Man Ray (1890-1976)

Andrew Strauss and Timothy Baum of the Man Ray Expertise Committee have confirmed the authenticity of this work and that it will be included in the Catalogue of Works on Paper of Man Ray, currently in preparation.

Executed during a brief stay in London during the summer of 1937, L’attente is one of sixty original drawings created for Man Ray’s captivating Surrealist publication, Les mains libres, a collaborative project he had embarked upon with his close friend Paul Eluard in 1936. According to Man Ray, many of the drawings for Les mains libres were rooted in his dreams, their images a record of the thoughts and motifs that haunted him in sleep, which were then committed to paper upon waking. In L’attente, the intricately woven web hangs delicately from the unseen figure’s outstretched fingers in a manner that recalls the popular children’s game of cat’s cradle, though here a visual paradox presents itself – the fragile strings would invariably break as soon as the fingers moved, the pattern torn asunder by the hands rather than created by them. Each of the images in Les mains libres was subsequently ‘illustrated’ by Eluard in the form of a short poem, which took inspiration directly from Man Ray’s drawings, a reversal of the typical relationship between artist and writer in such a project. For L’attente, Eluard chooses not to mention the spider at all in the poem, instead conjuring just a single line of text to accompany the image: ‘Je n’ai jamais tenu sa tête dans mes mains’ (Éluard, ‘L’attente’, in Les Mains Libres, Paris, 1937).