“The art-world is a small world, the word got around, and very soon [Man Ray] became its chosen photographer. Gertrude Stein was one of the first American writers whom Man Ray met and photographed.”
Man Ray’s 1922 photograph, Gertrude Stein and Picasso's Portrait, encapsulates the intricate web of mutual influence and exchange across the early-20th century avant-garde. Stein, an American writer, set up a salon in Paris that hosted a circle of leading figures across modernist literature and art, including Ernest Hemingway, Henry Matisse, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Pablo Picasso. Man Ray, who moved to Paris in 1921, became a vital part of this bohemian circle. His photographs of the avant-garde elite both documented their personas and shaped their legacies. Man Ray served as the exclusive photographer for Stein’s official portraits and, in return, she celebrated him in her unpublished 1924 prose-poem Somet.mes Man Ray Somet.mes .
Stein and her circle practiced a form of “mutual portraiture,” exchanging works about one another in their respective medium. This photograph stands as one of the most layered of those exchanges: a painted portrait by Picasso, rendered within a photographic portrait by Man Ray, memorialized in words by Stein.
Prints of this image are rare, and it is believed that only one other example has come to auction in more than three decades. This photograph was originally acquired from the artist by Arturo Schwarz, the Italian gallerist and Dada scholar whose close relationship with Man Ray led to his stewardship of key works by the artist. It later passed to Luciano Anselmino’s Galleria Il Fauno, an important Italian gallery known for its championing of Surrealist and Dada artists. Perhaps owing to its rarity and excellent print quality, as indicated by the photographer’s annotation ‘bon,’ this particular print was selected for several major international exhibitions, notably the traveling retrospective Perpetual Motif: The Art of Man Ray (1989–90), which spanned the Smithsonian National Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C., the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Menil collects
ion in Houston, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. This print was most recently exhibited in Alias Man Ray: The Art of Reinvention at The Jewish Museum, New York (2009–10), and in Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C. (2011–12).