Man Ray Biography

"You can say that I'm a retired banjo player, or a former chewing gum executive, or a retired coal dealer. It doesn't matter about me; the important thing is my painting."

Man Ray's work--in painting, photography, sculpture, assemblage, and film--is among the most surprising and shocking of the modern era. In addition to pushing the creative envelope, he also made many technical advances in the use of photography; one such process was named the Rayograph in his honor. Mysterious, witty, and erotic, his creations embody the challenge to institutional art that was characterized by the styles known as surrealism and dadaism.

The son of Russian immigrants, Man Ray was born Emmanuel Rudnitzky on August 27, 1890, in Philadelphia, but after his family gave him the nickname Man Ray he never used any other. The Rudnitzky clan moved from Philadelphia to Brooklyn, New York, when Man Ray was seven. Man Ray displayed an interest in art from an early age and once made a drawing of the battleship Maine using every color in his box of crayons. In his autobiography, Self Portrait, he related that he paid little attention to his formal schoolwork and spent most of his time painting and drawing. After graduating from high school, he was offered a scholarship to study architecture.

Exposed to Cubism and African Art

But what he wanted was to paint, so he held odd jobs to support himself while he pursued his vocation. He also attended life drawing classes in the evenings and haunted the galleries and museums of New York. It was at the famous Gallery 291 run by Alfred Stieglitz that Man Ray became familiar with works by modern American and European painters and photographers such as the Spaniard Pablo Picasso, Frenchman Paul Cezanne, and American George Bellows. Works in styles previously unseen in domestic galleries, including the fruits of cubism and African art, were on view there.

Man Ray's first important work, Tapestry, bears the stamp of these influences. He made the cloth construction in 1911 from samples obtained from a tailor's shop; the resulting patchwork strongly resembles some of the cubist paintings he had seen. Already Man Ray had established his trademark use of unusual materials. It was around this time that he met the French artist Marcel Duchamp, who became his closest friend. Duchamp, Man Ray, and artist Francis Picabia would be pioneers in America of a movement known as dadaism, which had begun in Switzerland. Dada was based on a perception of life's essentially irrational and absurd character and challenged the idea that there existed laws of beauty or organization in art. Dada artists worked to shock, surprise, and disorient their audiences through the use of bizarre combinations, disturbing images, and dream logic.

Another important influence on Man Ray's art during this time was the famous 1913 New York art exhibition known as the Armory Show, which included works in a variety of modern--and controversial--styles. Many of these creations were attacked as scandalous by critics and conventional artists. The impact of the show on artists like Man Ray was enormous; it encouraged him to continue experimenting with cubism and with "anti-artistic" works. In 1914, Man Ray married Adon Lacroix, and his first solo show took place in New York in 1915. A Chicago collector was sufficiently impressed by Man Ray's work to purchase six paintings for $2,000, a substantial amount for the time. This was enough for Man Ray to buy his own studio.

Makes Waves with Strange Self-portrait

Between 1916 and 1921 Man Ray worked feverishly in the dada and cubist styles. His most renowned creation from this phase is most likely The Rope Dancer Accompanies Herself with Her Shadows, a work that combined painting and paper cutouts. He also undertook a "self-portrait" in 1917; it was once described as consisting of two nonringing electric bells and a push button attached to a background of aluminum and black paint that bore at its center an imprint of his hand." Needless to say, identifying this odd artifact as a self-portrait challenged a slew of prevailing notions about representation. Man Ray was also among the earliest practitioners of a process known as assemblage. Assemblages are works assembled, or put together, from items of varying media, often found objects. Though Man Ray's compositional skills are evident in these works, they were revolutionary in the context of mainstream art.

When Man Ray was thirty-one years old, he moved to Paris and was immediately accepted into the circle of artists working in the dada movement. He continued painting and creating assemblages, as well as producing sculpture and collages, which, like assemblage, incorporates various kinds of materials but generally involves a framed surface. Man Ray soon realized that he could not earn a living from his paintings, so he began earning money by photographing fashion layouts and portraits of prominent society people. He had begun teaching himself photography in order to take pictures of his own art works, but he soon developed such skill in this increasingly popular medium that other artists began to hire him to photograph their creations. He achieved fame for photographing some of the most important art figures of the day, including American writers Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway, Irish writer James Joyce, and Picasso. Man Ray gained a reputation for unusual poses that nonetheless revealed the personality of his subject.

The 1920s and 1930s were phenomenally successful and busy years for Man Ray, years that saw his involvement in the artistic movement called surrealism. He also made several films and even appeared in one by director Rene Clair. Most importantly, he continued to hone his distinctive, humorously creative perspective. Once he found a broken lamp from which he removed the shade, cutting it to form a spiral. And one of his most famous assemblages was made from an iron. He glued tacks on the flat bottom of the iron; by depriving it of its functionality, he transformed it into an aesthetic object, absurd and menacing, that he called The Gift. Another infamous work from this time, Indestructible Object, consisted of a metronome to which Man Ray attached a photograph of a human eye. The eye would swing back and forth on the metronome's arm as the device ticked. These works are considered the forerunners of the pop art of the 1960s.

Innovative Photographer

In Paris, while pursuing photography, Man Ray discovered a new process: he accidentally placed some objects, including a funnel and a thermometer, onto unexposed photographic paper. He was delighted when, on turning on the light, he found that white silhouettes of these objects had "printed" on the black background. He experimented for many years with this process, which he called the Rayograph, and with a reverse process called solarization. He often called this "painting with light." His Rayographs and other photographic works were exhibited around the world and appeared in numerous publications.

Man Ray's most famous photograph of these years in Paris is called Violon d'Ingres. It is a picture of a woman's back on which Man Ray painted the sound holes of a violin. This work--spoofing a painting by the nineteenth-century French artist Ingres--at once jibes playfully at the "serious" art world and exemplifies the dreamlike eroticism of the surrealists, which often involved mysterious transformations of the female nude.

After twenty years in France, Man Ray returned to the United States during the Nazi occupation of Paris in the early 1940s. He settled in Hollywood, where he worked and taught for roughly ten years. Man Ray's works were collected and displayed in several exhibitions, including one in New York in 1945 titled "Objects of My Affection" that was comprised almost entirely of items the artist had found by chance. His first marriage had ended in divorce, and he married again during these years.

Continued to Evolve as an Artist

From the early 1950s until his death in Paris on November 18, 1976, Man Ray lived in France, working on a multitude of projects. One involved photographing the adjustable wooden figures that artists use as models, arranging them in frequently provocative poses to sometimes humorous, sometimes eerie effect. He was also one of the first artists to use the airbrush. He continued experimenting with photography, worked on several books, and helped organize exhibitions.

Man Ray maintained, that no two things were the same in his work and that he was continually evolving. He won a score of awards that recognized his creativity and inventiveness, including the Legion d'Honneur, France's highest laurel. He occupied a storied place in the worlds of painting and photography, explaining that he used photography for subjects he did not wish to paint and painting for what could not be photographed. Most of all, he specialized in realizing what previously could not be imagined.