Ceci est une pipe
If there is one picture in which Surrealist art, nude photography, and porn all come together, it's a notorious image by Man Ray featuring his mistress and muse Kiki de Montparnasse displaying what Humbert Humbert would describe as the magic and might of her own soft mouth ... [1]
The picture - one of four sexually explicit images taken by Ray of himself and his lover - appeared in the avant-garde magazine Variétés, alongside equally explicit poetry written by Benjamin Péret and Louis Aragon (two pioneers of literary Surrealism).
The story goes that when editor of the Brussels-based magazine, Edouard Mesens, complained he was having trouble paying the printers, Aragon suggested a special issue should be published in order to increase sales. Keen to contribute, Péret argued that nothing is more special - or sells better - than sex and he volunteered to provide some risqué verse (about little girls lifting up their skirts and masturbating in the bushes, for example).
Aragon explained the idea to Ray, who excitedly agreed to provide some photos - which, conveniently, he just happened to have hidden in a drawer of his desk. As one commentator notes:
"Even with the faces cropped, Aragon knew who'd posed for
them. The male body, hairy and pale, was obviously Ray's. And everyone
in Montparnasse would recognise as Kiki's the mouth, lipsticked in a
Cupid's bow, clamped around his penis ..." [2]
André Breton edited the special special edition and called it 1929. He divided the poetry into four sections, named after the seasons, and each was illustrated with a tipped-in photograph by Ray. The initial print run of 215 copies were intended for private sale in Paris, but most were seized at the border by the authorities and destroyed.
The few copies that escaped the clutches of the French customs offcials were sold (under the counter) at hugely inflated prices to art lovers, for whom the work embodied the freedom, dark humour, and daring eroticism that defined Surrealism. It has since become a collectors item; as has the first English edition published (somewhat belatedly) in 1996 [3].
Notes
[1] Vladimir Nabokov, The Annotated Lolita, ed. with
preface, introduction, and notes by Alfred Appel Jr., (Vintage Books, 1991), p. 184.
[2] John Baxter, 'Man Ray Laid Bare', Tate Magazine, issue 3 (Spring 2005): click here to read online.
[3] 1929, by Benjamin Péret, Aragon, and Man Ray, (Alyscamps Press, 1996). Although the work is said to have been translated by Zoltan Lizot-Picon, it is actually a collaboration
between the art scholar and critic Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno and André Breton's biographer Mark Polizzotti.
Whilst - predictably - HM Customs and Excise declared it pornographic and prohibited its importation into the UK, the book was, however, allowed to circulate freely within the United States as a work of art.
