Man Ray (1890-1976), painter, photographer, and object maker, was the principal American artist in the Dada movement.

Man Ray was born in Philadelphia, Pa. on August 27, 1890. In 1908 he studied painting at the National Academy of Design in New York City. He made his first abstract painting in 1911 and held his first one-man show in 1912. Before meeting the Dadaist artist Marcel Duchamp in 1915, Ray worked in a quasi-cubist fashion. His oil painting The Rope Dancer Accompanies Herself with Shadows (1916) shows the influence of synthetic cubism in the way forms are put together; but the influence of Duchamp is evident in the concern with movement, as seen in the repetitive positions of the skirts of the dancer.

After 1917, the year that Ray became important in the New York Dada group, he gave up conventional methods of painting. He became an object maker and adopted various mechanical and photographic methods of...