Man Ray

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Man Ray (born Emmanuel Radnitzky; August 27, 1890 – November 18, 1976) was an American visual artist who spent the majority of his time in Paris.

He was a major contributor to the Dada and Surrealist movements, but his connections to them were tenuous.

He created major exhibitions in a variety of mediums, but most referred to him as a painter.

He was best known for his photography, and he was also known as a well-known fashion and portrait photographer.

Man Ray is also known for his photograms, which he referred to himself as "rayographs."

Background and early life

During his career, Man Ray made no public knowledge of his early life or family history. He even refused to admit that he didn't have a name other than Man Ray.

Emmanuel Radnitzky was the name of Man Ray's birth name. On August 27, 1890, he was born in South Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He was the youngest child of Russian Jewish immigrants Melach "Max" Radnitzky, a tailor, and Manya "Minnie" Radnitzky (née Lourie or Luria). Sam and his two sisters, Dorothy "Dora" and Essie (or Elsie), were the youngest siblings born in 1897 in Brooklyn, New York, shortly after settling at 372 Debevoise St. The Radnitzky family changed their surname to Ray in early 1912. In reaction to ethnic discrimination and antisemitism prevalent at the time, Man Ray's brother chose the surname. Emmanuel, who was known as "Manny" as a nickname, changed his first name to Man, and gradually began using Man Ray instead.

Man Ray's father worked in a garment factory and operated a small tailoring company far from home. He enlisted his children to help him from an early age. Man Ray's mother loved designing the family's clothes and making patchwork pieces from scraps of fabric. Man Ray wanted to distance himself from his family history, but tailoring left a lasting impression on his art. Mannequins, flat irons, sewing machines, needles, pins, threads, swatches of fabric, and other tailoring-related products are present in virtually every form of his work. Both artists' collage and painting techniques as well as tailoring styles have been noted by art historians.

The artist may have been "the first Jewish avant-garde painter," according to Mason Klein, curator of a Man Ray exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York.

Man Ray was Naomi Savage's uncle who collected some of his techniques and applied them to her own work.

From childhood, Man Ray demonstrated artistic and mechanical skills. He received a solid grounding in drafting and other basic art skills at Brooklyn's Boys' High School from 1904 to 1909. Though he went to school, he enriched himself by frequent visits to the local art museums, where he learned the Old Masters' works. After his graduation, Ray was given a scholarship to study architecture but decided against going into art as an artist. Man Ray's parents were dissatisfied with their son's decision to pursue art, but they decided to rename the family's modest living quarters so that Ray's room would be his studio. Over the next four years, the artist stayed in the family's house. During this period, he progressed steadily towards becoming a professional painter. Man Ray worked as a commercial artist and as a technical illustrator at several Manhattan businesses.

He attempted mainly paintings and drawings in 19th-century styles, as shown by the remaining examples of his career from this period. He was already an avid follower of contemporary avant-garde art, as well as the European modernists he encountered at Alfred Stieglitz's "291" gallery and works by the Ashcan School. However, with a few exceptions, he was not yet able to incorporate these trends into his own work. He continued to take art classes, including stints at the National Academy of Design and the Art Students League, but no apparent benefit was apparent to him. He began to study at the Ferrer School in 1912 in a period of intense and rapid artistic growth.

Man Ray was influenced by avant-garde practices of European contemporary artists he was exposed to at the 1913 Armory Exhibition and in visits to Alfred Stieglitz's "291" art gallery while living in New York City. His early paintings depict cubism's cubism's various aspects. Marcel Duchamp, who was interested in showing movement in static paintings, was enthralled with his drawings, which began to depict movement of the figures. In The Rope Dancer Accompanies Herself with Her Shadows (1916), an example is the repeated positions of the dancer's skirts.

After taking up residence at an art colony in Grantwood, New Jersey, across the Hudson River from New York City in 1915, Man Ray had his first solo show of paintings and drawings. The following year, his first proto-Dada object, a series titled Self-Portrait, was on display in the museum. He took his first photographs in 1918 after first picking up the camera to photograph his own art.

Man Ray left conventional painting to engage with Dada, a radical anti-art movement. He published two Dadaist periodicals that had just one issue, The Ridgefield Gazook (1915) and TNT (1919), the latter co-edited by Adolf Wolff and Mitchell Dawson. He began making objects and created unique photographic and photographic methods for photographing. He combined a spray-gun technique with a pen drawing for Rope Dancer's 1918 version. He worked with readymades — everyday objects that are chosen and modified as Duchamp. His gift readymade (1921) is a flatiron with metal tacks attached to the bottom, and Enigma of Isidore Ducasse (a sewing machine) is wrapped in cloth and tied with cord. Aerograph (1919), another work from this period, was created with airbrush on glass.

Man Ray was a catalyst in 1920 for the creation of the Rotary Glass Plates, one of the first examples of kinetic art. It was made of glass plates turned by a motor. Man Ray, Katherine Dreier, and Duchamp founded Société Anonyme, an itinerant collection that was the first museum of modern art in the United States. The collection was donated to Yale University Art Gallery in 1941.

In 1920, Man Ray joined Duchamp to produce one issue of New York Dada. The wild and tumultuous streets of New York were no match for Man Ray, Dada's experiment. "Dada can't live in New York," he said. All New York is father, and will not accept a competitor."

Man Ray's first wife, Adon Lacroix (1887–1975), lived in New York in 1913. They married in 1914, divorced in 1919, and officially divorced in 1937.

Man Ray went to live and work in Paris, France, in July 1921. He soon settled in the Montparnasse quarter, which has long been favored by many artists. Tristan Tzara's accidental discovery of the cameraless photogram, which he dubbed "rayographs," resulted in mysterious photographs hailed as "pure Dada creations."

He met and fell in love with Kiki de Montparnasse (Alice Prin), an artist's avatar and a well-known figure in Paris bohemian circles, a short time after arriving in Paris. For the most part of the 1920s, Kiki was Man Ray's companion. She became the subject of some of his most famous photographic photos, and she appeared in his experimental films Le Retour à la Raison and L'Étoile de mer.

He began a love affair with Surrealist photographer Lee Miller in 1929. She was also his photographic assistant, and together, they reimagined the photographic technique of solarization. Miller was born in 1932.

Man Ray was in a friendship with Adrienne Fidelin from late 1934 to August 1940. She was a Guadeloupe dancer and model, and her portraits were included in many of his exhibitions. Adrienne stayed behind to care for her family after Ray left France during the Nazi occupation. Fidelin had little to write about his life story until 2022, unlike the artist's other major muses.

Man Ray, a pioneering photographer in Paris for two decades during the wars. Peggy Guggenheim, Antonio Bach, Tristan Tzara, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Jean Cocteau, Salvador Dale, Peggy Guggenheim, Monte Carlo, Luisa Casati, and Antonin Artaud all posed for his camera. Man Ray's international fame as a portrait photographer is captured in a series of photographs of Maharajah Yashwant Rao Holkar II and his wife Sanyogita Devi from their visit to Europe in 1927. Méstine Oppenheim, a surrealist artist 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 in the winter of 1933.

Several iconic photographs, including Noire et blanche, were inspired by Paul Guillaume and Charles Ratton's practice of photographing African objects in the Paris collections of Charles Ratton and others. "No one was more influential in translating the vogue for African art into a Modernist photographic aesthetic than Man Ray," Man Ray scholar Wendy A. Grossman has explained.

In 1925, Man Ray was included in the first Surrealist show with Jean Arp, Max Ernst, André Masson, Joan Miró, and Pablo Picasso at the Galerie Pierre in Paris. A metronome with an eye, originally titled Object to Be Destroyed, and Violon d'Ingres, a stunning snapshot of Kiki de Montparnasse styled after the painter/musician Ingres, were two of the time's most notable works from this period. Violon d'Ingres is a popular example of how Man Ray could mix disparate elements in his photography to create meaning. Cinéma Purity film directed a number of influential avant-garde short films by Man Ray. He directed Le Retour à la Révolution (1923); Emak-Bakia (16 mins, 1926); and Les Mystères du Château de Dé (27 mins, 1929). Man Ray assisted Marcel Duchamp with the film Anemic Cinema (1926), and Ray personally handled the camera on Fernand Léger's Ballet Mécanique (1924). Man Ray appeared in a brief scene with Duchamp in René Clair's film Entr'acte (1924). Man Ray, Duchamp, and Francis Picabia were all friends and collaborators linked by their experimental, entertaining, and innovative art.

Man Ray was forced to return from Paris to the United States as a result of the Second World War. He lived in Los Angeles from 1940 to 1951, where he devoted his creative energies to painting. Juliet Browner, a first-generation American of Romanian-Jewish lineage, arrived in Los Angeles a few days after arriving in Los Angeles. She was a trained dancer who studied dance with Martha Graham and became a veteran artists' model. Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning married in 1946 in a double wedding. Ray had a solo exhibition at the Copley Galleries in Beverly Hills in 1948, which brought together a large body of work and highlighted his newly painted canvases of the Shakespearean Equations series.

Man Ray returned to Paris in 1951 and with Juliet, transforming his artistic endeavor through mediums. He returned to a few of his legendary earlier works during the last quarter century of his life, resurrecting them in a new way. He also supervised the production of limited-edition replicas of several of his designs, beginning with Marcel Zerbib and later Arturo Schwarz.

Self-Portrait, his autobiography, was released in 1963 (republished in 1999).

Ray continued to work on new paintings, photographs, collages, and art works until his death. "Man Ray." Retrieved August 19, 2022. He died in Paris on November 18, 1976, from a lung disease epidemic. He was arrested in the Cimetière du Montparnasse in Paris. "Unconcerned, but not indifferent," his epitaph reads. Juliet was buried in the same cemetery when she died in 1991. "Together again," her epitaph reads. Juliet established a foundation for Ray's work and gave a significant part of his funds to museums. Her plans to save the studio as a public museum were impractical; the building's disrepair led to its demise. The bulk of the contents were stored at the Pompidou Centre.

Later life

Man Ray returned to Paris in 1951 and married Juliet in a studio at 2 bis rue Férou near the Luxembourg Gardens in St. Germain-des-Prés, where he continued his artistic pursuits on mediums. He returned to a number of his legendary earlier works during the last quarter century of his life, reimagining them in a new light. He also supervised the development of limited-edition replicas of several of his objects, first with Marcel Zerbib and later Arturo Schwarz, and then Arturo Schwarz.

He published his autobiography, Self-Portrait, in 1963 (republished in 1999).

Ray continued to work on new paintings, photographs, collages, and art works until his death. "Man Ray" appears on the television. Retrieved August 19, 2022. He died in Paris on November 18, 1976, from a lung disease epidemic. In the Cimetière du Montparnasse in Paris, he was arrested. "Unconcerned, but not indifferent," his epitaph reads. Juliet was interred in the same cemetery when she died in 1991. "Together again," she says in her epitaph. Juliet arranged a museum fund to support Ray's work, and a portion of his work was donated to museums. The studio's efforts to revive it as a public museum were too expensive; the building's disrepair was the object. The bulk of the items were stored at the Pompidou Centre for the most part.

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