A man has been arrested in connection with the apparent desecration of surrealist artist Man Ray’s tomb in the Montparnasse cemetery in Paris.

A gravestone bearing the inscription “Unconcerned but not indifferent” was knocked over in the incident, as was a headstone added after the death of Ray’s wife, the dancer Juliet Browner, on which was inscribed “Together again”.

No other tombs nearby were damaged.

The deputy security head for the Paris district where the cemetery is located said a man was taken into custody on suspicion of being behind the damage after being observed near the grave on Wednesday.

Man Ray – who has been called the “first Jewish avant-garde artist” – spent most of his life in the French capital, and was a major figure in the Dada and Surrealist movements, as well as a huge influence on fashion photography.

He died in Paris in 1976 and is buried not far from the Nobel prize-winning Irish playwright Samuel Beckett.

The cemetery contains the remains of other artistic greats such as the writers Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Charles Baudelaire and Marguerite Duras.

Man Ray is best known for Ingres’ Violin, a nude photomontage in which he transformed the naked back of his lover and muse, singer Kiki de Montparnasse, into a violin.

As well as being a visual gag, Ingres’ Violin is a pun, the idiom meaning “hobby” in French.

The great 19th-century French painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres was passionate about the instrument, although he never scaled the same heights with it as he did with his paintbrush.

Born Emmanuel Radnitzky in Philadelphia in 1890, Man Ray was a star of Paris’s frenetic artistic scene between the two world wars alongside Picasso, Salvador Dalí, and Marcel Duchamp.

Ray fled the Nazis when they invaded France during the second world war but returned from California in 1951 and spent the rest of his days in Paris.