See How Man Ray Made Elliptic Paraboloids Erotic At This Phillips Collection Photography Exhibit

At the Institut Henri Poincaré in Paris, the models are not famous for being sexy. Crafted out of wood and plaster in the early twentieth century, they're mathematical models, designed to aid the study of algebraic geometry. But when the Surrealist artist Man Ray visited the Institut in 1934, he photographed the elliptic paraboloids and conic points in the same sensual light as his pictures of Kiki de Montparnasse.

Replicated in the Surrealist journal Cahiers d'Art, Man Ray's photos of mathematical objects later became the basis for his series of paintings representing famous Shakespearian plays such as Romeo and Juliet. An exhilarating new exhibition at the Phillips Collection reunites the paintings and photographs with the original models, thrillingly exposing Man Ray's artistic process.

The models are not what you'd expect given Man Ray's artwork. The shadowplay in his photographs obscures much of what the models were built to reveal. Through his lens, they become evasive. The photographs and models are as different as nude drawings and the diagrams in Gray's Anatomy.

Man Ray was explicitly dismissive of the models' mathematics. "The formulas meant nothing to me," he wrote in his autobiography. And yet there's a way in which they're truer to elliptic paraboloids and conic points than the models, for geometric surfaces and algebraic functions are not plaster concoctions. Man Ray's ethereal depictions of these objects dematerializes them, teasing them back to their Platonic ideal. The erotic and the mathematical are both untouchable.

All that Man Ray created in his photography he ruined in his paintings, which are self-importantly pretentious and vapid. Setting aside the dubious Shakespearian allusions, the attempt to imbue the images with painterly meaning overrides the subtle relationship between the images and their source material. The mathematical models become commonplace props in predictably strange Surrealist tableaux.

Yet the inclusion of Man Ray's paintings is more than just an art historical necessity in a comprehensive survey of this body of work. In their failure, the canvases draw attention to his photographic achievement, which transcends the usual Surrealist rewarming of Freudian psychology. Man Ray's photographs are not only visually beautiful, but also philosophically profound. In his Mathematical Objects, he ingeniously repurposes the cool calculations of mathematics to reveal the topology of desire.

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