The mathematician, the Surrealist, and the poet are of imagination all compact: Man Ray’s Shakespearean Equations

Abstract

Man Ray’s series of paintings entitled Shakespearean Equations remains largely unknown even today, despite the artist’s fame. Perhaps that is partly because, like many Surrealist works, it so stubbornly resists interpretation; it is difficult to even grasp what one is looking at. The paintings depict mathematical models and their only Shakespearean characteristics are their titles, taken directly from Shakespeare’s canon. Nevertheless, I argue that a fruitful analysis is possible by understanding the pictures in relation to Shakespeare’s texts, the reception of Shakespeare in the twentieth century, and the reception of non-Euclidean geometry in artistic circles at the time. My study thus hinges on an assessment of the context in which Man Ray produced these works. But it also takes a closer look at two paintings in the series, uncovering the textual and pictorial sources they reference, parsing the layers of meaning which are thus built up. This paper does not set itself the impossible task of producing a definitive interpretation, which would, among other things, be contrary to the Surrealist spirit. I rather hope to explore what this particular act of appropriation uncovers about the reception of Shakespeare and mathematics.