Raoul Ubac
1939
Les objets

Gelatin silver print
29.8 x 23.0 cm (11 3/4 x 9 1/16 ins)
 
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Ford Motor Company Collection, Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell, 1987, Accession Number: 1987.1100.467, © 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
 
Curatorial description (Accessed: 12 September 2015)
 
In this work, Ubac removes everyday objects—an egg, knife, coin, and cord—from their usual contexts, stripping them of their meaning as items of consumption, utility, or exchange, and assembles them according to his own flexible logic. When Ubac exhibited this photograph with the knife pointing up, he subtitled it “Night Landscape,” but when he displayed the photograph inverted, with the knife pointed down, he called it “Alphabetical Order.” By populating his image with common items surrounded by an eerie glow and giving it changeable subtitles, Ubac demonstrates the associative dream logic of Surrealism.
 
LL/61416