Man Ray

Painter

• Born: August 27, 1890
• Birthplace: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
• Died: November 18, 1976
• Place of death: Paris, France

American photographer and painter

A Dadaist and an early Surrealist, Man Ray’s haunting photographs of ordinary objects coupled with more traditional photographic subjects such as the human form helped legitimatize photography as art. His paintings and drawings, as well, contributed to the body of significant twentieth century artworks.

Areas of achievement Photography, art

Early Life

Man Ray, one of the twentieth century’s most celebrated avant-garde, modernist artists, was born Emmanuel Radnitsky to Melach and Manya Radnitsky in Philadelphia. When Man Ray was seven years old, his father accepted a job at a garment factory in New York, leading the family to move to Brooklyn. During his childhood, Man Ray demonstrated his growing artistic talents by copying newspaper graphics and transforming a toy wagon into a model locomotive. When he was a high school senior, he began prowling the city’s galleries, including the 291 Gallery of Alfred Stieglitz and the Macbeth Gallery, both early homes to modernist art.

Upon graduating, Man Ray decided to devote his life to painting and turned down a scholarship to study architecture at New York University, creating a rift with his family that never healed. At first, Man Ray followed a conventional representational style, but as he came increasingly into the orbit of modernists like Stieglitz, he set forth on more challenging paths. In 1911, he created the work Tapestry from 110 fabric samples. He signed the work “Man Ray,” and his artistic persona was born.

In 1913, Man Ray became deeply impressed by the legendary Armory Show, which introduced New York to major modernist painters like Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, and Georges Braque. Man Ray was especially excited by Marcel Duchamp’s controversial Nude Descending a Staircase, with its representation of motion through a series of angled planes. That same year, Man Ray moved to an artist’s colony in Ridgefield, New Jersey, where he met Belgian poet Adon Lacroix. They married in 1914.

Life’s Work

In Ridgefield, all the elements constituting Man Ray’s life and work came together. He was in a stimulating community of artists and writers. Like Picasso, Man Ray was profoundly inspired by a woman; Lacroix would be at the center of his life as both lover and muse. It was also during this time that Man Ray became friends with Duchamp, his most enduring influence. Inspired by Duchamp and other cutting-edge visionaries, Man Ray never left the avant-garde path. It was around this time also that he purchased his first camera. As he mastered its technical aspects, he perceived photography’s artistic possibilities, and it became his most significant creative form.

Man Ray moved back to New York City in 1915. Over the next four years he had three one-person shows and was part of a group show by the Society of Independent Artists, fully engaging his creative energies. These shows featured numerous paintings, constructions, and photographs, including the construction New York (1917), made from wood strips and a C-clamp, and the photographs of an egg beater and darkroom equipment (1919). Even though Duchamp, Stieglitz, and others realized that Man Ray was producing major work, the critics were unimpressed, and the shows were failures.

It became increasingly clear to Man Ray that while the United States was his birthplace, it was not his artistic home. In Paris, the Dadaists, dedicated to the overthrow of traditional artistic expression through the irreverent and the irrational, had emerged after World War I. Man Ray recognized in the Dadaists his creative kin. When his marriage ended, and after Duchamp left for France, Man Ray realized he had nothing keeping him in New York. On July 22, 1921, he arrived in Paris and was introduced by Duchamp to the Dadaists, who embraced him. He also became the lover of Kiki de Montparnasse (Alice Prin), a famous model. Many of Man Ray’s signature photographs are of Kiki, including Noire et Blanche (1926), which posed a nude Kiki with an elongated African mask.

During the 1920’s, Man Ray produced many of his most important pieces, including Gift (1921), depicting a clothes iron with tacks glued to its flat surface. As Surrealism replaced Dadaism, Man Ray flowed with the change, and his work appeared in the first exhibition of Surrealist art at Paris’s Gallery Pierre in 1925. He also shot a number of Surrealist films, including Emak Bakia (1926) and Étoile de Mer (1928; star of the sea). Perhaps his greatest innovation of the 1920’s was the Rayograph impressions of objects made directly on photographic paper without a camera, producing a ghostly, X-ray effect.

Man Ray also began his commercial use of photography in the 1920’s, when much of his income came from shooting famous personalities like Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, and Igor Stravinsky. He also became a fashion photographer and is credited with bringing artistry to that field.

The 1930’s brought the Great Depression, and like many artists, Man Ray struggled. To survive, he shot more fashion photography, which made him tire of the camera. Turning back to painting, he produced his most celebrated works: À l’heure de l’observatoire, les Amoureux (1934; observatory time, the lovers), its giant red lips becoming a major icon of the Surrealist movement; and Le Beau Temps (1939), a protest against war. However, Man Ray continued to create powerful photographic works, including Les Larmes (1932; tears), the famous close shot of a woman’s eyes with glass tears, and Object to Be Destroyed (1932), a photograph of an eye attached to a metronome’s armature.

Some of Man Ray’s best photographs of the 1930’s were of Lee Miller. In 1929, Miller, a classically featured blond of disarming beauty, became Ray’s apprentice and lover. She was partly responsible for the discovery of solarization the technique that produces a silvery aura around a photograph’s subject as an art technique popularized by Man Ray. Their troubled relationship ended in 1932 when Miller returned to New York.

War loomed in Europe at the decade’s close. Man Ray fled France when the Nazis captured Paris, and he reluctantly returned to the United States on August 16, 1940. Haunted by memories of rejection, he decided to live not in New York but in Los Angeles. There, he met Juliet Browner, a lithe dancer who charmed the weary refugee artist. Married in 1946, they remained together until Man Ray’s death in 1976.

Man Ray remained artistically vibrant in the 1940’s, producing such major works as the series of paintings Shakespearian Equations (1948). Few buyers, however, were interested, so the decade proved difficult financially. At one point, Man Ray survived by selling his geometric chess sets. Nonetheless, he remained disdainful of photography, an art form that would have served him well financially had he decided to return to it, given that he lived near Hollywood. Feeling that America had again rejected him, he returned to Paris in 1951, where his money troubles continued.

At last, in the 1960’s, Man Ray received his first serious recognition since his early decades in Paris. Exhibitions of his work appeared worldwide, culminating in major retrospectives in Paris in 1972 and in New York in 1974. Still, he would not allow his photographs to be exhibited or sold, despite the strong interest shown in them by dealers and art historians.

After Man Ray’s death on November 18, 1976, the full extent of his oeuvre could be displayed, including his photographs. As a result, most of the lingering critical objections to Man Ray’s work disappeared, and his works commanded some of the highest prices ever received at auction by any Surrealist.

Significance

During his lifetime, Man Ray always was in the shadows of the famous artists around him. His most impressive work was in photography, a medium even Man Ray thought was questionable as “true” art. Also, his homeland was always ambivalent toward his work. Right up to the end, full artistic recognition eluded him.

At the time of his death, however, photography became recognized as a legitimate artistic form. Man Ray, through his Surrealist sensibilities, his willingness to push the boundaries of subject and form, and his innovative techniques like Rayographs and solarization created images that led critics to accept photography as legitimate art. In addition, Man Ray enriched the twentieth century’s artistic legacy with his paintings in the cubist and Surrealist traditions. Finally, with brilliant art constructions such as Gift and Object to Be Destroyed, Man Ray was a key pioneer of the installment art movement of the late twentieth century.

Bibliography

Baldwin, Neil. Man Ray: American Artist. 2d ed. New York: Da Capo Press, 2001. A thorough biography of the artist. Examines Man Ray’s connections with the artistic, social, and political movements of his time and explores his complex personal relationships as well. Includes a bibliography and an index.

Foresta, Merry. Man Ray Introduction. 1989. Reprint. London: Thames & Hudson, 2006. A brief, sixty-three-page introduction to Man Ray and his art from the Photofile series. Includes a bibliography and an index.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗, et al. Perpetual Motif: The Art of Man Ray. New York: Abbeville Press, 1988. A retrospective of the artist’s work inspired by an exhibition at the National Museum of American Art. The book contains eight critical essays covering Man Ray’s life and work. Includes a bibliography.

Man Ray. Self Portrait. 1963. Reprint. Boston: Little, Brown, 1988. While not the best source for the facts of Man Ray’s life, Self Portrait presents his experiences from his own point of view. The 1988 edition includes a foreword by Merry Foresta and an afterword by Juliet Man Ray.

Martin, Jean-Hubert. Man Ray: Photographs. London: Thames & Hudson, 1982. A superb collection originally printed in conjunction with an exhibition at the National Center for Art and Culture in Paris. Includes a chronology and essays by Man Ray, Jean-Hubert Martin, Philippe Sers, and Herbert Molderings.

Penrose, Roland. Man Ray. Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1975. A brief biography with 154 illustrations, including many of Man Ray’s paintings and constructions.

Schwarz, Arturo. Man Ray: The Rigour of Imagination. New York: Rizzoli, 1977. A thorough critical and biographical examination of Man Ray’s work. Includes over five hundred illustrations and a bibliography.

Related Articles in Great Events from History: The Twentieth Century

1901-1940: 1913: Duchamp’s “Readymades” Redefine Art; 1921: Man Ray Creates the Rayograph; October, 1924: Surrealism Is Born.