Les Mains libres: Dessins de Man Ray, illustrés par les poèmes de Paul Éluard (Free Hands: Drawings illustrated by the poems of Paul Éluard)

Following the simple inscription “to my friend” from Paul Eluard and Man Ray to Marcel Duchamp, this large illustrated book is a testament to the Surrealist collaborative spirit. While traveling through France from 1936 to 1937, Man Ray created a series of illustrations based on the Surrealist technique of automatic drawing, which allows the unconscious mind to take control of the creative process. This may explain why the book contains such an array of visual detail while maintaining one recurring motif: human hands. In one image, a man uses his hands to straighten his bowtie; in another, a giant hand tightly grips a nude woman, her face obscured and fate unknown. Much like waking from a dream in which some details are illogical but others are clear as day, Man Ray’s drawings tell a story that verges beyond comprehension.

When Man Ray’s collaborator and friend Paul Eluard saw his drawings, he responded with poetry induced by his own dream state. As conveyed in the subtitle, each drawing in the book is “illustrated” by Eluard’s equally hypnotic words. The goal of both artists was to override the conscious impulse to manipulate the movement of the hands and what they create/write, freeing the creative process from intellectual control.

This is one of two copies of Les mains libres that came to the Art Institute from Mary Reynolds’s library. The second copy was elaborately bound into a work of sculpture by Reynolds.