Man Ray

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Man Ray
Man Ray, photographed at the Théâtre de la Gaîté-Montparnasse exhibition in Paris by Carl Van Vechten on June 16, 1934
Born
Emmanuel Radnitzky

(1890-08-27)August 27, 1890
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
DiedNovember 18, 1976(1976-11-18) (aged 86)
Paris, France
Known forPainting, photography, assemblage, collage, film
MovementDada, surrealism
Spouses
Adon Lacroix
(m. 1914; div. 1937)
(m. 1946)
PartnerLee Miller (1929–1932)
Signature

Man Ray (born Emmanuel Radnitzky; August 27, 1890 – November 18, 1976) was an American visual artist who spent most of his career in

media but considered himself a painter above all. He was best known for his pioneering photography, and was a renowned fashion and portrait photographer. He is also noted for his work with photograms, which he called "rayographs" in reference to himself.[1]

Biography

Background and early life

Man Ray, 1913, Landscape (Paysage Fauve), watercolor on paper, 35.2 x 24.6 cm, Smithsonian American Art Museum

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 ever had a name other than Man Ray.[2]

Man Ray's birth name was Emmanuel Radnitzky. He was born in

ethnic discrimination and antisemitism prevalent at the time. Emmanuel, who was called "Manny" as a nickname, changed his first name to Man and gradually began to use Man Ray as his name.[2][6]

Man Ray, c. 1921–1922, Rencontre dans la porte tournante, published on the cover (and page 39) of Der Sturm, Volume 13, Number 3, March 5, 1922

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

medium of his work.[7] Art historians have noted similarities between Ray's collage and painting techniques and styles used for tailoring.[6]

Mason Klein, curator of a Man Ray exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York, Alias Man Ray: The Art of Reinvention, suggests that the artist may have been "the first Jewish avant-garde artist."[4]

Man Ray was the uncle of the photographer Naomi Savage, who learned some of Ray's techniques and incorporated them into her own work.[8]

First artistic endeavors

Man Ray, 1919, Seguidilla, airbrushed gouache, pen & ink, pencil, and colored pencil on paperboard, 55.8 × 70.6 cm, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

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 the local art museums, where he studied the works of the Old Masters. 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 their son's decision to pursue art, but they agreed to rearrange the family's modest living quarters so that Ray's room could be his studio.[2] 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.[2][6]

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

Ferrer School in the autumn of 1912, he began a period of intense and rapid artistic development.[6]

New York

Man Ray, 1920, The Coat-Stand (Porte manteau), reproduced in New York dada (magazine), Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, April 1921[9]
Man Ray, Lampshade, reproduced in 391, n. 13, July 1920
Man Ray, c. 1921–22, Dessin (Drawing), published on page 43 of Der Sturm, Volume 13, Number 3, March 5, 1922

While living in New York City, Man Ray was influenced by the avant-garde practices of European contemporary artists he was introduced to at the 1913 Armory Show and in visits to Alfred Stieglitz's "291" art gallery. 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 (1916).[10]

In 1915, Man Ray had his first solo show of paintings and drawings after he had taken up residence at an art colony in Grantwood, New Jersey, across the Hudson River from New York City.[11] 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.[12]

Man Ray abandoned conventional painting to involve himself with Dada, a radical anti-art movement. He published two Dadaist periodicals, that each only had one issue, The Ridgefield Gazook (1915) and TNT (1919), the latter co-edited by Adolf Wolff and Mitchell Dawson.[13][14] 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 Gift readymade (1921) is a flatiron with metal tacks attached to the bottom, and Enigma of Isidore Ducasse[15] is an unseen object (a sewing machine) wrapped in cloth and tied with cord. Aerograph (1919), another work from this period, was done with airbrush on glass.[16]

In 1920, Man Ray helped Duchamp make the

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.[17]

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 wild and chaotic streets of New York.[18] He wrote that "Dada cannot live in New York. All New York is dada, and will not tolerate a rival."[18]

In 1913, Man Ray met his first wife, the Belgian poet Adon Lacroix (Donna Lecoeur) (1887–1975), in New York. They married in 1914, separated in 1919, and formally divorced in 1937.[19]

Paris

Man Ray, 1922, Untitled Rayograph, gelatin silver photogram, 23.5 x 17.8 cm

In July 1921, Man Ray went to live and work in Paris, France. He soon settled in the Montparnasse quarter favored by many artists. His accidental rediscovery of the cameraless photogram, which he called "rayographs", resulted in mysterious images hailed by Tristan Tzara as "pure Dada creations".[20]

Shortly after arriving in Paris, he met and fell in love with Kiki de Montparnasse (

Le Retour à la Raison and L'Étoile de mer
.

In 1929, he began a love affair with the Surrealist photographer Lee Miller.[21][22][23] She was also his photographic assistant and, together,[24][25][26] 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 Adrienne Fidelin.

Guadeloupean dancer and model and she appears in many of his photographs. When Ray fled the Nazi occupation in France, Adrienne chose to stay behind to care for her family.[29] Unlike the artist's other significant muses, Fidelin had until 2022 largely been written out of his life story.[30]

Man Ray was a pioneering photographer in Paris for two decades between the wars. Significant members of the art world, such as

Maharajah Yashwant Rao Holkar II and his wife Sanyogita Devi from their visit to Europe in 1927.[33][34] 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.[35]

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."[36]

Chess Set by Man Ray

Man Ray was represented in the first

Kiki de Montparnasse,[38] 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.[39]
Man Ray directed a number of influential
Les Mystères du Château de Dé (27 mins, 1929). Man Ray also assisted Marcel Duchamp with the cinematography of his film Anemic Cinema (1926), and Ray personally manned the camera on Fernand Léger's Ballet Mécanique (1924). In René Clair's film Entr'acte (1924), Man Ray appeared in a brief scene playing chess with Duchamp.[40] Duchamp, Man Ray, and Francis Picabia were all friends and collaborators, connected by their experimental, entertaining, and innovative art.[41][42]

Hollywood

The

Romanian-Jewish lineage. She was a trained dancer who studied dance with Martha Graham,[43] and an experienced artists' model. They married in 1946 in a double wedding with their friends Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning. In 1948 Ray had a solo exhibition at the Copley Galleries in Beverly Hills, which brought together a wide array of work and featured his newly painted canvases of the Shakespearean Equations series.[44]

Later life

Man Ray returned to Paris in 1951, and settled with Juliet into a studio at 2 bis rue Férou near the Luxembourg Gardens in St. Germain-des-Prés, where he continued his creative practice across mediums.[45] During the last quarter century of his life, he returned to a number of his iconic earlier works, recreating them in new form. He also directed the production of limited-edition replicas of several of his objects, working first with Marcel Zerbib and later Arturo Schwarz.[46]

In 1963, he published his autobiography, Self-Portrait (republished in 1999).[12]

Grave of Juliet and Man Ray in Paris.

Ray continued to work on new paintings, photographs, collages and art objects

Pompidou Centre.[43]

Innovations

Man Ray was responsible for several technical innovations in modern art, filmmaking, and photography. These included his use of

solarization (rediscovered with Lee Miller). His 1923 experimental film Le Retour à la raison was the first 'cine-rayograph', a motion picture made without the use of a camera.[49] Ray's 1935 Space Writing (Self-Portrait) was the first light painting, predating Picasso's 1949 light paintings, photographed by Gjon Mili, by fourteen years.[50]

Accolades

In 1974, Man Ray received the Royal Photographic Society's Progress Medal and Honorary Fellowship "in recognition of any invention, research, publication or other contribution which has resulted in an important advance in the scientific or technological development of photography or imaging in the widest sense."[51] In 1999, ARTnews magazine named Man Ray one of the 25 most influential artists of the 20th century. The publication cited his groundbreaking photography, "his explorations of film, painting, sculpture, collage, assemblage and prototypes of what would eventually be called performance art and conceptual art." ARTnews further stated that "Man Ray offered artists in all media an example of a creative intelligence that, in its 'pursuit of pleasure and liberty', unlocked every door it came to and walked freely where it would."[52][53]

Art market

Man Ray's Le Violon d'Ingres (1924), a famed photograph depicting a nude Kiki de Montparnasse's back overlaid with a violin's f-holes, sold for $12.4 million on May 14, 2022, setting a new world record as the most expensive photograph ever to be sold at auction. The sale came after a drawn-out bidding period that lasted nearly ten minutes during Christie's New York's auction dedicated to Surrealist art.[54]

On November 9, 2017, Man Ray's Noire et Blanche (1926), formerly in the collection of Jacques Doucet, was purchased at Christie's Paris for €2,688,750 (US$3,120,658), becoming (at that time) the 14th most expensive photograph to ever sell at auction.[55][56][57] This was a record not only for Man Ray's work in the photographic medium but also for the sale at auction of any vintage photograph.[58]

Only two other works by Man Ray in any medium have commanded more at auction than the price captured by the 2017 sale of Noire et blanche. His 1916 canvas Promenade sold for $5,877,000 on November 6, 2013, at the Sotheby's New York Impressionist & Modern Art Sale.[59] And on November 13, 2017, his assemblage titled Catherine Barometer (1920), sold for $3,252,500 at Christie's in New York.[60]

Legacy

Self-Portrait was republished in 1999.[12]

In March 2013, Man Ray's photograph Noire et Blanche (1926) was featured in the US Postal Service's "Modern Art in America" series of stamps.[61]

Selected publications

  • Man Ray and Tristan Tzara (1922). Champs délicieux: album de photographies. Paris: [Société générale d'imprimerie et d'édition].
  • Man Ray (1926). Revolving doors, 1916–1917: 10 planches. Paris: Éditions Surrealistes.
  • Man Ray (1934). Man Ray: photographs, 1920–1934, Paris. Hartford, Connecticut: James Thrall Soby.
  • Éluard, Paul, and Man Ray (1935). Facile. Paris: Éditions G.L.M.
  • Man Ray and André Breton (1937). La photographie n'est pas l'art. Paris: Éditions G.L.M.
  • Man Ray and Paul Éluard (1937). Les mains libres: dessins. Paris: Éditions Jeanne Bucher.
  • Man Ray (1948). Alphabet for adults. Beverly Hills, California: Copley Galleries.
  • Man Ray (1963). Self portrait. London: Andre Deutsch.
  • Man Ray and L. Fritz Gruber (1963). Portraits. Gütersloh, Germany: Sigbert Mohn Verlag.

See also

References

Citations

  1. ^ "Rayograms by Man Ray". Time. April 18, 1932. Archived from the original on November 8, 2008. Retrieved January 6, 2012.
  2. ^ (1988, 2000)
  3. .
  4. ^ on January 27, 2010, Klein suggests that Ray may have even been the first Jewish avant-garde artist, though it is a tenuous claim given both the movement and Man Ray's disavowal of ethnic identity.
  5. ^ a b 1900 United States Federal Census
  6. ^ (2003).
  7. (2001).
  8. .
  9. ^ New York dada (magazine), Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, April, 1921, Bibliothèque Kandinsky, Centre Pompidou
  10. ^ "The Collection | Man Ray. The Rope Dancer Accompanies Herself with Her Shadows. 1916". MoMA. Retrieved January 6, 2012.
  11. ^ Staff. "Man Ray Is Dead in Paris at 86; Dadaist Painter and Photographer", The New York Times, November 19, 1976. Retrieved December 15, 2013. "His style changed in 1915 to 'reducing human figures to flat-patterned disarticulated forms.' He was living at the time in Ridgefield, N. J."
  12. ^ .
  13. ^ Husar, Emma (2017). In the Spirit of Dada Man Ray, The Ridgefield Gazook, and TNT (Honors). University of Iowa. Archived from the original on November 5, 2017. Retrieved January 7, 2019.
  14. ^ "Inventory of the Mitchell Dawson Papers, 1810-1988". The Newberry. Archived from the original on January 8, 2019. Retrieved January 7, 2019.
  15. ^ "IMAGINE – The Israel Museum's searchable collections database". Imj.org.il. Retrieved January 6, 2012.
  16. ^ "Man Ray, Aerograph, 1919, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam". Archived from the original on June 18, 2015. Retrieved June 18, 2015.
  17. ISBN 9780786749713. Archived from the original
    on November 15, 2017 – via Google Books.
  18. ^ a b "Man Ray – Prophet of the Avant-Garde | American Masters". PBS. September 17, 2005. Retrieved January 6, 2012.
  19. ^ Lacroix's first marriage had been to Adolf Wolff, an immigrant anarchist sculptor and poet, born in Brussels, Belgium.
  20. ^ "Untitled". The Art Institute of Chicago. 1923.
  21. ISBN 978-0-85771-255-4{{citation}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link
    )
  22. ^ Charles Darwent (January 27, 2013). "Man crush: When Man Ray met Lee Miller". The Independent. Retrieved May 9, 2014.
  23. ^ Giovanni, Janine D. "What's a Girl to Do When a Battle Lands in Her Lap?" New York Times Magazine Winter 2007: 68-71. ProQuest. March 2, 2017
  24. ^ Penrose, Roland. "Picnic [Nusch Éluard, Paul Éluard, Lee Miller, Unknown, Man Ray, Ady Fidelin]- 4771". LeeMiller.co.uk. Archived from the original on March 19, 2022. Retrieved March 13, 2022.
  25. ^ Miller, Lee. "3697 - Nusch and Paul Ėluard, Roland Penrose, Man Ray and Ady Fidelin". LeeMiller.co.uk. Archived from the original on March 13, 2022. Retrieved March 13, 2022.
  26. ^ Miller, Lee. "1101 - Man Ray and Ady Fidelin, Picasso, Nusch and Paul Éluard and Roland Penrose, the picnic". LeeMiller.co.uk. Archived from the original on March 13, 2022. Retrieved March 13, 2022.
  27. ^ Yo, Adrienne, The New York Times, February 25, 2007, › 2007 › 02 › 25 › style › tmagazine › 25tmodel.html
  28. ^ Felder, Rachel, Overlooked No More: Ady Fidelin, Black Model 'Hidden in Plain Sight', The New York Times, May 2, 2022
  29. ^ Wendy A. Grossman and Sala E. Patterson, "Adrienne "Ady" Fidelin" in Dictionary of Caribbean and Afro-Latin American Biographies, ed. Franklin W. Knight and Henry Louis Gates Jr.; Oxford University Press, 2016.
  30. ^ "Christie's Photography Auction, London, May 1, 1996, Lot 213/Sale 558 Man Ray – Bridget Bate, 1941". Christies.com. Retrieved January 6, 2012.
  31. ^ "[The Marquise Casati with Horses] (Getty Museum)". The J. Paul Getty in Los Angeles.
  32. ^ Owens, Mitchell (August 2, 2019). "How Maharaja Yeshwant Holkar and Maharani Sanyogita Devi Turned Indore Into a Art Deco Paradise". Architectural Digest.
  33. ^ "Thoroughly Modern Maharaja: how an Indian prince amassed one of the world's greatest interwar design collections". www.theartnewspaper.com. September 18, 2019.
  34. ^ "Meret Oppenheim | Widewalls". www.widewalls.ch. Retrieved February 12, 2021.
  35. ^ Getty collection. Retrieved November 6, 2009
  36. ^ Ray, Man (1963), Self Portrait, Little, Brown and Company, p. 158
  37. ^ Penrose, Roland. Man Ray. 1. Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1975. Pg 92
  38. ^ Entr'acte photo with Duchamp and Man Ray
  39. ^ Bors, Chris (January 9, 2008), "Winter Museum Preview: Top 5 London", Art+Auction, retrieved April 23, 2008
  40. ^ Neil Baldwin, Man Ray American Artist[permanent dead link]. Retrieved July 17, 2010
  41. ^ a b Flint, Peter B. (January 21, 1991). "Juliet Man Ray, 79, The Artist's Model And Muse, Is Dead". The New York Times. Retrieved December 3, 2014.
  42. ^ Andrew Strauss, "To Be Continued Unnoticed: Mathematics and Shakespeare in Hollywood," in Wendy A. Grossman, et al., Man Ray—Human Equations: A Journey from Mathematics to Shakespeare, Hatje Cantz, 2015
  43. ^ Neil Baldwin, Man Ray: American Artist, p. 278
  44. ISSN 0362-4331
    . Retrieved April 13, 2023.
  45. ^ "Man Ray". Retrieved August 19, 2022.
  46. ^ Wilson, Scott. Resting Places: The Burial Sites of More Than 14,000 Famous Persons, 3d ed.: 2 (Kindle Locations 38837-38838). McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers. Kindle Edition.
  47. ^ Foresta, M. (2003). "Man Ray". Grove Art Online.
  48. ^ "Man Ray | Space Writing (Self-Portrait) (1935) | Artsy". www.artsy.net.
  49. ^ "Progress Medal". Royal Photographic Society. 1974. Archived from the original on March 10, 2016. Retrieved December 2, 2017.
  50. ^ Coleman, A. D. "Willful Provocateur"; ARTnews, May 1999.
  51. . Retrieved April 24, 2012.
  52. ^ Angelica Villa, ARTnews, "Man Ray's Famed Photograph of Kiki de Montparnasse Sells for Record $12.4 M," May 14, 2022 [1]
  53. ^ Man Ray Makes a $3m Record in Paris, November 9, 2017, by Marion Maneker
  54. ^ Stripped Bare: Photographs from the Collection of Thomas Koerfer, Christie's Paris, November 9, 2017
  55. ^ Elodie Morel, 'My highlight of 2017' — Man Ray's Noire et Blanche, Christie's Paris, December 13, 2017
  56. ^ Wendy A. Grossman, "Surrealism and the Marketing of Man Ray's Photographs in America: The Medium, the Message, and the Tastemakers," in Networking Surrealism in the U.S.A. Agents, Artists and the Market, ed. Julia Drost, et al (DFK Paris/arthistoricum.net, 2019), 237. https://books.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/arthistoricum/catalog/book/485
  57. ^ Wendy A. Grossman, "Surrealism and the Marketing of Man Ray's Photographs in America: The Medium, the Message, and the Tastemakers," in Networking Surrealism in the U.S.A. Agents, Artists and the Market, ed. Julia Drost, et al (DFK Paris/arthistoricum.net, 2019), 238, n.3
  58. ^ Man Ray, Catherine Barometer, $3,252,500 USD, Christie's New York, November 13, 2017
  59. ^ "U.S. Postal Service Dedicates Modern Art in America, 1913 — 1931 Forever Stamps". about.usps.com.

Sources

External links