The Heckscher Museum of Art’s collection spans 500 years with particular emphasis on art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. American landscape painting and work by Long Island artists, past and present, are particular strengths, as is American and European modernism.
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La Ville is one of ten images in the portfolio Electricité, commissioned from Man Ray in 1931 by the Parisian electric company Compagnie Parisienne de Distribution d'Electricité (CPDE) to promote the domestic uses of electricity. Man Ray had experimented with electricity in photographic processes as early as 1917 and throughout the 1920s, inventing two types of photographs: rayographs and solarized images. Invented by chance in 1917, rayographs were produced by placing various objects on light sensitive paper in the darkroom and exposing the paper to light, creating images that resemble x-rays. Solarized images were made by briefly exposing the developing negatives to light, which creates a halo effect around the object depicted. While several of the images in the Electricité portfolio depict domestic appliances, La Ville makes use of superimposed images of neon signs and the Eiffel Tower to present a vibrant and electrified Paris.