Object Indestructable

Private collection, New York [1];

With Zabriskie Gallery, Inc., New York, NY, by May 10, 2000-September 2001 [2];

Purchased from Zabriskie Gallery by The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 2001 [3].

NOTES:

[1] According to object documentation, Archives of American Art, Washington, DC, Zabriskie Gallery Records, Box 66, folder 24: Works for Sale, 1988-2000. Copy in Nelson-Atkins curatorial file.

[2] According to Virginia Zabriskie, Zabriskie Gallery, in a letter to Leesa Fanning, Curator, January 23, 2001, NAMA curatorial files, “The Metronome that you have on loan from the gallery is one of an incomplete edition done for the New York Cultural Center at the time of Man Ray’s retrospective in 1974. According to Mario Amaya (the director of the cultural center at that time) the edition was not completed. As told to me some years later, Man Ray apparently did 8 or 9 Metronomes of the suggested edition of 200 and then left Mr. Amaya with some eyes and labels, telling him if he needed any more he should put them together himself. That is what was told to me years ago in Chicago by Mr. Amaya who is no longer living.” The New York Cultural Center closed in 1975.

[3] “The first version of this Dada construction, Object to be Destroyed , was assembled in1923 and destroyed in 1957. It was followed by five subsequent versions: Object of Destruction (1932), Lost Object (1945), Indestructible Object (1958), Last Object (1966) and Perpetual Motif (1972). The Nelson-Atkins version, made in 1975, is the final embodiment of an indestructible idea.” Jan Schall, The William T. Kemper Collecting Initiative at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art , exh. cat. (Kansas City, MO: The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2008), 26.