is currently on view in the Marcel Duchamp retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, alongside the device.
From 1915 until Duchamp’s death in 1968, the lives and careers of Marcel Duchamp (French-American, b. Blainville-Crevon 1887, d. Neuilly-sur-Scene 1968) and Man Ray (American, b. Philadelphia 1890, d. Paris 1976) were inextricably intertwined. The two artists were united by a shared conceptual thinking, mutually recognized when they first met in New Jersey in 1915 and played a conceptual tennis match with each other, and then articulated in their subsequent artistic collaboration, through irony, language, humour, the erotic, and the photographic and cinematic apparatus. Both adopted then rejected a Cubist-influenced painting technique, and had important exhibitions in New York in the mid-teens – Duchamp in the infamous showing of his painting Nude Descending a Staircase at the Armory Show in 1913, which Man Ray saw, and which left an indelible impression; and Man Ray’s first one-man show at the Daniel Gallery in 1915, shortly after he and Duchamp first met.
At the core of Duchamp and Man Ray’s collaboration lies what Francois Lyotard, Rosalind Krauss and David Joselit have identified in Duchamp’s
work as a corporeal, eroticized model of visuality. Mechanical forms and devices symbolize the mechanized female body, which is perceived as a
dangerous machine. Duchamp’s Precision Optics, his motor-driven rotating glass plates, revolving optical discs, coffee and chocolate grinders, pistons, stereoscopic structures, and watermill wheels introduce, as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari argue, “desire into the mechanism, and… production into desire.”ii This situating of vision within the forcefield of desire through an amalgamation of female body and machine, Krauss argues, “places this enterprise at a kind of threshold or bridge moment between a nineteenth century psycho-physiological theory of vision and a later, psychoanalytic one.” Hence, in the midst of Duchamp’s spinning rotoreliefs, “busily enacting the images of industry: the flywheels, the turnscrews, the propellers… the experience of an archaic, infantilized desire irrupts inexorably… creating, ever so fleetingly, a space of resistance to rationalization. Temporal, carnal, it is the space of… Duchamp’s version of the optical unconscious.”
- text from Iles, Chrissy. "Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and the Desiring Machine." Marcel Duchamp – Man Ray: 50 Years of Alchemy. Sean Kelly Gallery, New York, 2004.