by Herbert Reich
Born Emmanuel Radnitzky in Philadephia, 1890, Man Ray, as he later came to be known as, was an American artist whose work spanned the 20th century. Although perhaps best known for his avant-garde black and white photography, he was active in many visual arts, including sculpture, performance art, and especially painting. Like many avant-garde artists, he received little recognition or appreciation for his work at the time, but they have been slowly growing in popularity since.
Although his earliest paintings are done in the traditional 19th-century style of the Old European Masters, Man Ray was always interested in experimental artwork. He finally began to break with traditionalism in his artwork by experimenting with cubism. After moving to New York in 1912 and becoming involved with its art community, Man Ray’s work began to focus on showing movement despite the inherently static nature of a painting. For example, his 1916 painting “The Rope Dancer Accompanies Herself with Shadows”, great care was paid to the repetitive positions of the dancer’s skirts. As Man Ray continued to explore experimental art, he gradually moved away from painting. At first he merely experimented with different materials-for example, his 1919 painting “Aerograph” was done with airbrush on glass-he eventually left the canvas altogether and moved into experimental art in the sculpture and photography mediums.
Man Ray soon took to “found” or “readymade” sculpture-objects chosen by the artist and displayed, with very little modification, as a sculpture. Other sculptures stressed form over subject, such as his sculpture “Enigma of Isidore Ducasse”, in which cloth is draped around an unknown object and tied with rope. In 1920, he assisted fellow avant-garde artist Marcel Duchamp designing and building one of the first pieces of kinetic art in which glass plates were rotated by a motor. In the same year, Man Ray, Duchamp, and Katherine Dreier opened the Socit Anonyme, effectively the first museum of modern art in the United States.
Man Ray began working with photography in 1918. Although he was to become a renowned fashion and portrait photographer, it was the potential of the camera for experimental artistic images that he proceeded to develop. It represented a further step away from static, two-dimensional painting, and he experimented with mechanical and photographic ways of creating images. After moving to the artistic community of Montparnasse in Paris, France, Man Ray spent the next twenty years redefining the art of photography. Man Ray juxtaposed objects, subjects, backgrounds, and lighting in his photographs to alter the meaning and message it would at first glance appear to be sending to society. The Surrealist artist Mret Oppenheim posed for Man Ray in 1934 for a famous series of photographs, in which she stood nude next to a printing press. Later, Ray revisited and reinvented the photographic technique of “solarization”. He developed new techniques of using photograms, which he named after himself, calling them “rayographs”. During his life, he also directed several short avant-garde experimental films.
In 1976, Man Ray died in Paris. He was buried in the famous Montparnasse cemetery. His tombstone bears the inscription “Unconcerned, but not indifferent”. In 1999, ARTnews magazine rated him among the 25 most influential artists during the 20th century due to his exploration, expansion, and blending of the artistic disciplines of painting, sculpture, and black and white photography.
