Man Ray's 1924 image Le Violon d'Ingres, of a woman's body transformed into a violin, has continued to fascinate, confuse and upset viewers, more than 100 years on.

Some works of art endure in spite of themselves. They transcend their own deficiencies. The Mona Lisa, The Scream and The Girl with a Pearl Earring are all meme machines, but still manage to move us. Something in them shields their essence from the acid of caricature, and ceaselessly restores their mystery. So it is with Man Ray's iconic photograph of his lover's naked torso, which the France-based American Surrealist famously transformed into a violin.

The image's objectionable perspective, which transforms a person into a thing, has not slowed its propulsion in popular imagination. In 2022, Le Violon d'Ingres (1924), among the key works on display in the exhibition Man Ray: When Objects Dream at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, sold for more than $12m (£9.6m), the highest price ever paid for a photograph at auction – proof of its accelerating appeal. What is it about the photo that, despite its ostensible flaws, keeps it resonating over a century after it was created?

Le Violon d'Ingres captures from behind the celebrated French model, memoirist, painter and Jazz singer, Alice Prin, who adopted the nickname "Kiki de Montparnasse" after the bohemian neighbourhood of south Paris in which she rose to prominence in the 1920s. Man Ray shows Kiki seated with a straight back, arms invisible in front of her, and head turned slightly to the left. She wears nothing more than a turban fashioned from a patterned shawl and drop earrings. Two bold, black, f-shaped acoustic sound holes, of the kind cut out from bodies of violins and violas, cellos and double bases, are surreally imprinted on her lower back. These are, as we will see, the twin keys that unlock both the photo's defects and its peculiar power as they connect the work to a dizzying array of cultural shapes, from ancient mysticism to Gibson guitars, from Orpheus to Proust.

The image takes its title from a French idiom for "hobby", alluding, as it does, to the 19th-Century Neoclassical artist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and his fondness for playing the violin as a diversion from painting. By fitting Kiki's back with a pair of f-holes, Man Ray more than merely lyricises her feminine curves or melts them into melody. The holes re-engineer her physique altogether, conceptually dislocating it from that of a human being into something built, not born: a tunable, playable and ultimately silenceable object. They hollow her out.

In musical terms, the f-holes control an instrument's projection, and dictate where its bridge and the soundpost sit. Expertly crafted, they are essential to the object's objectness – its function as a thing that is played, plucked and ultimately put away. They are no less fundamental to the strategy of Man Ray's photo. At first glance, the sinuous sound holes may seem like adoring augmentations of the........

© BBC