{
"data": {
"id": 169326,
"accession_number": "2011.198",
"share_license_status": "Copyrighted",
"tombstone": "Gift, 1921, recreated 1963. Man Ray (American, 1890\u20131976). Hand iron, tacks, paint, wood base; overall: 15.3 x 9 x 11.4 cm (6 x 3 9/16 x 4 1/2 in.). The Cleveland Museum of Art, Delia E. Holden Fund, 2011.198. \u00a9 2013 Man Ray Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris",
"current_location": "225 German Expressionism & Surrealism",
"title": "Gift",
"creation_date": "1921, recreated 1963",
"creation_date_earliest": 1921,
"creation_date_latest": 1963,
"artists_tags": [
"male",
"Jewish artists"
],
"culture": [
"France"
],
"technique": "Hand iron, tacks, paint, wood base",
"support_materials": [],
"department": "American Painting and Sculpture",
"collection": "American - Sculpture",
"type": "Metalwork",
"measurements": "Overall: 15.3 x 9 x 11.4 cm (6 x 3 9/16 x 4 1/2 in.)",
"dimensions": {
"overall": {
"height": 0.153,
"height_inch": 6,
"height_inch_fraction": 0.0,
"width": 0.09,
"width_inch": 3,
"width_inch_fraction": 0.5625,
"depth": 0.114,
"depth_inch": 4,
"depth_inch_fraction": 0.5
}
},
"state_of_the_work": null,
"edition_of_the_work": null,
"copyright": "\u00a9 2013 Man Ray Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris",
"inscriptions": [
{
"inscription": "Signed: \"EA MR\" (\u00e9preuve de l'artiste Man Ray)\r\n\r\n",
"inscription_translation": null,
"inscription_remark": null,
"sortorder": null
}
],
"exhibitions": {
"current": [],
"legacy": []
},
"provenance": [
{
"description": "Private collection, acquired directly from the artist during the early 1970s",
"citations": [],
"footnotes": null,
"date": "1970",
"sortorder": null
},
{
"description": "(Mayor Gallery, London, United Kingdom, 2011, sold to the Cleveland Museum of Art)",
"citations": [],
"footnotes": null,
"date": "2011",
"sortorder": 2
},
{
"description": "The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH",
"citations": [],
"footnotes": null,
"date": "2011-",
"sortorder": 3
}
],
"find_spot": null,
"related_works": [],
"former_accession_numbers": [],
"did_you_know": "Man Ray once said, \"I never knew what I was doing until I was done.\"",
"early_education_description": null,
"artlens_description": null,
"description": "By gluing a row of tacks to the face of a hand iron, Man Ray transformed a common household item into an illogical object with menacing undertones. He first made this work in 1921, displaying it in an exhibition and intending to give it away in a raffle. However, it disappeared during the show\u2019s opening, likely stolen by the gallery owner who admired it. Decades later in his career, the artist recreated Gift multiple times. In 1963, he made this version, which he kept in his personal collection.",
"external_resources": {
"wikidata": [
"https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q60758221"
],
"internet_archive": []
},
"citations": [
{
"citation": "Mann, C. Griffith, and Amy Bracken Sparks. \"Acquisitions 2011.\" Cleveland Art: Cleveland Museum of Art Members Magazine 52, no. 2 (March/April 2012): 10-27.",
"page_number": "Mentioned and reproduced: p. 25",
"url": "https://archive.org/details/CMAMM2012-02/page/24/mode/2up"
}
],
"url": "https://clevelandart.org/art/2011.198",
"images": {},
"alternate_images": [],
"creditline": "Delia E. Holden Fund",
"image_credit": null,
"sketchfab_id": null,
"sketchfab_url": null,
"gallery_donor_text": null,
"athena_id": 169326,
"creators": [
{
"id": 618,
"description": "Man Ray (American, 1890\u20131976)",
"extent": null,
"qualifier": null,
"role": "artist",
"biography": "Man Ray (Emanuel Rudnitsky) American, 1890-1976 Man Ray (born Emanuel Rudnitsky in Philadelphia) was an avant-garde painter and photographer active in the dada and surrealist movements who became known for his experiments with the photogram and solarization. He grew up in New York and in his 20s worked in the city as a commercial artist, attending night classes at the National Academy of Design and lectures at the avant-garde Ferrer Social Center. Visiting the 1913 Armory show and \"291,\" Alfred Stieglitz's gallery, he became increasingly familiar with the latest developments in modern art. In 1915 Man Ray had his first one-person show of paintings and drawings at New York's Daniel Gallery and met French artist Marcel Duchamp, with whom he became lifelong friends. He also began taking photographs that year as a way to document his paintings. Along with Duchamp and Francis Picabia, another French artist, Man Ray was a member of the New York dada group during World War I and in the years immediately following the war. In 1921 he moved to Paris, soon establishing himself as a professional portrait and fashion photographer. He also became interested in experimental photography, producing photograms (cameraless photographs that he called rayographs) and pioneering the use of solarization, a technique accidentally discovered by his darkroom assistant, Lee Miller, in 1929. Throughout the 1920s-30s Man Ray worked with surrealist painters and poets on a number of collaborative projects, providing photographs for their books and articles. He also made avant-garde films, including Le Retour \u00e0 la raison (1923), Emak Bakia (1926), L'Etoile de mer (1928), and Les Mysteres du Chateau du Des (1929). Widely recognized for its innovation, his work was shown at the first invitational exhibition of contemporary modernist photography held in Paris at the Salon de l'Escalier at the Th\u00e9atre des Champs-Elys\u00e9es (1928) and at the Film und Foto exhibition in Stuttgart (1929). In 1940 Man Ray moved to Hollywood, where he worked as a freelance photographer and painter until returning to Paris in 1951. He experimented with color photography in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but painting became his primary interest. One of his paintings is also in the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art. Man Ray's photographs have been exhibited in more than 100 one-artist exhibitions, including a retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (1966), a showing at the Venice Biennale (1976), and major exhibitions at the Kunstverein, Frankfurt (1979, and tour), and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (1981). Awarded the Gold Medal for photography at the Venice Biennale in 1961, Man Ray's images, which emphasize chance and the irrational and which deliberately mock traditional ideas of art, continue to fascinate and inspire generations of photographers. M.M.",
"name_in_original_language": null,
"birth_year": "1890",
"death_year": "1976",
"use_in_caption": true,
"include_extent": false,
"weight": 1
}
],
"legal_status": "accessioned",
"accession_date": "2011-12-05T00:00:00",
"sortable_date": 1921,
"date_added_to_oa": null,
"date_text": "1921, recreated 1963",
"collapse_artists": false,
"on_loan": false,
"recently_acquired": false,
"record_type": "object",
"conservation_statement": null,
"has_conservation_images": false,
"cover_accession_number": null,
"is_nazi_era_provenance": false,
"impression": null,
"alternate_titles": [],
"is_highlight": false,
"updated_at": "2026-05-14 15:18:53.136000"
}
}