Man Ray
Man Ray was an American-born, French-naturalized visual artist who spent most of his career in Paris. He was a significant contributor to the Dada and Surrealist movements, although his ties to each were informal. He produced major works in a variety of media but considered himself a painter above all.
He was a photography innovator as well as a fashion and portrait photographer, and is noted for his work with photograms, which he called "rayographs" in reference to himself.
Biography
Background and early life
During his career, Man Ray allowed few details of his early life or family background to be known to the public. He even refused to acknowledge that he even had a name other than Man Ray, and his 1963 autobiography Self-Portrait contains few dates.Man Ray was born Emmanuel Radnitzky in South Philadelphia on August 27, 1890. He was the eldest child of Russian Jewish immigrants Melach "Max" Radnitzky, a tailor, and Manya "Minnie" Radnitzky. He had a brother, Sam, and two sisters, Dorothy "Dora" and Essie, the youngest born in 1897 shortly after they settled at 372 Debevoise St. in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. In early 1912, the Radnitzky family changed their surname to Ray; Sam chose this surname in reaction to the antisemitism prevalent at the time. Emmanuel, who was nicknamed "Manny", changed his first name to Man and gradually began to use Man Ray as his name.
Man Ray's father worked in a garment factory and ran a small tailoring business out of the family home. He enlisted his children to assist him from an early age. Man Ray's mother enjoyed designing the family's clothes and inventing patchwork items from scraps of fabric. Man Ray wished to distance himself from his family background, but tailoring left an enduring mark on his art. Mannequins, flat irons, sewing machines, needles, pins, threads, swatches of fabric, and other items related to tailoring appear in much of his work, and art historians have noted similarities between Ray's collage and painting techniques and styles used for tailoring.
Mason Klein, curator of the exhibition Alias Man Ray: The Art of Reinvention at the Jewish Museum in New York, suggests that Man Ray may have been "the first Jewish avant-garde artist."
Man Ray was the uncle of the photographer Naomi Savage, who learned some of his techniques and incorporated them into her own work.
First artistic endeavors
Man Ray displayed artistic and mechanical abilities during childhood. His education at Brooklyn's Boys' High School from 1904 to 1909 provided him with solid grounding in drafting and other basic art techniques. While he attended school, he educated himself with frequent visits to local art museums. After his graduation, Ray was offered a scholarship to study architecture but chose to pursue a career as an artist. Man Ray's parents were disappointed by his decision to pursue art, but they agreed to rearrange the family's modest living quarters so that Ray's room could be his studio. The artist remained in the family home over the next four years. During this time, he worked steadily towards becoming a professional painter. Man Ray earned money as a commercial artist and was a technical illustrator at several Manhattan companies.The surviving examples of his work from this period indicate that he attempted mostly paintings and drawings in 19th-century styles. He was already an avid admirer of contemporary avant-garde art, such as the European modernists he saw at Alfred Stieglitz's 291 gallery and works by the Ashcan School. However, he was not yet able to integrate these trends into much of his own work. The art classes he sporadically attended, including stints at the National Academy of Design and the Art Students League, were of little apparent benefit to him. When he enrolled at the Ferrer Centre in the autumn of 1912, he began a period of intense and rapid artistic development. The Centre, established and run by anarchists in memory of the executed Catalan anarchist educationalist Francisco Ferrer, provided classes in drawing and lectures on art-criticism. Anarchist writer Emma Goldman noted "a spirit of freedom in the art class which probably did not exist anywhere else in New York at that time" there. Man Ray exhibited works in the Centre's 1912-13 group exhibition, with his painting A Study in Nudes reproduced in a review of the show in the Centre's associated magazine The Modern School. This may have been his first published art work, and the magazine would go on to print his first published poem in 1913. During this period he also contributed illustrations to radical publications, including providing the cover-art for two 1914 issues of Goldman's journal Mother Earth.
Man Ray's work at this time was influenced by the avant-garde practices of European contemporary artists he was introduced to at the 1913 Armory Show. His early paintings display facets of cubism. After befriending Marcel Duchamp, who was interested in showing movement in static paintings, his works began to depict movement of the figures. An example is the repetitive positions of the dancer's skirts in The Rope Dancer Accompanies Herself with Her Shadows.
In 1915, Man Ray had his first solo show of paintings and drawings after taking up residence at an art colony in Grantwood, New Jersey. His first proto-Dada object, an assemblage titled Self-Portrait, was exhibited the following year. He produced his first significant photographs in 1918, after initially picking up the camera to document his own artwork.
Man Ray abandoned conventional painting to involve himself with the radical Dada movement. He published two Dadaist periodicals, that each only had one issue, The Ridgefield Gazook and TNT, the latter co-edited by Adolf Wolff and Mitchell Dawson. He started making objects and developed unique mechanical and photographic methods of making images. For the 1918 version of Rope Dancer, he combined a spray-gun technique with a pen drawing. Like Duchamp, he worked with readymades—ordinary objects that are selected and modified. His readymade The Gift is a flatiron with metal tacks attached to the bottom, and Enigma of Isidore Ducasse is an unseen object wrapped in cloth and tied with cord. Aerograph, another work from this period, was done with airbrush on glass.
In 1920, Man Ray helped Duchamp make his Rotary Glass Plates, one of the earliest examples of kinetic art. It was composed of glass plates turned by a motor. That same year, Man Ray, Katherine Dreier, and Duchamp founded the Société Anonyme, an itinerant collection that was the first museum of modern art in the U.S. In 1941 the collection was donated to Yale University Art Gallery.
Man Ray teamed up with Duchamp to publish one issue of New York Dada in 1920. For Man Ray, Dada's experimentation was no match for the environment of New York; he wrote that "Dada cannot live in New York. All New York is dada, and will not tolerate a rival."
In 1913, Man Ray met his first wife, the Belgian poet Adon Lacroix , in New York. They married in 1914, separated in 1919, and formally divorced in 1937.
Paris
In July 1921, Man Ray went to live and work in Paris, settling in the Montparnasse quarter favored by many artists. His accidental rediscovery of the cameraless photogram, which he called "rayographs", resulted in images hailed by Tristan Tzara as "pure Dada creations".Shortly after arriving in Paris, he met and fell in love with Alice Prin, an artists' model and celebrated character in Paris bohemian circles. Prin was Man Ray's companion for most of the 1920s, and became the subject of some of his most famous photographic images. She also starred in his experimental films Le Retour à la raison and L'Étoile de mer.
In 1929, he began a love affair with the Surrealist photographer Lee Miller. She was also his photographic assistant and, together, they reinvented the photographic technique of solarization. Miller left him in 1932.
From late 1934 until August 1940, Man Ray was in a relationship with French art model Ady Fidelin, who appeared in many of his photographs. When Ray fled the Nazi occupation in France, Adrienne chose to stay behind to care for her family. Unlike the artist's other significant muses, Fidelin had until 2022 largely been written out of his life story.
Man Ray was a pioneering photographer in Paris for two decades between the wars. Many significant members of the art world, including Pablo Picasso, Tristan Tzara, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Jean Cocteau, Salvador Dalí, Peggy Guggenheim, Alice Rahon, Bridget Bate Tichenor, Luisa Casati, and Antonin Artaud, posed for his camera. His international fame as a portrait photographer is reflected in a series of photographs of Maharajah Yashwant Rao Holkar II and his wife Sanyogita Devi from their visit to Europe in 1927. In the winter of 1933, surrealist artist Méret Oppenheim, known for her fur-covered teacup, posed nude for Man Ray in a well-known series of photographs depicting her standing next to a printing press.
His practice of photographing African objects in the Paris collections of Paul Guillaume and Charles Ratton and others led to several iconic photographs, including Noire et blanche. As Man Ray scholar Wendy A. Grossman has illustrated, "no one was more influential in translating the vogue for African art into a Modernist photographic aesthetic than Man Ray."
Man Ray was represented in the first Surrealist exhibition with Jean Arp, Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, Georges Malkine, André Masson, Joan Miró, and Pablo Picasso at the Galerie Pierre in Paris in 1925. Important works from this time were a metronome with an eye, originally titled Object to Be Destroyed, and the Violon d'Ingres, a photograph of Kiki de Montparnasse styled after the painter/musician Ingres. Violon d'Ingres is a popular example of how Man Ray could juxtapose disparate elements in his photography to generate meaning.
Man Ray directed a number of influential avant-garde short films, known as Cinéma Pur. He directed Le Retour à la Raison ; Emak-Bakia ; L'Étoile de Mer ; and Les Mystères du Château de Dé. Man Ray also assisted Marcel Duchamp with the cinematography of his film Anemic Cinema, and Ray personally manned the camera on Fernand Léger's Ballet Mécanique. In René Clair's film Entr'acte, Man Ray appeared in a brief scene playing chess with Duchamp. Duchamp, Man Ray, and Francis Picabia were all friends and collaborators, connected by their experimental, entertaining, and innovative art.