Wants: Man Ray's suggestive peaches

A fortnightly meditation on something for sale

Man Ray, Pêchage (1969/72). Available from Sotheby’s (est. £60,000 - £80,000)

When I see Pêchage I think first of scrummage and scrimmage. English absorbed the -age suffix from Norman French in the 11th century. Much to our later amusement it gave us a French method of forming collective nouns, as in: blokeage and pintage.

Second, I think of other famous stone fruits in modern art. None sooner than William Carlos Williams’ plums:

Forgive me

they were delicious

so sweet

and so cold

So what of Ray’s peachage? Ray and Williams moved in the same circles in New York of the early century; their work appeared in the same magazines, like Alfred Stieglitz’s and Ray’s own New York Dada. If these famous lines from ‘This is Just to Say’ are an ode to betrayal and sadism, Ray’s boxed up fruit articulates something similarly spare and devious, with a latent esotericism that spites its blithe front.

The arrangements exist inside the frame of an apparently warm ‘set’, something like a soundstage for children’s television, imitating an outdoor scene. The thrice repeated peaches and the cotton-wool clouds are tight, cold and specific – like a form of notation – the clouds iterated in precisely varied dimensions; and the peaches, like an ellipsis or a string of Morse, punched in a stern trio. There is a tension between the sense of ‘world’ saluted by the set and the sense of codification created by its elements.

As in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, where birds, bees and other natural objects often appear in sequence, the peaches and clouds hint at an arcane system of meaning beyond. The Rebus principle relates to a way of writing in which pictures or symbols are used to represent sounds; for example, a symbol of a bee representing the sound ‘bee’. Its emergence was a huge leap in the ancient technology of writing, allowing cultures like the Egyptians vastly to expand the scope of written vocabulary. Suddenly, the ‘sound value’ of a symbol such as ‘bee’ could be used to help spell unrelated words containing the same sound. Like writing ‘Isaac’ with an eye and a sack.

Rebus was a bridge between the pictographic and the alphabetic: a mobilisation of pictures toward a finery of meaning – and the beginning of an unstoppable process of abstraction. This is the sense that Pêchage gives. A snapshot of the deferral of meaning; a glimpse – even a dramatisation – of meaning sluicing away from world and into code.

Three clouds, three peaches – like a heavily configured promise: abstract, remote, and yet highly specific. Alphabetic, if you like.

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Pêchage is part of the forthcoming Pauline Karpidas: The London Collection Day Auction at Sotheby’s, beginning September 18.