Man Ray

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Man Ray, born Emmanuel Radnitzky (August 27, 1890–November 18, 1976), was an American artist who spent most of his career in Paris, France. Perhaps best described simply as a modernist, he was a significant contributor to both the Dada and Surrealist movements, although his ties to each were informal. Best known in the art world for his avant-garde photography, Man Ray produced major works in a variety of media and considered himself a painter above all. He was also a renowned fashion and portrait photographer.

While appreciation for Man Ray’s work beyond his fashion and portrait photography was slow in coming during his lifetime, especially in his native United States, his reputation has grown steadily in the decades since.

Legendary photographer, painter, and maker of objects and films, Man Ray was one of the most versatile and inventive artists of the 20th century. Born in Philadelphia in 1890, he knew the worlds of Greenwich Village in the avant-garde era following the 1913 Armory Show; Paris in the 1920's and 1930's, where he played a key role in the Dada and Surrealist movements; The Hollywood of the 1940s, where he joined others chased by war from their homes in Europe; and finally, Paris again until his death in 1976.

In 1999, ARTnews magazine named him one of the 25 most influential artists of the 20th century, citing his groundbreaking photography as well as "his explorations of film, painting, sculpture, collage, assemblage, and prototypes of what would eventually be called performance art and conceptual art" and saying "Man Ray offered artists in all media an example of a creative intelligence that, in its 'pursuit of pleasure and liberty,'" — Man Ray’s stated guiding principles — "unlocked every door it came to and walked freely where it would."^[1]

Contents 1 Biography 1.1 Background and early life 1.2 First artistic endeavors 1.3 New York 1.4 Paris 1.5 Later life 2 Quotations 2.1 By Man Ray 2.2 About Man Ray 3 Man Ray references in popular culture 4 References 5 External links

[edit] Biography

[edit] Background and early life

From the time he began attracting attention as an artist until his death more than 60 years later, Man Ray allowed little of his early life or family background to be known to the public, even refusing to acknowledge that he ever had a name other than Man Ray.^[2]

Man Ray was born Emmanuel Radnitzky in South Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1890, the eldest child of recent Russian-Jewish immigrants. The family would eventually include another son and two daughters, the youngest born shortly after they settled in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, New York, in 1897. In early 1912, the Radnitzky family changed their surname to Ray, a name selected by Man Ray's brother, in reaction to the ethnic discrimination and anti-Semitism prevalent at that time. Emmanuel, who was called "Manny" as a nickname, changed his first name to Man at this time, and gradually began to use Man Ray as his combined single name.^[2][3]

Man Ray’s father was a garment factory worker who also ran a small tailoring business out of the family home, enlisting his children from an early age. Man Ray’s mother enjoyed making the family’s clothes from her own designs and inventing patchwork items from scraps of fabric.^[2] Despite Man Ray’s desire to disassociate himself from his family background, this experience left an enduring mark on his art. Tailor's dummies, flat irons, sewing machines, needles, pins, threads, swatches of fabric, and other items related to clothing and sewing appear at every stage of his work and in almost every medium.^[4] Art historians have also noted similarity in his collage and painting techniques to those used in making clothing.^[3]

[edit] First artistic endeavors

Man Ray displayed artistic and mechanical ability from childhood. His education at Boys' High School from 1904 to 1908 provided him with a solid grounding in drafting and other basic art techniques. At the same time, he educated himself with frequent visits to the local art museums, where he studied the works of the Old Masters. After graduation from high school, he was offered a scholarship to study architecture but chose to pursue a career as an artist instead. However much this decision disappointed his parents' aspirations to upward mobility and assimilation, they nevertheless rearranged the family's modest living quarters so that Man Ray could use a room as his studio. He stayed for the next four years, working steadily toward being a professional painter, while earning money as a commercial artist and technical illustrator at several Manhattan companies.^[2][3]

From the surviving examples of his work from this period, it appears he attempted mostly paintings and drawings in 19th-century styles. He was already an avid admirer of avant-garde art of the time, such as the European modernists he saw at Alfred Stieglitz's "291" gallery and works by the Ashcan School, but, with a few exceptions, was not yet able to integrate these new trends into 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, until he enrolled in the Ferrer School in the autumn of 1912, thus beginning a period of intense and rapid artistic development.^[3]

[edit] New York

Living in New York City, influenced by what he saw at the 1913 Armory Show and in galleries showing contemporary works from Europe, Man Ray's early paintings display facets of cubism. Upon befriending Marcel Duchamp who was interested in showing movement in static paintings, his works begin to depict movement of the figures, for example in the repetitive positions of the skirts of the dancer in The Rope Dancer Accompanies Herself with Shadows (1916).^[5]

In 1915, Man Ray had his first solo show of paintings and drawings. His first proto-Dada object, an assemblage titled Self-Portrait, was exhibited the following year. He produced his first significant photographs in 1918.

Abandoning conventional painting, Man Ray involved himself with Dada, a radical anti-art movement, 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. Again, like Duchamp, he made "readymades" - objects selected by the artist, sometimes modified and presented as art. His Gift readymade (1921) is a flatiron with metal tacks attached to the bottom, and Enigma of Isidore Ducasse is an unseen object (a sewing machine) wrapped in cloth and tied with cord. Another work from this period, Aerograph (1919), was done with airbrush on glass.^[5]

In 1920 Ray helped Duchamp make his first machine and one of the earliest examples of kinetic art, the Rotary Glass Plates composed of glass plates turned by a motor. That same year Man Ray, Katherine Dreier and Duchamp founded the Société Anonyme, an itinerant collection which in effect was the first museum of modern art in the U.S.

Ray teamed up with Duchamp to publish the one issue of New York Dada in 1920, but he soon declared, "Dada cannot live in New York", and he moved to Paris in 1921.

It was in New York in 1913 that Man Ray met his first wife, Adon Lacroix. They married in 1914, separated in 1919, and were formally divorced in 1937.

[edit] Paris

In July 1921, Man Ray went to live and work in Paris, France, and soon settled in the Montparnasse quarter favored by many artists. Shortly after arriving in Paris, he met and fell in love with Kiki de Montparnasse (Alice Prin), an artists' model and celebrated character in Paris bohemian circles. Kiki was Man Ray's companion for most of the 1920s. She became the subject of some of his most famous photographic images and starred in his experimental films. In 1929 he began a love affair with the Surrealist photographer Lee Miller.

For the next 20 years in Montparnasse, Man Ray made his mark on the art of photography. Great artists of the day such as James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Jean Cocteau and Antonin Artaud posed for his camera.

With Jean Arp, Max Ernst, André Masson, Joan Miró, and Pablo Picasso, Man Ray was represented in the first Surrealist exhibition at the Galerie Pierre in Paris in 1925. Works from this period include a metronome with an eye, originally titled Object to Be Destroyed.

In 1934, Surrealist artist Méret Oppenheim, known for her fur-covered teacup, posed for Man Ray in what became a well-known series of photographs depicting Oppenheim nude, standing next to a printing press.

Together with Lee Miller — his photography assistant and lover — Man Ray reinvented the photographic technique of solarization. He also created a technique using photograms he called rayographs.

Man Ray also directed a number of influential avant-garde short films, known as Cinéma Pur, such as Le Retour à la Raison (2 mins, 1923); Emak-Bakia (16 mins, 1926); L'Étoile de Mer (15 mins, 1928); and Les Mystères du Château du Dé (20 mins, 1929).

Artists Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, and Francis Picabia were friends as well as collaborators, connected by their experimental, entertaining, and innovative art.^[6]

[edit] Later life

Later in life, Man Ray returned to the United States, having been forced to leave Paris due to the dislocations of the Second World War. He lived in Los Angeles, California from 1940 until 1951. A few days after arriving in Los Angeles, Man Ray met Juliet Browner, a trained dancer and experienced artists' model. They began living together almost immediately, and married in 1946 in a double wedding with their friends Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning. However, he called Montparnasse home and he returned there.

In 1963 he published his autobiography, Self-Portrait, which was republished in 1999 (ISBN 0821224743).

He died in Paris on November 18, 1976, and was interred in the Cimetière du Montparnasse, Paris. His epitaph reads: unconcerned, but not indifferent. When Juliet Browner died in 1991, she was interred in the same tomb. Her epitaph reads, together again. Juliet set up a trust for his work and made many donations of his work to museums.

[edit] Quotations

[edit] By Man Ray

• "It has never been my object to record my dreams, just the determination to realize them." (Julien Levy exhibition catalog, April 1945.)

• "There is no progress in art, any more than there is progress in making love. There are simply different ways of doing it." (1948 essay, "To Be Continued, Unnoticed".)

• "I have never painted a recent picture." (1966 essay.)

• "To create is divine, to reproduce is human." ("Originals Graphic Multiples," circa 1968; published in Objets de Mon Affection, 1983.)

• "When I saw I was under attack from all sides, I knew I was on the right track." (1972 interview, published 1973 in Man Ray by Sarane Alexandrian.)

• "I paint what cannot be photographed, that which comes from the imagination or from dreams, or from an unconscious drive. I photograph the things that I do not wish to paint, the things which already have an existence." (Undated interview, circa 1970s; published in Man Ray: Photographer, 1981.)

• "I have been accused of being a joker. But the most successful art to me involves humor." (Undated interview, circa 1970s; published in Man Ray: Photographer, 1981.)

• "Many so-called tricks of today become the truths of tomorrow." (in reference to solarization, in Self- Portrait by Man Ray, published 1963, as cited by William L. Jolly in Solarization Demystified, 1997)

[edit] About Man Ray

• "MAN RAY, n.m. synon. de Joie jouer jouir." (Translation: "MAN RAY, masculine noun, synonymous with joy, to play, to enjoy.") — Marcel Duchamp, as the opening epigram for Man Ray's memoir Self-Portrait, 1963.

• "With him you could try anything — there was nothing you were told not to do, except spill the chemicals. With Man Ray, you were free to do what your imagination conjured, and that kind of encouragement was wonderful." — artist and photographer Naomi Savage, Man Ray’s niece and protégée, in a 2000 newspaper interview.

• "Man Ray is a youthful alchemist forever in quest of the painter's philosopher's stone. May he never find it, as that would bring an end to his experimentations which are the very condition of living art expression." — Adolf Wolff, "Art Notes", International 8, no. 1 (January 1914), p. 21.

• "[Man Ray was] a kind of short man who looked a little like Mr. Peepers, spoke slowly with a slight Brooklynese accent, and talked so you could never tell when he was kidding." — Brother-in-law Joseph Browner on his first impression of the artist; quoted in the Fresno Bee, August 26, 1990.

[edit] Man Ray references in popular culture

• Man Ray features in the song "Downtown Canon" on Walter Becker's Circus Money album. The line is: "Packed up the Dylan and the Man Ray and the Joyce."

• Man Ray's surrealist art inspired the R.E.M. song, "Feeling Gravity's Pull", on Fables of the Reconstruction. It contains the lines, "It's a Man Ray kind of sky. Let me show you what I can do with it."

• Man Ray and his work are the inspiration for the song "Man Ray" by the British indie band The Futureheads, the closing track on their self-titled debut album. The song includes the line: "Touch each other in black and white."

• There is a character called "Man Ray" in SpongeBob SquarePants.

• One famous Man Ray painting was the inspiration for the infamous lips logo of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

• The name of the band Man-Raze is partially a reference to Man Ray.

• The music video for the song "Otherside" by the Red Hot Chili Peppers features the lips from Man Ray's famous painting, The Lovers. The protagonist in the video uses the lips as a pair of wings to escape from his own shadow.

• The Sheffield band, The Long Blondes, features a track "Madame Ray" on their debut album, Someone to Drive You Home, which was inspired by Man Ray's lover, Lee Miller. It also refers to the solarization technique rediscovered by her and also used by Man Ray in his photographic work.

• The American band Damon and Naomi used Man Rays work "Tears" as the cover for their album "More Sad Hits".

• William Wegman, the famous photographer of Weimaraner dogs, named his first and most-photographed dog Man Ray.^[7]

• A Seattle-based band by the name of Man Ray released their CD "Casual Thinking" in 1997, under the Mercury/Tim Kerr label, and used Man Ray's pictures in the CD's artwork. The band later changed their name to "Shiro" and is now believed to be defunct.^{[citations needed]}

• In the 1980's, Thomas Dolby released a video for his song "She Blinded Me With Science" which featured a woman in a back-baring dress who had two f-holes on her skin near her waist and hips, creating the image of a cello. This same concept of using a back view of a female marked with f-holes to create the image of a stringed instrument was used earlier by Man Ray in his photograph Le Violon d'Ingres

• Doug Wright's 1989 stage play "Interrogating the Nude" depicts Man Ray as one of its characters. The play implies that Man Ray had a homosexual relationship with Marcel Duchamp, although there is no evidence to suggest this was actually the case.

• There is a nightclub called the "Man Ray" in Paris, 32 Rue Marbeuf, near the Champs-Elysee and another (unaffiliated) called Man-Ray in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.

• Poet Derek Adams wrote a series of biographical poems about Man Ray, published as "unconcerned but not indifferent - the life of Man Ray" in 2006 by Ninth Arrondissement Press.

• The Swedish band Komeda wrote a song inspired by Man Ray called "Focus" which appeared on their CD "What Makes it Go?" in 1998. It contains the chorus, "Man Ray pictures the world in a different sense. He sees the world through a camera lens."

[edit] References

Cited

More References

• Sarane Alexandrian; Man Ray; J. P. O'Hara; ISBN 0-87955-603-X (1973).
• Neil Baldwin; Man Ray: American Artist; Da Capo Press; ISBN 0-306-81014-X (1988, 2000).
• A. D. Coleman; "Willful Provocateur"; ARTnews, May 1999.
• Milly Heyd; "Man Ray/Emmanuel Radnitsky: Who is Behind the Enigma of Isidore Ducasse?"; in Complex Identities: Jewish Consciousness and Modern Art; ed. Matthew Baigell and Milly Heyd; Rutgers University Press; ISBN 0-8135-2869-0 (2001).
• Francis Naumann; Conversion to Modernism: The Early Work of Man Ray; Rutgers University Press; ISBN 0-8135-3148-9 (2003).

[edit] External links

• A biography of the artist Man Ray from the J. Paul Getty Museum
• Brief biography of Man Ray by the Biography Resource Center, Gale Group
• Man Ray Trust
• Official Man Ray Licensing archive (searchable)
• Collection of Man Ray short films
• Man Ray at Find A Grave