"Le Violon d’Ingres"

duotone offset photolithography

embossed stamp of the artist’s name, copyright imprinted (Man Ray Trust/Adagp-SIAE/Telimage 2006)

Le Violon d'Ingres (French for "Ingres' Violin") was created by American artist Man Ray in 1924. It is one of his best-known photographs and of surrealist photography. The picture was first published in the Surrealist magazine Littérature in June 1924. It shows model Kiki de Montparnasse (Alice Ernestine Prin) from the back with two f-holes painted on to draw similarities between the shape of her body and a violin.
The photograph takes its name from a popular French expression, "le violon d'Ingres", which means a hobby, in reference to the fact that the French neoclassical painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres used to play the violin as a pastime when he was not painting. Man Ray admired Ingres's work and he drew inspiration from his painting La Baigneuse Valpinçon (1808) for this photograph.
He had his model and then-lover Kiki de Montparnasse pose for him. In a first photograph, Étude pour Le Violon d'Ingres, she is seen in profile, with her face and breasts visible.¹ In the final picture, she is depicted in a similar way to the female model of Ingres, nude and seated, looking slightly to her left, seen from the back and with an oriental inspired turban. Her arms are not visible. After the photograph was developed, he painted on a print the f-holes of a violin onto her back, and had the print rephotographed, creating the present work of art.
The title humorously shows Man Ray's goal of depicting the model's torso as a musical instrument, and plays with the fact that she was the artist's model and lover at the same time.²
Kirsten Hoving Powell stated on the photograph: "Le Violon d'Ingres is a complex photograph that demonstrates Man Ray's long‐standing admiration for Ingres, as well as his desire to mock tradition. Man Ray's distortion and deformation of the model's body engage Surrealist concepts of metamorphosis and formlessness, but they also belong to a larger context of fascination for Ingres' manipulations of anatomy during the interwar period, as seen in the writings of critics such as André Lhote."³

An original print of Le Violon d'Ingres set a new record for the most expensive photograph when it sold for $12,400,000 on May 14, 2022 at Christie's New York.⁴ This photograph is an official reproduction from the Man Ray Trust/Adagp-SIAE/Telimage 2006.
(wikipedia)

Notes

1
Centre Pompidou (accessed May 26, 2026)

2
"Man Ray Artworks & Famous Art", The Art Story (accessed May 26, 2026)

3
Kirsten Hoving Powell, "Le Violon d'Ingres: Man Ray's Variations on Ingres, Deformation, Desire and de Sade", Art History, vol. 23, issue 5, December 2000, pp. 772–799. doi:10.1111/1467-8365.00243 – via Wiley Online Library

4
Angelica Villa, "Man Ray’s Famed Photograph of Kiki de Montparnasse Sells for Record $12.4 M", ARTnews, May 14, 2022 (accessed May 26, 2026)