Sunday, March 1, 2026, 18.00-19.00pm UK time (Please check your own time zone).

Join us for this free virtual event hosted by the International Society for the Study of Surrealism (ISSS) Communications Committee.

Register for the event here.

Purchase the book here.

Man Ray said “most creative work is invisible—until someone comes along and discovers it.” In Permanent Attraction: Man Ray & Chess Larry List has “discovered” Man Ray’s life-long passion for chess imagery. He used the game of courtship & warfare to dramatize episodes of his life and those of his friends. His chess art fused avant garde 20th c. art and design. It employed commercial techniques and industrial materials to combine European high culture with American popular cultural influences – everything from the Spanish Civil War to California car culture, Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, and two World Wars. 

Visual cultures historian Christina Heflin will host Permanent Attraction: Man Ray & Chess author Larry List and Man Ray scholar Francis M. Naumann, contributor of the book’s Foreword, to consider the whole body of Man Ray’s chess-related work and the significant new picture of the artist’s life and art that it offers.

Discussion will cover the early 20th century era when a chess set, board or table was the centerpiece of every living room, studio, café, or bar as an active participant pastime that the young Dada and Surrealist artists embraced. They adopted the 1500-year-old global iconography of chess as they rejected the imagery of the Judeo-Christian cultures that symbolized the catastrophic destruction of W.W. I and  W.W. II. 

The influence of Man Ray’s polar opposite mentors and friends – Robert Henri and Alfred Stieglitz; Marcel Duchamp and Constantin Brancusi; and how his relationships with strong creative women all contributed to the dynamics of his creative processes will be considered.

Man Ray and Duchamp will also be examined as alter egos – Duchamp finding beauty in chess through playing the game while Man Ray explored the beauty of chess through the creation of dozens of drawings, photos, paintings, objects and editions. His chess set designs especially embodied an irresistible yet irresolvable Dada contradiction by providing useful designs for a totally useless activity. 

Emphasis will be placed on Man Ray’s early mechanical drawing training, work in cartography, and self-education in photography – commercial, industrial techniques and skill sets that the artist used to create the art of a new, radical machine age before many others. List and Naumann will trace Man Ray’s adept transmutations of images from drawing to photograph to painting to collage to assemblage or sculpture – one medium kaleidoscopically becoming another. List and Naumann hope to share with ISSS members “almost the same thrill as [that of] the creator . . .” Man Ray.

Christina Heflin is an historian of visual culture interested in early twentieth century avant-garde European art and the intersection of science and culture. Her writings include “Aquatic Sensing in Jean Painlevé’s Early Filmic Environments” in Surrealism and Ecology, Vernon Press, 2025; “Eileen Agar and the Undersea Marvelous” Colloquy, Stanford University, 2025; “The Ceremonial Hat for Eating Bouillabaisse d’Eileen Agar et les modes sensoriels” Hors d’oeuvre nº 48, 2022. Her current project concerns documentary war drawings from the 20th century. Her work Submerged Surrealism: Science in the Service of Subversion will be appearing soon in monograph form.

New York-based independent curator and writer Larry List began his chess and art studies as a guest curator researching his 2005 Imagery of Chess Revisited exhibition and book for the Noguchi Museum and the Menil Collection. He has since produced exhibitions and written essays about Dada, Surrealism, modern and contemporary art for The Tate Modern, The Warhol Museum, Reykjavik Art Museum, DOX Center for Art, Prague, The World Chess Hall of Fame & Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Bordeaux, David Zwirner Gallery, Maruani Mercier Gallery, Brussels and many journals. He was authorized by the Man Ray Trust in 2006 to catalog the artist’s chess-related work. Permanent Attraction: Man Ray & Chess was published Hirmer/Verlag in Fall 2025. 

Francis M. Naumann is an art historian, curator, and former gallerist, specializing in art of the Dada and Surrealist periods. He is author of numerous articles and exhibition catalogues, including his 1994 New York Dada 1915–25, and his 1999 Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Making Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. He has written extensively on Man Ray, including Conversion to Modernism: The Early Work of Man Ray, which was also a 2003 exhibition he organized for the Montclair Art Museum. His most recent books are his 2012 The Recurrent, Haunting Ghost: Essays on the Art, Life and Legacy of Marcel Duchamp, and the recently completed Impossible: The Love Affair between Marcel Duchamp and Maria Martins and the Artwork it Inspired, to be published by Abbeville in 2026.