In 2023, I traveled to the City of Brotherly Love for the second time. The first time had been twelve years before, to see a friend who’d moved from Brooklyn to try to drink himself to death. Handles of Heaven Hill bourbon lined his apartment’s perimeter. Cat urine dappled the floors. We’d made plans to visit the Philadelphia Museum of Art, but instead his ex-girlfriend showed up unexpectedly, and they spent most of my visit behind a locked bedroom door.
Upon my return, I set aside two days especially for the museum. It did not disappoint. I devoted hours to Duchamp. I took in Cy Twombly’s Iliad, and an exhibition on outsider art from the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection. Still, what stood out the most was Man Ray’s Fair Weather, “culmination of his Surrealist career.”
One of the final paintings he completed prior to departing Paris, after more than twenty years abroad, the hypnagogic masterpiece is often interpreted as a premonition of the Second World War. An androgynous harlequin with a gas lamp for a head opens a frameless door. Blood oozes and puddles on the ground from its keyhole. Lovers embrace within a brutalist building. Atop it, a pig mauls a lizard. A wall crumbles. The artist’s sketchbook stands open, and a weathervane blocks a billiard table with a golden path running through it.
I claim no analysis of Man Ray’s apparition. It simply is. Violent and romantic, luminous and dim. I recently began practicing transcendental meditation. In so doing, I’ve found I can recall dreams, and not just recent ones, but those from the past, and explore their chimerical territories, probing and deepening my own lost illusions.
From France, “the first Jewish avant-garde artist” relocated to Hollywood. There, he befriended George Hodel, prime suspect in the Black Dahlia murder. It’s been suggested the ornate homicide was in homage to Man Ray’s surrealism. Fair Weather itself feels almost like its blueprint. Though he left it in Europe when he returned to the states, after the war, Man Ray came back for this painting. He held onto it personally until his death in 1976.
-David Fishkind