Man Ray's Le Violon d'Ingres becomes most expensive photograph ever sold at auction

Man Ray's iconic 1924 photograph Le Violon d'Ingres sold for $12.4 million at Christie's New York, setting a new world record for the most expensive photograph ever auctioned. The sale was part of the single-owner collection The Surrealist World of Rosalind Gersten Jacobs and Melvin Jacobs, which totaled over $42 million and contributed to Christie's weekly sales reaching $1.4 billion. The photograph, depicting Kiki de Montparnasse with violin f-holes painted on her back, had a pre-sale estimate of $5-7 million and took ten minutes of bidding between two phone bidders in New York and Paris. The previous record for a photograph was held by Andreas Gursky's Rhein II, which sold for $4.3 million in 2011. Man Ray's own previous record was $3 million for Noire et Blanche (1926) in 2017. The surrealist collection achieved a 99% sell-through rate by value and 92% by lot, with additional records for Dorothea Tanning's Le mal oublié (over $1.4 million, tripling estimates), William Nelson Copley, and jewelry by Noma Copley and Man Ray. René Magritte works also performed strongly: L'autre son de cloche exceeded $10 million, Eloge de la dialectique reached $4.6 million, Le coeur du monde $2.2 million, and Le modèle rouge $2.1 million.