Miriam Hopkins (Primary Title)
Man Ray, American, 1890 - 1976 (Artist)
Miriam Hopkins (1902–1972) was one of the most famous and scandalous international film stars of the 1930s. She made her debut on the silver screen in Fast and Loose in 1930, and her subsequent roles in The Smiling Lieutenant, Design for Living, and The Story of Temple Drake established Hopkins as one of the leading film stars of the day. This portrait was made in April 1936 during Hopkins’s vacation in France. Man Ray deliberately positioned the blonde actress’s tilted head and upward gaze to resemble a movie star publicity image. On May 13, 1937, Man Ray published a variant image of Hopkins in La photographie n’est pas l’art (Photography is Not Art). This provocatively titled album reflects Man Ray’s disdain for commercial photography in the late 1930s, although his carefully cropped portraits of Miriam Hopkins disproved his polemical statement that photography could never attain the elevated status afforded to painting or sculpture.
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