When confiding to his friend Arturo Schwarz, the Surrealist artist Man Ray spoke wittily about his first Dada objects made in Paris. The artist’s remark is deliberately ironic as his use of an iron is diametrically opposed to common sense. Inspired by Marcel Duchamp’s `readymades’, Man Ray distorted manufactured objects, by adding elements to them, to create what he called ‘plastic poems’. If the physical appearance is changed, so too is their meaning and utility.

In 1921, the idea of gluing a row of fourteen tacks to the bottom of an iron came to Man Ray when passing by a hardware store, and the work was created on the spot, there and then. Man Ray offered it to the gallery owner and poet Philippe Soupault the same day, and it appeared on display on his first solo show in Paris. Famously facetious, the artist entitled this iron readymade Cadeau (Gift) and in doing so, imbued the daily and seemingly mundane tool with an irreverent significance. Soupault’s present was stolen however in 1960, Man Ray decided to create this new version, a unique and rare hand-signed variant of the lost 1921
version. Employing a more modern iron, this work re-appropriates the bourgeois object this time in and of itself, without the addition of nails, endowed with the all-important signature of the artist, denoting its status as an artwork. Once again, it was offered to a dear friend, Maurice Lefebvre-Foinet, the great collector and champion of the Surrealists. In 1972, Man Ray granted permission to produce replicas of Cadeau on a larger scale, however this work remains one of the few readymades by the artist’s own hand. As Man Ray sometimes created objects in order to photograph them, then discarding them or reused them in other ways, this work presents a rarity of the artist’s exceptional transformative powers.