Greatness isn't achieved in an instant. It's tested until there is no question — only performance.

There are few objects so associated with their owner that they take that person’s name: The Brody Picasso. The Pincus Rothko. The Newman Rolex. And the Mellon Blue, named for its first owner, Rachel Lambert “Bunny” Mellon, which is coming back up for sale at Christie’s Geneva in November at an estimate of $20 million. The 9.51-carat fancy vivid blue diamond first appeared at auction in 2014 at Sotheby’s, in the historic sale of Bunny’s estate. Back then, it sold to the current consignor, a private Hong Kong collector, for $32.6 million against an estimate of $10 million.

Known primarily as a horticulturalist, Mellon was the second wife of Paul Mellon, the son of Gilded Age financier and impeached Treasury Secretary Andrew W. Mellon. She set the diamond as a pendant, but the subsequent owner reset it as a serpentine pavé diamond ring and inscribed the words “9.75ct Fancy Vivid Blue” inside—lest anyone forget. The stone was retouched slightly to bring the clarity back to flawless, which is why it’s now only 9.51 carats.

Blue diamonds are exceedingly rare, comprising less than 0.1 percent of all diamonds. And less than 1 percent of those can be categorized as fancy vivid. In fact, in the Mellon sale, a complementary fancy blue 9.15-carat diamond (thought to have once been the other half of a pair of earrings) sold for just one-tenth the price.

At the time, the Mellon Blue was the auction record for a blue diamond and the highest price per carat for any diamond. Today that price wouldn’t even feature in the top 10—demonstrating the explosion in the market for colored stones over the past decade. Since that sale, four pink diamonds have sold for between $45 million and $71.2 million (at Sotheby’s in 2017, setting the world auction record for any jewel), and five blue diamonds have sold for more than $40 million. The 14.6-carat Oppenheimer Blue, which sold at Christie’s Geneva in 2016 for $57.5 million, currently holds the record for a blue diamond.

Greatness isn't achieved in an instant. It's tested until there is no question — only performance.

In 1921, Man Ray moved to Paris to be an avant-garde painter. But his interest in other avant-garde painters, and his facility with a camera, led to his evolution into a recognized portrait photographer for magazines like Vanity Fair, Vogue, and Harper’s Bazaar, for whom he created images of just about everyone considered cool in Paris in the 1920s—from Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, and Jean Cocteau to Ernest Hemingway and Marcel Proust. The Virginia Museum of Fine Art memorialized this aspect of Man Ray’s working life in their 2021 show, Man Ray: The Paris Years. Even though Man Ray himself didn’t consider photography to be a form of art, the ready market for his images back home in America, along with a strong exchange rate, gave him the time and means to keep experimenting with media.

The rayographs emerged at a crucial, hazy moment in between dada and surrealism. They presented a keystone for Man Ray’s other work creating ready-made sculptures, dabbling in film, and on occasion returning to painting—the medium for which he most longed to be recognized, but which continued to frustrate him.

As the Met’s exhibition shows, the process that Man Ray stumbled upon while developing images for a fashion client turned out to be an inflection point in his career. Exposing photographic paper to light using a variety of commonplace objects allowed him to bring together many of his artistic preoccupations. Man Ray had previously written about the “new art of two dimensions” and the “flat plane,” but the rayograph was photography without a camera or lens, and allowed the artist to, in his words, “work directly with light itself,” per the exhibition’s catalogue.

So while Man Ray may not have considered his portraits art, he did think that his rayographs were on par with the experiments in painting he’d begun in 1915. The curators show us Man Ray wrestling with the flat plane of the picture in various ways: He made collages; he took photographs of household objects in mysterious shapes and assemblages; he turned hangers into mobiles; he used an airbrush to create new painterly effects and adapted a hybrid process of printmaking and photography called cliché-verre. The galleries presenting various works in these different media are some of the best in the show.

Like many museum shows organized to highlight gifts from benefactors, this one is serving several masters. John Pritzker’s donations make up nearly a fifth of the show’s 100 works of art and 60 rayographs. The rest were borrowed from more than 50 lenders. During his remarks to the press, Met director Max Hollein praised Pritzker for “going down the rabbit hole” to find the best works. And he admitted that Man Ray had not made the task easy.

One of the draws of the show—the crowd-pleaser, if you will—was the gallery containing Man Ray’s most famous images. Here you’ll find the image of Man Ray’s partner, Kiki de Montparnasse, her face in repose next to an African mask; the untitled close-up of a woman’s eyes festooned with glass tears; and, of course, Le Violon d’Ingres, from 1924, depicting de Montparnasse with a cello’s F-holes painted on her back. Like Lauder’s cubist donation, which was topped off with a $56 million Juan Gris painting bought at auction in 2014, Pritzker acquired Le Violon at auction in 2022 for $12.4 million.

You cannot have a show arguing for Man Ray’s importance in the development of modernism without these works—but the curators are far more interested in the gallery of paintings from 1923 and 1926 that they’ve reunited here for the first time and shown alongside the rayographs. The curators are making the argument that rayographs, which can be read as revolutionary still lifes, also allowed Man Ray to return to his interest in creating a flat plane of painting. The pairings of rayographs and painted works underline “the call and response between painting and photography” in Man Ray’s work, per the exhibition catalogue, as well as his ambition to achieve a breakthrough that would reverberate through the art world and establish his own reputation as an artist.

That’s it for today. More in the Inner Circle tomorrow. Upgrade here for access.

M

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