In 1923 the Surrealist artist Emmanuel Radnitzky (1890– 1976), better known as Man Ray, wound up a metronome in his Paris studio and set to painting, regulating the speed of his strokes according to the device. The faster it ticked, the faster he painted. “If the metronome stopped then I knew I had painted too long, I was repeating myself, my painting was no good and I would destroy it.” Man Ray intensified the experience by clipping a photo of an eye to the metronome, creating the illusion of being watched while he painted. “One day I did not accept the metronome’s verdict, the silence was unbearable and since I had called it, with a certain premonition, Object of Destruction, I smashed it to pieces.”

In 1932 Man Ray remade the concept on paper, now modified with a photograph of the eye of his former lover. What was formerly an objective device passing judgement on his work now took on personal meaning for the artist, one that no longer simply determined the rate of his brushstrokes but represented a connection to his romantic psyche: “Cut out the eye from a photograph of one who has been loved but is seen no more. Attach the eye to the pendulum of a metronome and regulate the weight to suit the tempo desired. Keep going to the limit of endurance. With a hammer well-aimed, try to destroy the whole at a single blow.”

Upon Germany’s 1940 invasion of France, Man Ray fled Paris and returned to the United States, the country of his birth. Though his Object of Destruction was lost, he remade it five years later for a New York gallery. Now retitled Lost Object, it was mistakenly labeled Last Object by a printer, a mistake that stuck. Then, in 1957, Last Object or Object of Destruction met its fate at a Paris exhibition dedicated to Dadaism and Surrealism, when protesters grabbed Man Ray’s device, ran outside with it and destroyed it. The work would undergo a final transformation when Man Ray replaced the eye with an image that opened and closed with each swing of the pendulum.