Man Ray (born Emmanuel Radnitzky; August 27, 1890 – November 18, 1976) 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

thumb|upright|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 refused to acknowledge that he 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.<!--ref name="1910 Federal Census">1910 United States Federal Census</ref>

thumb|upright|left|Man Ray, –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 patchwork items from scraps of fabric. and art historians have noted similarities between Ray's collage and painting techniques and styles used for tailoring.

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

thumb|Man Ray, 1919, Seguidilla, airbrushed gouache, pen & ink, pencil, and colored pencil on paperboard, 55.8 × 70.6&nbsp;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 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. provided classes in drawing and lectures on art-criticism.|1x1px]]

thumb|upright|Man Ray, Lampshade, reproduced in [[391 (magazine)|391, n. 13, July 1920]]

thumb|upright|Man Ray, –22, Dessin (Drawing), published on page 43 of [[Der Sturm, Volume 13, Number 3, March 5, 1922]]

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 (1916).

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 (1915) and TNT (1919), 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 (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. Aerograph (1919), 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 United States. In 1941, its collection was donated to the 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."

Paris

thumb|upright|Man Ray, 1922, Untitled Rayograph, gelatin silver photogram, 23.5 x 17.8&nbsp;cm

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 (popularly known as "Kiki de Montparnasse"), 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 Nazi-occupied 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 Tzara, Pablo Picasso, 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 Maharaja of Indore Yashwant Rao Holkar II and his wife Sanyogita Devi from their 1927 visit to Europe. 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 art 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."

thumb|Chess Set by 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 with f-holes superimposed on her back, inspired by Jean-Auguste-Dominique 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 (2 mins, 1923); Emak-Bakia (16 mins, 1926); L'Étoile de Mer (15 mins, 1928); and 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. Duchamp, Man Ray, and Francis Picabia were all friends and collaborators, connected by their experimental, entertaining, and innovative art.

Hollywood

The Second World War forced Man Ray to return to the United States. He lived in Los Angeles from 1940 to 1951, where he focused his creative energy on painting. One of his residences was the Chateau des Fleurs, another was Villa Elaine Apartments, both in Hollywood. A few days after arriving in Los Angeles, he met Juliet Browner, a first-generation American of Romanian-Jewish lineage. She was a trained dancer who studied dance with Martha Graham, and an experienced artists' model. They married in 1946 in a double wedding with their friends Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning; Browner took the name "Juliet Man Ray". They were also close friends with Black Dahlia suspect George Hodel and his second wife Dorothy Harvey (also known as Dorero). George Hodel's son Steve Hodel even proposes that the staging of the murder was an homage to Man Ray's surrealist creations. 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.

Later life

Man Ray returned to Paris in 1951, and settled with Juliet into a studio at 2 bis rue Férou near the Jardin du Luxembourg, where he continued his creative practice across mediums. 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.

In 1963, he published his autobiography, Self-Portrait (republished in 1999). until his death from a lung infection on November 18, 1976. He was interred in the Cimetière du Montparnasse in Paris; his epitaph reads "Unconcerned, but not indifferent".

When Juliet died in 1991, she was interred in the same tomb. Her epitaph reads "Together again". The grave site has now fallen into disrepair and the memorial stone is removed or missing. Juliet organized a trust for Ray's work and donated much of his work to museums. Her plans to restore the studio as a public museum proved too expensive; such was the structure's disrepair. Most of its contents were stored at the Centre Pompidou museum in Paris. 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.

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." 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."

Art market

Man Ray's Le Violon d'Ingres (1924), a famed photograph depicting a nude Alice Prin'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.

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. 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.

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. And on November 13, 2017, his assemblage titled Catherine Barometer (1920), sold for $3,252,500 at Christie's in New York.

Legacy

Ray's autobiography Self-Portrait was republished in 1999. The photo features Lee Miller's neck with her head thrown back. In 2015, they used another photo of Ray's; 'Plume', depicting a feather, for the cover of 'Affection', one of their singles.

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

In 2025, Irish actor Frank Bourke played Man Ray in the Belgian television series This Is Not a Murder Mystery.

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.

References

Citations

Sources

  • Alexandrian, Sarane. Man Ray; J. P. O'Hara; (1973).
  • Allan, Kenneth R. "Metamorphosis in 391: A Cryptographic Collaboration by Francis Picabia, Man Ray, and Erik Satie" in Art History 34, No. 1 (February 2011): 102–125.
  • Baldwin, Neil. Man Ray: American Artist; Da Capo Press; (1988, 2000).
  • Coleman, A. D. "Willful Provocateur"; ARTnews, May 1999.
  • Foresta, Merry, et al. Perpetual Motif: The Art of Man Ray. Washington: National Museum of American Art; New York: Abbeville Press, 1988.
  • Grossman, Wendy A., Adina Kamien, Edouard Sebline, and Andrew Strauss. Man Ray—Human Equations: A Journey From Mathematics to Shakespeare; Hatje Cantz; (2015).
  • Heyd, Milly. "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; (2001).
  • Klein, Mason. Alias Man Ray: The Art of Reinvention; Yale University Press; (2009).
  • Knowles, Kim, A Cinematic Artist: The Films of Man Ray. Bern; Oxford: Peter Lang; (2009).
  • Mileaf, Janine. "Between You and Me: Man Ray's Object to be Destroyed," Art Journal 63, No. 1 (Spring 2004): 4–23.
  • Naumann, Francis. Conversion to Modernism: The Early Work of Man Ray; Rutgers University Press; (2003).
  • Man Ray Trust Digital Photo Library. Searchable; over 1,000 photos
  • Man Ray Trust
  • Man Ray at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), Melbourne, Australia
  • "Man Ray Laid Bare" from Tate Magazine
  • Man Ray's Subtle Surrealistic Genius Women
  • Collection of Man Ray short films
  • Man Ray letters and album, 1922–1976. Research Library at the Getty Research Institute. Los Angeles
  • Man Ray in the National Gallery of Australia's Kenneth Tyler collection
  • Man Ray at The Jewish Museum
  • Man Ray: African Art and the Modernist Lens 2009-2010 exhibition at The Phillips Collection
  • Man Ray–Human Equations: A Journey from Mathematics to Shakespeare 2015 exhibition at The Phillips Collection
  • Man Ray: When Objects Dream 2025 exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art