The art and artifice of Man Ray – Glass looks at the painter, photographer, sculptor, filmmaker, poet, philosopher
Painter, photographer, sculptor, filmmaker, poet, philosopher – Man Ray was the quintessential modern man, a master of reinvention who shed his immigrant past in Brooklyn to become the ex-pat celebrity, the nexus of bohemian society.
Fusing Surrealism and high style, mixed with a cross-section of the artistic greats of post World War I Europe, Man Ray created images that are icons of one of history’s most artistically brilliant and innovative eras. It was during the 1920s, a decade characterised as the hedonistic interlude between the Great War and the Great Depression, a time of dissipation, and hot jazz, that a generation of artists, writers and intellectuals rebelled against traditional societal dictums. Ex-patriots were seeking not only to invent or reinvent themselves, but mostly to fathom or forget the conflagration that had defined their generation. The epicentre of this bohemian society was Paris, a city pulsating with life in which Man Ray photographed, and immortalised, the men and women who were denizens of this new avant-garde.
Born Emmanuel Radnitzky in Philadelphia in 1890 to Russian Jewish immigrants, Man Ray’s years in New York set the stage for his Parisian sojourn. Shunning college and his family’s home in Brooklyn for the bohemian lifestyle of Manhattan, Man Ray began to work as an artist, taking up life-drawing classes supervised by Robert Henri and George Bellows at the anarchist Ferrer Center. Named after Francisco Ferrer, the martyred Spanish reactionary, the school promulgated independence and self-development, and attracted a cross-section of radical writers, artists, journalists, educators and activists.
But it was art dealer and photographer Alfred Stieglitz from whom Man Ray learnt the rudiments of photography. Established in 1905 at 291 Fifth Avenue, Stieglitz’s Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession was the foremost venue for exhibiting modern art in America. The ‘291’ gallery, as it came to be called, championed European artists such as Matisse, Rodin, Braque and Picasso years before they were brought together at the 1913 Armory Show.
Stieglitz is credited with almost single handedly pioneering photography as an art form in its own right and his influence fuelled Man Ray’s desire to assimilate aspects of the European modernists into his early oeuvre, such as Cézanne’s “economical touches of colour” which made his watercolors look “so different from any … I had seen before,” and which were perhaps the inspiration for Man Ray’s own experimentation with the medium. American artists such as Marin, Hartley and Arthur Dove were exhibited as well, but for Man Ray, they lacked the mystery inherent in the imported works.
Together with Marcel Duchamp, whom Man Ray would soon meet, the two artists became advocates of the short-lived New York Dada movement, promoting an irreverent, iconoclastic attitude towards modern art. According to art historian Judy Annear, “If Stieglitz, as a mentor, had whetted Man Ray’s appetite for modernity, its revolutions and debates, it was Duchamp who enabled the development of Man Ray’s emerging sense of play, interest in ambiguities of form, and helped refine his ideas about art and modernism.”
For Man Ray, Dada’s experimentation was no match for the wild and chaotic streets of New York, and he wrote “Dada cannot live in New York. All New York is Dada, and will not tolerate a rival.”
When Man Ray took up the camera in 1915 in order to record his own creations, the notion of photographing the work of others was still “repugnant” to him, “beneath my dignity as an artist,” as he would later state. Yet, by 1920 Man Ray was acting as a publicity agent for the Société Anonyme by photographing its art collections and selling the reproductions as postcards. A non-commercial organisation founded by Man Ray, Duchamp and Katherine Dreier (artist and patron of the arts) to promote and exhibit the international avant-garde, the Société – which eventually merged with the Yale University Art Gallery in 1941 – was the first museum of modern art in the United States, showcasing American one-man shows for artists such as Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and Fernand Léger. These experiences helped prepare Man Ray for his move to Paris in 1921, a pivotal time when free-thinkers and creative minds from all walks of life inhabited the city.
The year would prove momentous for the young artist: in rapid succession he acquired a studio, a lover – model and muse Alice Prin, better known as Kiki de Montparnasse, who typified the hedonistic and liberated culture of Paris in the 1920s – and a circle of friends who supported and encouraged him, as well as his first one-man show in Paris at the Librairie Six. It was during this period that Man Ray began exposing objects on light-sensitive paper to create cameraless “rayographs.” Many artists responded positively to Man Ray’s daring combination of humour, chance, and absurdity, and in 1922 he published his first book of rayographs entitled Les Champs Délicieux (The Delightful Fields), with an introduction by the influential Dada artist Tristan Tzara, who admired the enigmatic quality of Man Ray’s images.
In order to earn a living, Man Ray began making photographic portraits of his friends and fellow artists, including Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, Constantin Brancusi, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein and Salvador Dali, a veritable Who’s Who of Bohemian artists, writers, and models. Increasingly lucrative commissions from American and European fashion magazines followed, most notably Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. Through his immersion in the often Grand Guignol world of the outré, amongst individuals who advocated sexual freedom, collected and promoted primitive art, and cultivated personae that were deemed eccentric, offensive and outrageous, Man Ray came to be emblematic of the avant-garde individuals he photographed, their faces blank pages on which he could compose his own fantasies.
“It has never been my object to record my dreams – rather to realise them,” Man Ray wrote. “The streets are full of admirable craftsmen but so few practical dreamers.” A reluctant teacher, Man Ray nevertheless mentored numerous individuals during his first decade in Paris, namely Bernice Abbott – a young American who had also moved abroad in 1921 and quickly became Man Ray’s darkroom assistant – and Guy Bourdin, whose 1952 Paris exhibition catalogue included an introduction by the older artist, and whose later interest in Surrealism and experimentation can be traced back to his early days working in Man Ray’s studio.
Yet, the photographer’s most significant protégé came in the form of a nubile and eager American model 17-years his junior by the name of Lee Miller, who would go on to become Man Ray’s lover and muse – as well as collaborator, helping Man Ray to invent a photographic technique known as solarisation – and an accomplished photographer in her own right. Miller recounted the fateful night in 1929 when the two first met:
“He kind of rose up through the floor at the top of a circular staircase. He looked like a bull, with an extraordinary torso and very dark eyebrows and dark hair. I told him boldly that I was his new student. He said he didn’t take students, and anyway, he was leaving Paris for his holiday. I said, I know, I’m going with you – and I did. We lived together for three years. I was known as Madame Man Ray, because that’s how they do things in France.”
After Miller abandoned Man Ray in 1932, she literally became her ex-lover’s Object to be Destroyed, the well-known metronome with Miller’s eye clicking backwards and forwards in near perpetuity – a readymade which in 1957 would be destroyed by a group of early neo-Dadaists who took Man Ray’s words to heart. By 1934 Man Ray had painted Observatory Time – The Lovers, featuring the blown-up lips of Lee Miller. Work on the painting was slow and arduous, a project which took two years to complete, but which would become perhaps his most iconic piece of art to date.
Man Ray’s correspondences with Miller clearly revealed a man hopelessly enraptured by everything this quintessential modern woman stood for: “My darling Lee, I shall try to be everything you want me to be toward you, because I realise it is the only way to keep you. You are so young and beautiful and free, and I hate myself for trying to cramp that in you which I admire most, and find so rare in women, or non-existent.” (Courtesy of © Lee Miller Archives). Interestingly, when Man Ray passed away at the age of 86, Miller followed only eight months later at the age of 70.
Although he was forced to relocate to Hollywood during WWII, Paris would always remain Man Ray’s true home, a city which had nourished his creative and artistic talents for so many years, and which he would eventually return to in 1951. Accompanied by his wife, a young dancer and artists’ model named Juliet Brown, the couple spent the next 25 years in the City of Lights, where Man Ray focused on his first and true passion, painting. The artist died there on November 18, 1976, and was interred in the Cimetière du Montparnasse. His epitaph reads, “unconcerned, but not indifferent,” words that personify a man who became one of the greatest artistic revolutionaries of his time, leaving behind images that continue to fascinate and captivate.
by Lauren Weinberg
Taken from the Glass Archive – Issue four – Secret