Clare Patrick is the recipient of AWARE: Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions’ second edition of the Marie-Solanges Apollon programme, which aims to promote research into transcultural artistic practices of women artists of African descent, drawing inspiration from Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic concept. The publication of the following text was preceded by a roundtable with the participation of curator and scholar Claire Tancons, sound artist and writer Jamika Ajalon and Clare Patrick, at AWARE’s documentation centre in Montparnasse, on 3 July 2025.

Man Ray, Adrienne Fidelin, c. 1938, 6 x 9 cm, Gelatin silver print © Man Ray Trust / ADAGP © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. GrandPalaisRmn / image Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI

Man Ray, Adrienne Fidelin, c. 1938, 6 x 9 cm, Gelatin silver negative on flexible nitrate support © Man Ray Trust / ADAGP © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. GrandPalaisRmn / image Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI

Adrienne Fidelin (1915–2004) is depicted across many frames, and yet her contributions have been blurred and obscured. A Guadeloupean performer active in Paris during the 1930s, A. Fidelin is best known through her relationship with Franco-American photographer Man Ray (1890–1976). Together for at least four years from the mid 1930s, her presence is imprinted in hundreds of artworks and writings by Man Ray and their contemporaries. Despite this, she is rarely more than a footnote in monographs and has been consistently less remembered than his other so-called ‘muses’, Kiki de Montparnasse (1901–1953) or Lee Miller (1907–1977). A. Fidelin’s presence in interwar Paris, visible notably in Man Ray’s archive but absent from canonical narratives – exhibitions, archives, biographies and registries – compels a revision of Surrealist historiography, through foregrounding Black Atlantic networks, reconceptualising embodied labour and reconsidering socio-cultural influence.

In Her Hands: Adrienne Fidelin, Performance and Diasporic Frequencies — a roundtable with Claire Tancons, Jamika Ajalon, and AWARE researcher-in-residence Clare Patrick. Organized within the framework of the Marie-Solanges Apollon Residency, 3 July 2025. © AWARE: Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions

In Her Hands: Adrienne Fidelin, Performance and Diasporic Frequencies — a roundtable with Claire Tancons, Jamika Ajalon, and AWARE researcher-in-residence Clare Patrick. Organized within the framework of the Marie-Solanges Apollon Residency, 3 July 2025. © AWARE: Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions

In Her Hands: Adrienne Fidelin, Performance and Diasporic Frequencies — a roundtable with Claire Tancons, Jamika Ajalon, and AWARE researcher-in-residence Clare Patrick. Organized within the framework of the Marie-Solanges Apollon Residency, 3 July 2025. © AWARE: Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions

AWARE’s Marie-Solanges Apollon research residency, which brought me to Paris, calls on Paul Gilroy’s notion of the Black Atlantic. This has guided my inquiries around concepts of transnational interaction and impelled migration, while engaging with the work of Tracy Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Claire Tancons, Ingrid Kummels, Tina Campt and Saidiya Hartman to think through feminist inquiries of presence, absence and ‘self-making’¹. Social historian Petrine Archer-Straw’s understanding of diaspora “as a discursive form related to scattering, difference and multiplicity”² has been instructive in considering imagery of A. Fidelin. Linking her journey between Guadeloupe and Metropolitan France, this project situates A. Fidelin within a transnational Black presence in Paris. Exploring the interplay of displacement, influence and movement, her story is helpful as a method in building more nuanced art historiographic narratives.

I come to this research with a curatorial lens, to pursue questions and connections. Enquiries glimmer in reading between lines, decoding overwritten letters, highlighting silence as evidence and imagining through the gaps. An institutionalised archive of A. Fidelin is not currently accessible – instead, personal records remain with family and in passing anecdotes. Venturing transnationally, I explored her trace in the Fonds d’archives Man Ray held at the Centre Pompidou’s Bibliothèque Kandinsky, the Getty Research Institute, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Victoria and Albert Museum, Tate Britain and Farleys House & Gallery – in stark awareness of how her image remains owned by others. This displacement echoes Stuart Hall: that what is “thought of as dispersed and fragmented comes, paradoxically, to be the representative modern experience”.³ She is inconsistently named: Ady, Adrienne, Adie, and on occasion, Casimir Joseph Adrienne Fidelin. At Bibliothèque Kandinsky, I found material that had been mislabelled: a wartime note between A. Fidelin and Paul Éluard (1895–1952) – incorrectly filed under the name ‘Fidolin’. I wonder how many other missed opportunities to find her might be in play. In one box lies an outline of her foot traced onto brown paper, another letter has floating lips, reminiscent of Man Ray’s painting typically associated with L. Miller, and sketches of her cats to sign off. A letter from Man Ray to A. Fidelin asks after “notre petite maison”⁴ in Saint Germain-en-Laye – a home typically acknowledged singularly in Man Ray biographies – while their portmanteau play of ‘Manady, Addyman’⁵ infers a life the couple built and in which they envisioned a future.

In the gaps and silences surrounding A. Fidelin, a realisation focuses: reconsidering A. Fidelin requires conjuring a presence in absence. She recurs in motifs of hands, and markings by hands. In perhaps one of the only descriptions of A. Fidelin as active, P. Éluard describes her as the woman with “clouds in her hands”⁶. Les Mains Libres (1937) was a collaborative project between P. Éluard and Man Ray, initiated during one of the Surrealists’ summer gatherings – a circle that included Pablo Picasso (1881–1978), Dora Maar (1907–1997), Roland Penrose (1900–1984), and Nusch Éluard (1906–1946), all of whom appear alongside A. Fidelin in several photographs. A. Fidelin can be traced through the collaboration, visually and in descriptions, as the men exchange their drawings and poems – unfolding similarly as a game of cadavre exquis. Later, a bespoke cover was contributed by Mary Reynolds (1891–1950), which embeds the absent presence of hands through gloves stitched into the cover. One drawing among the many sketches found within Les Mains Libres, La Femme au Bras Cassé follows a conventional portraiture format of A. Fidelin. Her face is depicted in semi-profile, drawn in continuous lines, minimally contouring the features of her face and shoulders. To the bottom left, the piece notes “La femme au bras cassé” and, seemingly continuing off her shoulder, perhaps continuing the line of a tendril of a curl, her name, ‘Ady’ is written in reverse. Her hands are not shown in this image, nor is her supposedly broken arm.

Commemorative plaque in tribute to Adrienne Fidelin and Man Ray, 40 rue Henri Barbusse, Paris, France, 2025 © Clare Patrick

Commemorative plaque in tribute to Adrienne Fidelin and Man Ray, 40 rue Henri Barbusse, Paris, France, 2025 © Clare Patrick

Man Ray’s workshop, 2 bis rue Férou, Paris, France, 2025 © Clare Patrick

Exploring how artistic hands hold, make, shape and might leave very little trace, I connected with several contemporary transdisciplinary artists. While in residence at Villa Vassilieff, I met with Jamika Ajalon, Minia Biabiany, Malik Crumpler, Mike Ladd, Attandi Trawalley and Anouchka Agbayissah. I criss-crossed Les Buttes-Chaumont, Montreuil, Saint-Denis, Le Père-Lachaise and along the Seine. Curious about marking and manifestation, we discussed presence, fugitivity and new modes of remembrance. This pivoted my reading of A. Fidelin uncontained identity as cloud-like and changeable, enabling a more expansive framework. I traced famed footsteps through Montparnasse, finding each of Man Ray’s apartments that A. Fidelin might have shared with him. The proximity to other artists’ addresses, such as those of Gertrude Stein (1874–1946), P. and N. Éluard and P. Picasso, and the multitude of bars and cafes, make it easy to visualise frequent exchanges. Consecutive summer visits to the South of France – Mougins, Cannes, Antibes – and even to Cornwall, reflect years of friendship within the surrealist group. Walking, I think of friendships found in all-night conversations, lunch dialogues, drinking together and traversing years of ongoing interactions.

Georges Henri Carré, Bal nègre de la rue Blomet, 1928, oil on canvas, 54 × 73 cm

A. Fidelin’s artistic activity in Paris revolved around dance⁷, performance, the Surrealist movement⁸ and modelling⁹. She arrives in Paris as the beguine¹⁰ gains popularity amid a bourgeoning jazz scene. Her love of performing in the clubs of Montparnasse and at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées is described in letters from her and her husband André Art to Man Ray during the 1940s and 1950s.¹¹ Gisèle Pineau’s Ady, Soleil Noir (2021)¹² builds a fabulation in the gaps of existing knowledge: rather than complying with expected etiquettes of the metropole, G. Pineau’s A. Fidelin pursues dance and artist circles in Paris to carve her own subjectivity¹³. François Lévy-Kuentz’s collaging of Man Ray’s film footage in Un été à la Garoupe (2021)¹⁴ offers a brief shaky clip of a covered figure I presume to be A. Fidelin. She moves slowly, stretching her hands towards the camera, reaching. The lines on her palms have been darkened with ink. However fleeting, the clip reveals an interest in performing beyond clubs and within the studio – exploring gesture, veiling and abstracted making, congruent within a trajectory of Surrealist experimentation.

Édouard Glissant’s Caribbean Discourse (1989) links collectivity and authorship by examining how a “narrative forces us to draw up its relationship to the individual: In what way does a community influence the individuals who make it up? Or vice versa?”¹⁵ Influence resists measurement, and presence is necessarily intangible. Beyond A. Fidelin’s singular influence, she enabled access to a world in which the Surrealists could otherwise only be passing guests:¹⁶“In jazz nightclubs, urbanites and the avant-garde could have physical contact with blacks to lend fact to their fantasies”.¹⁷ To occlude A. Fidelin’s presence within this Surrealist circle, during arguably their most transitional and recalibrative years, is thus to overlook the broader cultural and social influences that informed their ongoing creative pursuits. Ignoring her as a key figure, therefore, is to erase the intimate interactions of the Surrealists with a broader Black Atlantic presence from the earlier interwar years onwards, within Paris itself.

Bal Blomet, 33 rue Blomet, Paris, France, 2025 © Clare Patrick

Bal Blomet, 33 rue Blomet, Paris, France, 2025 © Clare Patrick

A. Fidelin’s public activity culminates as the Second World War disperses the Surrealists and her relationship with Man Ray is interrupted by his exile to the United States. Following this separation, although they maintained private correspondence until at least 1961, her presence becomes harder to trace, despite her relatively recent death in 2004.¹⁸ As W. Grossman and S. Patterson have remarked throughout years of working on A. Fidelin, the possibilities of what might have been linger persistently. The act of examining a life unsettles as much as it illuminates, and the impact of any one individual is difficult to quantify, even when extensive material is available. This is compounded, as Claire Tancons observes, when “whom you could be was not dependant so much on who you were as on who others wanted you to be – and made you believe that you wanted to be”.¹⁹ Further, histories that trace diasporic navigations are rarely clear, and work uncovering such stories are often sanctioned and siloed into disciplines that rarely intersect.

Reviewing overlooked interactions can allow for expansiveness – adding more tonal values to hues which over time have been worn and washed out. In comprehending the influence of wider cultural contributions, links reveal themselves when centring narratives that have not fully been recognised. In this light, A. Fidelin’s story holds many possibilities for expansion and further questioning. I seek to continue, to expand, to create — space for more, space for specificity, space for nuance, space for recognition, space for visibility.

Following her residency at AWARE, Clare Patrick was awarded the 2025–26 British Art Network Bursary, supported by Tate and the Paul Mellon Centre, to further her research on Adrienne Fidelin.