Man Ray

artist

A leading experimental artist of the Parisian avant-garde in the 1920s, Man Ray was one of the most formidable Surrealist photographers and, along with László Moholy-Nagy, is credited with inventing camera-less photography in the modern era. By the time his work was recognised in the Museum of Modern Art’s 1936 exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, it had already been widely published. Moreover, his wide-ranging experimental process had already assumed a significant position within the modernist artistic discourse, continuing and reviving the debate between painting and photography that had begun at the turn of the century. As a photographer, he created some of the iconic images of the century, including Tears of 1932 and the portraits of Marcel Duchamp as his female alter ego Rrose Selavy of 1920-1921.
Born Emmanuel Radnitsky on 27 August 1890 to a Jewish family in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the artist spent most of his youth in Brooklyn, New York, after his parents moved there in 1897. After entering high school in 1904, the young Radnitsky studied freehand and industrial drawing. Four years later he was offered a scholarship to study architecture, which he declined, claiming that the construction of buildings was not as interesting as creating the atmosphere of an interior.
Soon after, Rudnitsky began taking drawing and watercolour classes at the Ferrer Centre. Named after a Spanish anarchist, this educational institution was dedicated to the practice of libertarian principles.
In 1911, the budding artist moved to Manhattan after meeting Alfred Stieglitz at the 291 Gallery. In the spring of the following year, however, Rudnitsky moved back to Ridgefield, New Jersey, where he worked as a commercial artist.
A visit to the now legendary Armory Show in New York in 1913 introduced him to the European avant-garde. Although he continued to work as a draughtsman for a map and atlas publisher, he joined forces with the poet Alfred Kreymborg to create an artists’ community in Ridgefield. In 1914 Rudnitsky married the poet Adon Lacroix (Donna Lecoeur), with whom he had been living for some time, and officially changed his name to Man Ray.
In the autumn of that year, Man Ray met the French avant-garde artist Marcel Duchamp, who was then living in New York and had his first solo exhibition at the Daniel Gallery, which included a collection of sketches and 30 paintings.
Arthur J. Eddy, a prominent lawyer involved in the development of modern trade policy, bought six paintings, prompting Man Ray to move back to Manhattan. In 1915 he bought his first camera to document his own work, but soon used it to explore new avenues of creativity. His interest in nuance, for example, was evident in his articulation of pictorial shadows and was reflected in a 1916 painting entitled The Rope Dancer Accompanies Herself With Shadows.
While attending a series of soirees at Walter Arensberg’s home, Man Ray made the acquaintance of many notable artists, including the Americans Charles Demuth and George Bellows and the French painter Francis Picabia. He also became an active member of the emerging New York Dada movement.
Before his second solo exhibition at the Daniel Gallery in the winter of 1916, Man Ray experimented relentlessly, designing a rotating collage entitled Revolving Doors. In 1917, he painted his first ”aerograph”, an airbrushed depiction imitating photographic effects, entitled Suicide.
It was also around this time that he made the first of his ‘Eggbeater’ sculptures, which transformed the notion of everyday utility into a latent sexual metaphor.
Man Ray’s work began to be collected by Ferdinand Howell in 1918 and inspired him to reproduce The Rope Dancer as an aerograph.
The rapid development and use of technology, despite the benefits of new industries developing in Western society, to create terrifying instruments of war during the First World War led those involved in the Dada and Surrealist movements to denounce the use of the machine. For post-World War I intellectuals, the notion of freedom was to be found in anarchy.
In search of intellectual and material autonomy, in March 1919 Man Ray published a single issue of an anarchist magazine called TNT, after the newly developed explosive. It was also around this time that he separated from his wife and began a correspondence with the leading European Dada figure Tristan Tzara.
The following year, he began collaborating with Marcel Duchamp and attempted to make an anaglyph film with two cameras. On 29 April, he signed the statutes of the “Société Anonyme Inc.” with Duchamp and Katherine Dreier, a collector of modern art and founding director of the Society of Independent Artists. During the summer, Man Ray followed Duchamp to Paris, where he was introduced to the Dadaists. In November of that year, Man Ray created his first rayograph, also known as a photogram, which depicted a silhouette on paper without the use of a negative or a camera.
At the opening of his third solo exhibition at the Galerie des Six, he met the composer Erik Satie, with whom he collaborated on The Gift, an iron whose face was covered in nails, one of his many Dadaist objects that transformed everyday objects into sculptures full of mystery or paradox, including the now legendary Object to be Destroyed (1923-1932), a metronome with a photographic cut-out of an eye. He also made the acquaintance of the famous French model Kiki de Montparnasse, of whom he made striking portraits, as well as other members of the Parisian avant-garde, including Gertrude Stein and Jean Cocteau.
By 1923, Man Ray was an established photographer, working in portraiture and fashion, and hired Berenice Abbott as his assistant. His famous image of Kiki, shot nude from behind and embellished with the ‘F’ holes of a violin, Le Violon d’Ingres, appeared in a 1924 issue of Littérature. Vogue also published some of his fashion photographs in May of that year.
From the mid-1920s to the late 1930s, Man Ray worked on avant-garde films with a number of artists, including Marcel Duchamp and his ‘Anemic Cinema’, and published his work in both monographs and books of poetry. In 1929, Lee Miller became his assistant. Man Ray returned to New York in the summer of 1940 and stayed there until 1951.
On his return to Paris, however, he spent less time on photography and more on painting. In 1961 he won the Gold Medal for Photography at the Venice Biennale and in 1967 he received worldwide recognition in an exhibition entitled Salute to Man Ray at the American Centre in Paris.
At the time of his death in Paris on 18 November 1976, Man Ray was a legend for his work in making Surrealism a vibrant, historic art movement. Man Ray’s Paris studio was preserved by his widow Julia after his death, but was destroyed by fire in 1989. The Man Ray Trust was established to preserve what remains of his archive and to promote his artistic legacy.