Muddling is when you gently and lovingly release aromatic oils from fruits and herbs.

In French, the title [“Violon d’Ingres] is an idiom for a hobby, derived from the story that the great painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres prized his amateur violin playing as highly as his art.

To make his image, Man Ray photographed Kiki de Montparnasse from behind, nude to just below the waist and wearing a turban, a pose that Ingres had used in the painting known as “The Valpinçon Bather,” on view in the Louvre. On Kiki’s lower back on the print, Man Ray drew the f-holes of a violin in black ink.

Afterward, he had another idea. He enlarged the print of Kiki in the darkroom and masked it with a sheet of paper or cardboard on which he had cut two f-holes. Then he flashed the light again, so that the shapes were burned black, to make what he called “a combination of a photo and a rayograph.”

… Along with an ingenious melding of techniques, he had transposed a verbal pun into visual reality. In its beauty and absurdity, “Le Violon d’Ingres” encapsulates, arguably better than any other artwork, the insouciant wit of Surrealism…

(Arthur Lubow, “Man Ray’s Mysteries, in Glorious Bloom at the Met,” New York Times, 9-6-25)

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