Valpinçon, , the Louvre,
Paris.
Man Ray frequently used this device of the ‘lowered robe’ in his photographs of women.
() and the central gure in Le Bain turc (), both now in the Louvre (see Figures and ).9
Rhetorically, Man Ray’s photograph is premised on a visual pun ( paronomasia ) where an image makes a connection between two elements (woman and violin), which have no logical relation (a false homology).0 What
the photograph does is to hold in tension ‘violin’ and ‘woman’. To understand one of these means ignoring or mis-recognizing the other one, to put them together is not ‘realistic’. In semiotic terms, a pun is a signier repeated (in two similar but distinct forms) with two separate, different, signieds. One signied (‘woman’) is constantly undermined by the co-presence of the other signied (‘violin’). As signied ‘objects’, a violin and a woman or ‘female body’ are in antithesis; one is hard, inanimate and ‘wooden’, the other is eshy, animate and ‘human’. To combine these makes no apparent ‘sense’
and violates the representation of woman.
But this enigraphic image has to be regarded as, not so much a signier of something, as a signier to someone to grasp the meaning. Moving from the level of what a classic semiotics called denotation to the discursive eld of connotation (the trail of cultural associations), the pun
Other versions of these paintings exist in other collec- tions, Bather () at Bayonne, Musée Bonnat, and Bain turc () in Cambridge, Mass., Fogg Art Museum (see Wendy Leeks, The ‘Family Romance’ and Repeated Themes in the Work of J.A.D. Ingres, Ph.D. thesis, University of Leeds, March ).
On visual puns see Paul Hammond and Patrick Hughes, Upon the Pun (London: W. H. Allen, ).
These opposites can be ‘deconstructed’, for example, someone might be described as wooden, but this is a metaphorical term not ‘literal’.
24 Ingres, Turkish Bath, , the Louvre, Paris.
Photography and surrealism The Oriental signier works by the vague, crude similitude of form proposed
between female body and violin. The joke meaning: a woman is an object to be played like a violin. The violin, an inanimate object, is brought to life by being ‘played’. The sliding signier, ‘woman-violin’ (denotation), con- notes ‘play’, ‘playing’, ‘played’.2 The ‘instrument’ to be
played is her body and the music heard is ‘love’. In this associative eld, it is preconscious popular ideas like ‘making music’, ‘If music be the food of love … ’,3
‘making love’ and other such gures of speech which associate the image of ‘play’ back to sexual play and ‘playing with the body’. This common-sense gurative language is available to anyone, without any specic interest in, familiarity with, or knowledge of surrealism and perhaps explains the durable public fascination that this image has had. Even verbalization of this linguis- tic meaning is not required for someone to arrive at the meaning. Indeed, to do so, to verbalize a description of the joke would be to labour the elements beyond its humour, as my text no doubt demonstrates. Preconscious reverie with the appropriate cultural knowledge is all that is required to ‘get the joke’. It is in this respect that Man Ray’s image can be said successfully to have ‘avoided’ critical analysis, that a meaning is not quite utterable and is only a joke. As precisely ‘only a joke’, it is as though there is nothing further to be said, since it is in the very nature of a joke to circumvent conscious criticism. As Freud has taught us, a joke is a way of avoiding social restrictions and censorship, effectively short-circuiting in advance any attempts at critical or, in this case, a historical analysis.4
The reader of the surrealist journal, Littérature, in which this image rst appeared, would have, by turning the page, found the picture anchored by the title printed there as Le Violon d’Ingres. Obviously at one level, the phrase violon d’Ingres refers to the violin of Ingres; taken literally, it anchors the picture as ‘this is the violin of Ingres’: a female body. As an idiom in gurative speech,
le violon d’Ingres makes this female body a hobby or
‘second skill’. Putting these two meanings together with the image in a syntactical sense means: ‘this is the violin that Ingres played’. His profession was an artist, he played
her like a violin. For the French-speaking viewer the idea
Puns are regarded as ‘cheap’ and ‘base’ jokes because of the low economy of expenditure required in making them (see Jonathan Culler [ed.], On Puns [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, ]).
Extrapolated from Shake- speare’s Twelfth Night, this phrase has become a platitude of the rst order, but signies none the less for it.
See Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Uncon- scious, PFL (Harmondsworth: Penguin, ), p. .
of play, jeu, is already in a chain of linguistic associations, to jouir (enjoy) and jouissance, which of course also has a sexual meaning. As the translator of Lacan’s Ecrits points out, in French, ‘Jouir is slang for “to come”.’5 A hobby, or
‘creative’ pastime is where activities like music and paint- ing are carried out for love, not money, and this is what the image proposes that Ingres loved: playing his women like a violin. Ingres is imputed as ‘playing the woman’s body’, making music with her body (like a violin), having sex. Such associations come readily to the fore when Man Ray makes the joke in relation to Ingres.
Why does Man Ray make a vulgar joke at the ex- pense of Ingres? It is certainly not justied, in that Ingres was known for not having sexual relations with his models, even if his representations of them clearly are ‘erotic’.6 This was simply not part of the ‘myth’ of
Ingres. So what reason is there for Man Ray’s slur on Ingres’s professional conduct as an artist and why did the surrealists choose to publish this photograph, only one of four, in their magazine in ; what was the cultural currency of such a joke in surrealism?
Angry at Ingres
The status and position of Ingres in French culture was being elevated at the beginning of the twentieth century, as more than just another nineteenth-century French Academy painter who had studied in the studio of Jacques-Louis David. The work of Jean-Auguste- Dominique Ingres was being re-evaluated and most notably advanced by Henry Lapauze, a tireless advocate, writer and curator of Ingres’s work. Born in Montauban, the same town as Ingres, Lapauze was instrumental in organizing at least three key exhibitions of the works of Ingres and wrote numerous articles and reviews to support them (, , ).7 For an ‘Ingriste’ like
Lapauze, Ingres was the undisputed (and insufficiently recognized) ‘grand master of l’Ecole Française’.8 The
violin playing of Ingres was part of his myth and the title phrase of Man Ray’s photograph, Le Violon d’Ingres, is attributed an origin in the life of Ingres.9 The story
goes that at the age of seventeen, Ingres left his home town of Montauban with a friend for Paris on foot, paying their way as they went by playing the violin.20
Alan Sheridan in Jacques Lacan, Ecrits (London: Tavistock, ), p. x.
In recent literature on Ingres some (male) critics seem to reject his odalisques as ‘erotic’, Richard Wollheim, for example, describes them as ‘chaste pictures’ in Painting as an Art (London: Thames and Hudson, ), p. .
Henry Lapauze, Les Dessins de J.A.D. Ingres du Musée de Montauban (Paris: I. E. Bulloz, ); Ingres, sa vie et son oeuvre (–) (Paris: Georges Petit, ); La Renaissance, May .
Henry Lapauze, ‘Les Faux Ingres’, in Lapauze (ed.), La Renaissance de l’art Française et des industries de luxe, November , p. .
Apollinaire claims: ‘Ingres’s violin has given us a proverb’, Leroy C. Breunig (ed.), Apollinaire on Art: Essays and Reviews, – , trans. Susan Suleiman (New York: Da Capo Press, ), p. .
See L. Frolich-Bume, Ingres, His Life and Art, trans. Maude Valerie White (London: Heine- mann, ), p. .
Photography and surrealism The Oriental signier In the exhibition, Ingres’s paintings and drawings
were grouped around his actual palette and violin, ex- hibited like cult relics, symbols of his rst profession and second talent: painting and music.2
A review of the July Ingres Exhibition in the English Burlington Magazine, in the same month that Man Ray arrived in Paris, reected that it was more important than the previous exhibition.22 The
exhibition included the Valpinçon baigneuse, La Source,
Grande Odalisque and Bain turc, Ingres’s major Oriental
odalisque, nude pictures. The last of these, Bain turc, adorned the front cover of La Renaissance journal with all the others reproduced inside and the Grande Odalisque printed on special paper as a detachable ‘hors texte’ (see Figure ). Directed by Henry Lapauze, the special issue of the magazine was dedicated to Ingres with written essays supporting the centrality of Ingres, not only to France, but for all modern art.23
Kenneth Silver argues in his book Esprit de Corps that the reason for this popularity of Ingres after the ‘Great War’ is because Ingres came to serve an ideology of patriotic ‘Frenchness’, represented as ‘the most public, condent, conservative, and quintessentially French of artists’.24 Silver suggests that Ingres was held up as the
guiding light of a ‘Great French Tradition’ in a nation still recovering from war. ‘Ingres was not only the symbol of sanctioned French art but was also seen as an antidote to everything that deviated from the path of France.’25
Silver notes, for example, that the exhibition of Ingres paintings was held as a benet for disgured war veterans, signifying Ingres’s work as appropriately ‘patriotic’. The neo-classical Roman garb adopted in some of Ingres’s ‘historical’ paintings lent itself to the representation of a glorious imperial tradition of France with its iconography serving its contemporary notion of a certain French colonial self-image whose geographic identity became a compulsory component in the school curriculum. ‘Textbooks began to portray France as “the heir to Rome”, reviving the Roman Empire around the Mediterranean Sea,’ now modied by ‘adding to it an African hinterland stretching southward to the Congo’.26 Ingres was made to signify Imperial France,
with the ‘classical’ realism of his paintings promoting G. Apollinaire, Review of
The Ingres Exhibition ( April ), reprinted in Apollinaire on Art, p. .
Despite declaring this Ingres exhibition more important than the one at Georges Petit Gallery, Paris, the reviewer heavily criticizes Ingres, ‘the obvious stage management of its emotion’ … ‘the inadequacy of Ingres to conceive of Christian themes’. He misses Ingres’s new (French) credentials as source reference for modern art. C. H. Collins Baker, ‘Reections on the Ingres Exhibition’, Burlington Magazine, July , pp. –.
‘La Nouvelle leçon de Ingres’ by Henry Lapauze, ‘Com- prendre Ingres, c’est comprendre la Grèce et la France’ by Arsène Alexandre, in Lapauze (ed.), La Renaissance de l’art française et des industries de luxe, May .
See Kenneth Silver, Esprit de Corps, Art of the Parisian Avant Garde and the First World War, – (Princeton, NJ: Prince- ton University Press, ), p. .
Ibid., pp. –. C. M. Andrews and A. S. Kanya-Forstner, France Overseas, the Great War and the Climax of French Imperial Expansion (London: Thames and Hudson, ), p. .
(more than that of a Delacroix) a ‘truthfulness’ about the past, just as his paintings of the Orient constituted the ‘truth’ about the East.
Thus, when Man Ray arrived in Paris, interest in Ingres was a contemporary one. Legitimated as the gure of a French ‘tradition’, Ingres had become a signicant cultural reference point of origin for modern art in France. The paths of modernist art were read back into the so-called ‘disciplined’ but ‘eclectic’ work of Ingres.27
A compressed diachronic history of this particular view can be quickly glimpsed through the key critics.
Mentor to the surrealists, Guillaume Apollinaire in his review of the Ingres exhibition quotes the same point made more than fty years earlier by Charles Baudelaire. Baudelaire, the inuential critic, had claimed that Ingres was ‘a revolutionary in his own way’.28 And
no more so than in his eroticizing of the depiction of woman. Baudelaire argued, ‘One of the things in our opinion that particularly distinguishes M. Ingres’s talent is his love of women. His libertinism is serious and convinced. M. Ingres is never so happy nor so powerful as when his genius nds itself at grips with the charms of a young beauty.’29
Jean Cassou and Geoffrey Grigson, The Female Form in Painting (London: Thames and Hudson, ), p. .
Charles Baudelaire, quoted in ‘The Ingres Exhibition’ review by Guillaume Apollinaire, April , reprinted in Apollinaire on Art.
Charles Baudelaire, reprinted in Art in Paris: – , Salons and Other Exhibitions Reviewed by Charles Baudelaire, ed. and trans. Jonathan Mayne (Oxford: Phaidon, ), p. .