Portrait photographique de Paul Éluard

Paul Éluard and Man Ray first met in the early 1920s. Man Ray, until then based in New York, arrived in Paris on July 14, 1921. At the Café Certà, passage de l’Opéra, headquarters of the Dadaists, Marcel Duchamp introduced him to a group of friends that included Éluard. Man Ray later recalled the meeting in his Self Portrait: “Half a dozen men and one woman were sitting around a table in a secluded corner. After the introductions, we tried to converse. Jacques Rigaut, who spoke a few words of English, translated the questions and answers. It was rather rudimentary, and yet I felt at ease with these strangers, who seemed to accept me as one of their own, no doubt because of the tastes attributed to me. Besides, they already seemed to know about my activities in New York. André Breton, who a few years later would found the Surrealist movement, already seemed to dominate the others, carrying his imposing head like a challenge; Louis Aragon, writer and poet, also seemed sure of himself and somewhat arrogant. The poet Paul Éluard, with his high forehead, looked like a younger version of the portrait of Baudelaire I had seen in a book.”

The two men’s first true artistic collaboration took place in no. 7 of La Révolution surréaliste, in June 1926. Éluard published a prose text there entitled “À la fenêtre,” illustrated by a photograph by Man Ray entitled “Course d’autos”; this collaboration marked a genuine rapprochement between the two men, which only deepened through the 1930s into a real friendship, attested in 1934 by the poem paying tribute to Man Ray’s photographic work that Éluard published in La Rose publique under the title “Man Ray.” Facile and Les Mains libres would follow.

A sitting took place in 1927, with several (at least four) shots taken from different angles, but all on the same day (same suit, same pocket square), and this is the earliest known sitting (sometimes incorrectly dated to 1922). The prints bear on the verso the stamp of the studio at 31 bis rue Campagne Première, as here — though the print offered here is clearly a later print.