The Metropolitan Museum of Art has significantly expanded its collection of avant-garde art following a major donation of 188 Dada and Surrealist works from collector John Pritzker. The generous gift, known as the Bluff Collection, includes Man Ray's iconic photograph "Le Violon d'Ingres," which became the most expensive photograph ever sold at auction when Pritzker purchased it for $12.4 million at Christie's in 2022.
Pritzker, a Met trustee who built his fortune through private equity investment and as an heir to the Hyatt hotel empire, began collecting in 1997 with his first Man Ray purchase - a rayograph showing a shaving brush next to a candle. This initial acquisition sparked a decades-long passion for the artist's unique ability to transform ordinary objects into captivating imagery. Over time, Pritzker's collecting interests expanded to include works by Man Ray's influential circle of Parisian contemporaries from the 1910s and 1920s, including Jean Arp, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, and Francis Picabia.
Thirty-five works from the Bluff Collection will serve as the centerpiece for the Met's upcoming exhibition "Man Ray: When Objects Dream," which opens to the public on September 14. The comprehensive show features rayographs alongside 100 paintings, objects, prints, drawings, and films, positioning itself as the first exhibition to use rayographs as a lens for understanding Man Ray's broader artistic output.
The exhibition explores Man Ray's journey into photography, which began in 1915 when he couldn't find anyone to properly reproduce his paintings. According to the American-born artist's possibly mythical account, he discovered the rayograph technique by accident during the winter of 1921. He had left a funnel and thermometer on an unexposed piece of printing paper, and when the light was turned on, a ghostly image appeared. While he didn't invent this camera-less photographic method, Man Ray made it his own, dedicating several years to perfecting the technique he named "rayograph."
Among the 64 rayographs assembled by Met curators for the exhibition, approximately one-fifth come from the Bluff Collection. The crown jewel is "Le Violon d'Ingres" from 1924, Man Ray's iconic image of his lover Kiki de Montparnasse. The photograph shows her nude from the waist up, wearing a turban and posed in reference to Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres' "The Valpinçon Bather" (1808). Man Ray created the final image by covering the print with a sheet cut with violin sound holes and exposing it to light, producing what he described as a combination of photography and rayograph.
Beyond Man Ray's works, the Bluff Collection encompasses an impressive range of avant-garde pieces. It includes 11 works on paper and two portfolios by Marcel Duchamp, featuring his first "Monte Carlo Bond" (1924), an irreverent critique of finance and gambling designed to fund his scheme to beat roulette. The collection also contains Max Ernst's self-portrait collage "The Punching Ball" (1920), Giorgio de Chirico's "Dream of Tobias" (1917), and photographs by notable artists including Lee Miller (Man Ray's former companion and studio partner), Charles Sheeler, and Edward Steichen.
Pritzker explained his collecting philosophy in a statement, saying, "I've long been interested in the period between the world wars and the exciting community of artists involved in Dada and Surrealism. As I've built the collection, Man Ray has been a central figure, especially as a person who moved between groups and connected ideas. Together, this group broke down barriers of what defined a painting, sculpture, text, or photograph, and more importantly, what art itself could be."
The donation extends beyond artworks to include funding for a new research initiative called the Bluff Collaborative for Research on Dada and Surrealist Art. This program, dedicated to advancing new scholarship on both artistic movements, will announce research programs annually, beginning with a focus on Man Ray's contributions to modern art.
Max Hollein, the Met's director, emphasized the significance of this acquisition in a statement: "This enhances our ability to offer a profound, more comprehensive view of these outstanding artists and enigmatic trailblazers of modernism whose bold and influential experimentation across media continues to fascinate and inspire. It further cements the Met as an essential destination for experiencing the full sweep of art history, from antiquity to the art of today."
