Ammon News - Man Ray's 1924 image Le Violon d'Ingres, of a woman's body transformed into a violin, has continued to fascinate, confuse and upset viewers, more than 100 years on.

Some works of art endure in spite of themselves. They transcend their own deficiencies. The Mona Lisa, The Scream and The Girl with a Pearl Earring are all meme machines, but still manage to move us. Something in them shields their essence from the acid of caricature, and ceaselessly restores their mystery. So it is with Man Ray's iconic photograph of his lover's naked torso, which the France-based American Surrealist famously transformed into a violin.

The image's objectionable perspective, which transforms a person into a thing, has not slowed its propulsion in popular imagination. In 2022, Le Violon d'Ingres (1924), among the key works on display in the exhibition Man Ray: When Objects Dream at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, sold for more than $12m (£9.6m), the highest price ever paid for a photograph at auction – proof of its accelerating appeal. What is it about the photo that, despite its ostensible flaws, keeps it resonating over a century after it was created?

Le Violon d'Ingres captures from behind the celebrated French model, memoirist, painter and Jazz singer, Alice Prin, who adopted the nickname "Kiki de Montparnasse" after the bohemian neighbourhood of south Paris in which she rose to prominence in the 1920s. Man Ray shows Kiki seated with a straight back, arms invisible in front of her, and head turned slightly to the left. She wears nothing more than a turban fashioned from a patterned shawl and drop earrings. Two bold, black, f-shaped acoustic sound holes, of the kind cut out from bodies of violins and violas, cellos and double bases, are surreally imprinted on her lower back. These are, as we will see, the twin keys that unlock both the photo's defects and its peculiar power as they connect the work to a dizzying array of cultural shapes, from ancient mysticism to Gibson guitars, from Orpheus to Proust.

The image takes its title from a French idiom for "hobby", alluding, as it does, to the 19th-Century Neoclassical artist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and his fondness for playing the violin as a diversion from painting. By fitting Kiki's back with a pair of f-holes, Man Ray more than merely lyricises her feminine curves or melts them into melody. The holes re-engineer her physique altogether, conceptually dislocating it from that of a human being into something built, not born: a tunable, playable and ultimately silenceable object. They hollow her out.

In musical terms, the f-holes control an instrument's projection, and dictate where its bridge and the soundpost sit. Expertly crafted, they are essential to the object's objectness – its function as a thing that is played, plucked and ultimately put away. They are no less fundamental to the strategy of Man Ray's photo. At first glance, the sinuous sound holes may seem like adoring augmentations of the singer's vocal gifts, affectionate enhancements of her sonic expressiveness. But Man Ray has positioned the sound holes on Kiki's back, not on her front, rendering them useless at best: a disfigurement.

Was that deformation deliberate? There are reasons to think it was. Not only does Man Ray allude explicitly to Ingres in the title of his work, Le Violin d'Ingres audaciously echoes the perspective and contours of his forebear's well-known portrait, The Valpinçon Bather (1808). That work, like many of Ingres's paintings, relies for its effect on a disturbing distortion of the female form. In idealising his subject, Ingres has pulled his subject's physique out of all proportion, skewing the relative dimensions of torso and limb. In The Valpinçon Bather these deformities are subtle enough; elsewhere, his spines are famously stretched to breaking point.

In Ingres's La Grande Odalisque, 1814, a lounging woman's absurdly elongated lumbar was lampooned by critics for its anatomical illogic. So severely has the artist taffy tugged his subject's backbone, medical scholars have since estimated that she has been given at least five additional vertebrae – a malformation that would, in reality, result in profound physical paralysis. Rather than enhancing sexuality, these interventions mistune their subjects' bodies. In Man Ray's photograph, the positioning of the f-holes conceptually impair Kiki's capacity for sound. They silence her.

'Teasing emblem of love and control'
Nor does it stop there. These blemishes are also marks of enslavement. At the time Man Ray created his work in 1924, f-holes were very much in the air. Once associated chiefly with elite orchestral instruments, their meaning had begun to widen. Modern mandolins had already been equipped with sound holes and the year before Man Ray made Le Violon d'Ingres, Gibson released its L-5 archtop guitar, the first mass-market instrument of its kind to utilise the f-hole, giving the instrument the volume and resonance necessary for performance in dance halls and jazz clubs. Suddenly, f-holes were not simply shorthand for projection and power, they were emblems of commodified culture and mass-produced sound. Tattooed onto Kiki's back, they brand her and turn her into a thing that is bought and sold.

Paradoxically, however, they also deepen the meaning of the photo, enriching its range of cultural resonance. The violin has long carried occult overtones in art, music and literature – from Pieter Bruegel the Elder's Triumph of Death, 1562, in which death plays a fiddle, to Niccolò Paganini's unreal violin virtuosity, which sparked rumours of a Faustian pact. The connection between the violin and the world we cannot see was well known to Man Ray's contemporaries. A decade before Le Violon d'Ingres, Marcel Proust famously likened the experience of hearing a violin "to listening to a captive genie, struggling in the darkness… like a pure and supernatural being that unfolds its invisible message as it goes by". By merging Kiki's shape with that of a violin, Man Ray taps into an intriguing tradition of grasping after the ungraspable.

In Man Ray's imagination, images such as Le Violin d'Ingres were constructed as talismans that could conjure unseen spirits. The so-called "rayograph" technique to which the Met's exhibition is devoted – conceived by the artist as an immaterial spin on material X-rays – was profoundly ritualistic. To create them, the artist sought to sidestep the soulless machinery of the camera by placing objects directly onto light-sensitive paper, a process he believed could access hidden energies and dimensions beyond human perception.

The result, of which Le Violin d'Ingres is a hybrid (a conventional photograph inscribed with rayographed f-holes), is absorbingly spectral – an image whose aura shudders with ghostly allure. In describing the achievement of his rayographs, Man Ray himself could hardly have been more inscrutably hermetic: "Like the undisturbed ashes of an object consumed by flames these images are oxidised residues fixed by light and chemical elements of an experience, an adventure, not an experiment."

In the case of Kiki, this adventure takes observers back to an occult tradition that conceives of the violin as an instrument of metamorphosis – a hollow body that mediates matter and spirit. That notion, of a cosmic instrument harmonising body and soul has its origins in antiquity, in the lyre of Orpheus, and can be traced forward through to Robert Fludd's 17th-Century symbolic concept of the "Monochord of the Universe", which mapped celestial vibrations – the music of the spheres – onto human anatomy.

By transforming Kiki's back into a violin, Man Ray envisions her body resonating eternally with invisible harmonies that quiver exquisitely through the elegant apertures of the ambiguous f-holes. The result is something irresolvably strange and complex, as art, desire and mystical vibration are tightly intertwined into an intensely teasing emblem of love and control, creative emancipation and physical confinement – a riddling rune that perennially plucks at both our patience and imagination.