Man Ray created the 1928 photograph Ingres’s Violin, showing Kiki de Montparnasse with violin-like body openings.
The image presents the model and performer Alice Prin, known as Kiki de Montparnasse, seen from behind with two f-shaped marks added to her lower back. Those marks resemble the sound holes of a violin, transforming the human body into a visual pun on a musical instrument.
The title refers to Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, the nineteenth-century French painter who played the violin as an amateur. The French expression “violon d’Ingres” also means a hobby or special talent outside someone’s main profession, giving the title a second layer of meaning.
Man Ray used photography, darkroom manipulation, and staged imagery to explore Surrealist ideas. The photograph is often misidentified as a work by Lee Miller because Miller was both his collaborator and partner, but Man Ray took Ingres’s Violin. Kiki de Montparnasse was a major figure in Parisian avant-garde culture.