A Blockbuster Trove of Dada and Surrealist Masterpieces Arrives at the Met

Donated by a billionaire trustee, the Bluff Collection features key works by artists like Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp

Ella Feldman | Daily Correspondent

September 10, 2025

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A trove of avant-garde art—including Man Ray’s iconic reimagining of his lover’s lower back as a violin—has been gifted to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Manhattan cultural institution announced this week.

Gifted by billionaire Met trustee John Pritzker, the collection includes 188 works by 37 prominent figures in Dada and Surrealism. Dubbed the Bluff Collection, the donation includes collages, paintings, photographs and more by artists like Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp, as well as rare catalogues and publications on the two art movements.

The collection is “remarkable” and “truly unparalleled,” says Max Hollein, the museum’s CEO, in a statement. “It enhances our ability to offer a profound, more comprehensive view of these outstanding artists and enigmatic trailblazers of modernism, whose bold and influential experimentation across media continues to fascinate and inspire.”

Marked by absurdism and biting satire, Dada came about in Zurich during World War I in response to what many artists saw as senseless violence engulfing the world. The movement directly challenged the logic and tradition that had long defined popular art. Surrealism, which arose in 1920s Paris, shared Dada’s disdain for conventionalism but was more interested in dreams, the subconscious and a person’s inner life.

Central to the Bluff Collection is the work of Man Ray, a multimedia artist who made major contributions to both Dada and Surrealism. The American-born painter and photographer spent most of his career in Paris, where he made one of the collection’s crown jewels, Le Violon d’Ingres.

In the provocative image, Man Ray’s model and lover Kiki de Montparnasse is seated with her head turned to the side and her bare back to the camera. On her lower back, Man Ray painted the sound holes of a violin, turning the curves of her figure into the instrument.

Pritzker purchased an original print of Le Violon d’Ingres for $12.4 million in 2022, during a Christie’s auction dedicated to Surrealist art. As the bidding passed Christie’s high-end estimate of $7 million, Pritzker considered dropping out of contention. But as he tells the New York Times’ Arthur Lubow, his wife said, “You tell me you’ve been chasing this for 30 years. If you walk away, you’ll never see it again.” Pritzker ultimately placed the winning bid, which made Man Ray’s print the most expensive photograph ever sold.

Other Man Ray works in the Bluff Collection include Torse (Retour á la Raison), an image of Kiki’s torso as light filtered through a lace curtain dances across her nude body; Noire et Blanche, in which Kiki’s pale face is juxtaposed with an African mask; and Untitled (Glass Tears), a tightly framed photograph of a woman’s eyes and cheeks, which are dotted with glass beads that evoke teardrops.

Thirty-five works from the donation will be featured in the exhibition “Man Ray: When Objects Dream,” which opens at the Met on September 14.

Pritzker also gifted a number of works by Duchamp, another central Dadaist, to the Met, including the first issue of the Monte Carlo Bonds, a series of legal documents that feature the French artist’s own face, topped with devilish horns, printed on top of a casino roulette. The collection is rounded out with works by Max Ernst, Giorgio de Chirico, Suzanne Duchamp, Francis Picabia and others.

In the statement, Pritzker, a private equity manager, says he’s always been interested in the art that emerged in between the world wars. He started assembling the Bluff Collection in the 1990s.

“As I’ve built the collection, Man Ray has been a central figure, especially as a person who moved between groups and connected ideas,” Pritzker says. “Artists in his circle … were, like Man Ray, instigators and innovators. Together, this group broke down barriers of what defined a painting, sculpture, text or photograph and more—what art itself could be.”

Elected to the Met’s board of trustees in 2019, Pritzker is also financing a new research initiative at the museum focused on Dada and Surrealism.

The blockbuster donation comes as the Met prepares for the Tang Wing, a new $550 million wing for modern and contemporary art expected to open in 2030. Designed by Frida Escobedo, the wing will be the first designed by a female architect in the museum’s 155-year history.

“Man Ray: When Objects Dream” will be on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City from September 14, 2025, to February 1, 2026.

Ella Feldman | Read More

Ella Feldman is a journalist based in New York City. Her work has appeared in NPR, Washington City Paper, DCist and more.