Man Ray, Equation (Mathematical Model), (1928)
In The History of Surrealist Painting, Marcel Jean suggests that it may have been Max Ernst who brought the mathematical models into the surrealist consciousness. “Max Ernst had originally come across these constructions in the Institute Henri Poincare ́ and had mentioned them to the director of Cahiers d’Art, Christian Zervos, who in his turn had asked Man Ray to photograph them.
Man Ray then executed a series of photographs, entitled Mathematical Objects, which were studies on models at the Poincare ́ Institute. Some of these photographs appeared in a 1936 issue of Cahiers d’Art along with an essay on mathematics and abstract art by Christian Zervos.
Man Ray’s photographs, as well as his later series of paintings based on them gave mathematical models a lot of exposure. The surrealists displayed mathematical objects in their May 1936 show “Exposition Surraliste d’Objets” at the Galerie Charles Ratton in Paris. In his famous “Crisis of the Object,” Andre ́ Breton writes, “The laboratories of mathematical institutions throughout the world already display side by side objects constructed according to both Euclidean and non-Euclidean principles, equally mystifying in appearance to the layman, but which nevertheless bear a fascinating and equivocal relationship to each other in space as we generally conceive it”
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