"Juliet"

gelatin silver print on Agfa paper

edition stamp "Griffelkunst-Vereinigung Hamburg" and copyright notice "Copie d'une epreuve originale © ADAGP Man Ray Trust" verso

The photo shows Juliet Browner (1911–1991, from 1946 Juliet Man Ray), who later became the wife of the famous American artist Man Ray.
Man Ray moved back to America from Paris in 1940. A few days after his arrival in Los Angeles, he met Juliet Browner. She was of Romanian-Jewish descent and was a trained dancer who studied with Martha Graham, as well as an experienced artist's model who served as a model for the Abstract Expressionist painters. "After dinner we went to a night club where some of the best jazz of the period was being played. We danced. Juliet was like a feather in my arms."¹ In 1946 they married in a double wedding together with Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning in Beverly Hills. From 1940 to 1955, Man Ray took numerous photographs of Juliet, which he tried in vain to realize in the early 1950s with a selection of 50 photographs in a book as a tribute to Juliet. These fifty photographs are “a message and Man Ray's declaration of love” to Juliet, who was his last lover, his companion, his friend, his wife, but also his model and his muse. Her face is unforgettable.² The book was not published in collaboration with Juliet until 1981 on the occasion of an exhibition at the Fondazione Mazzotta in Milan, five years after Man Ray's death.
(Christoph Fuchs)

Notes

1
Juliet Dancing (PDF), Performing Arts in Art, J. Paul Ghetty Museum, https://www.getty.edu/education/teachers/classroom_resources/curricula/performing_arts/downloads/juliet_dancing.pdf (retrieved 18.10.2024)

2
Fondazione Marconi, Man Ray. The Fifty Faces of Juliet, Press release, https://www.fondazionemarconi.org/en/exhibition/man-ray-the-fifty-faces-of-juliet/press-release (retrieved 18.10.2024)