This work, painted in 1914, is the earliest work in the museum’s modern art collection. It is a rare example of Man Ray’s early Cubist paintings, created after he encountered the European avant-garde at the 1913 Armory Show, where works by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque were introduced to American audiences.
In the same year, Man Ray produced Departure of Summer (1914), depicting three female nudes in a natural setting and revealing the influence of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907). He also painted the large-scale Cubist work A.D. MCMXIV (1914), in which human figures are rendered as geometric forms, reflecting the reduction of individuals to functional objects in the context of war.
Like A.D. MCMXIV, Le Couple presents abstracted, geometricized human forms. However, the figures here retain a greater sense of humanity and emotional resonance. The composition of a couple embracing among trees recalls Departure of Summer, yet after 1914 Man Ray would no longer produce oil paintings based on natural motifs. The following year, he met Marcel Duchamp, who had arrived in New York from Paris, and soon became involved in Dada activities there.