Man Ray- Dancer/Danger, 1972, Signed/Numbered/Framed With Mat, With Provenance

Details

Description

lithograph on high quality paper

47.6 x 26.7 cm

bought from Winston Scott Gallery

Man Ray’s Dancer/Danger (often titled Danger/Dancer) … Read more lithograph on high quality paper

47.6 x 26.7 cm

bought from Winston Scott Gallery

Man Ray’s Dancer/Danger (often titled Danger/Dancer) is a key Dada/Surrealist work in which a mechanized “dancer” becomes a metaphor for danger, eroticism, and malfunctioning machinery.

What the work is

The original Danger/Dancer is an airbrushed painting on glass with cogwheels and mechanical forms, made between 1917–1920 in New York.

Man Ray later reworked and disseminated the image through photographs and a 1970s color lithograph titled Dancer–Danger, editioned and signed, which you’ll see in auction and gallery listings.

The piece has also circulated as gelatin silver prints, sometimes under the extended title Danger-Dancer, Impossibility or L’Impossibilité, underscoring the idea of a system that cannot function.

Title: dancer vs. danger
Man Ray explicitly plays on the near-homophone “dancer/danger”: in French commentary the work is described as “joue sur la sonorité en anglais entre ‘Dancer’ [danseuse] et ‘Danger’.”centrepompidou

A Spanish dancer’s stage performance reportedly inspired him to translate the idea of a whirling, seductive dancer into a diagram of gears and mechanical “anatomy.”centrepompidou

In one annotated print, he writes “Danger or Dancer. It suffices to lift the dress of the dancer to realize that anatomy depicts all the laws of mechanics,” directly linking the dancing body to a machine whose movements obey mechanical logic—and whose failure is “danger" See less