Man Ray

Man Ray: The American Who Made Paris Modern

In May 2022 a single photograph sold at auction for $12.4 million, the highest price ever paid for a photograph. It shows a woman's naked back, posed like an odalisque, with two violin f-holes laid over the skin. The model was Alice Prin, the Montparnasse singer known as Kiki. The photographer was a Brooklyn tailor's son who had once been offered a scholarship to study architecture and turned it down.

The Tailor's Son from Williamsburg

Emmanuel Radnitzky arrived on August 27, 1890, in South Philadelphia, the eldest child of Russian Jewish immigrants. His father Melach — "Max" — worked in a garment factory and ran a small tailoring business out of the family home. His mother Manya, called Minnie, designed the family's clothes and invented patchwork items from scraps of fabric. In 1897 the household moved to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where Emmanuel grew up alongside his siblings Sam, Dora and Elsie. Cutting, stitching and the assembly of unlike materials were the ambient conditions of his childhood, and they never left the work. *The Enigma of Isidore Ducasse* — a sewing machine wrapped in cloth and bound with cord, never to be unveiled — is a tailor's shop turned into a riddle.

In early 1912 the family changed its surname to Ray, a name chosen by his brother Sam in response to the antisemitism the Radnitzkys encountered in America. Emmanuel took Man Ray as his professional name. The compression is telling: it sounds less like a person than a signature.

The Education He Turned Down

He attended Brooklyn Boys' High School from 1904 to 1909 and left with a solid grounding in drafting and other basic art techniques. Offered the architecture scholarship, he refused it. What followed was a deliberately unofficial training — the National Academy of Design, the Art Students League, and from the autumn of 1912 the Ferrer Centre, the anarchist school in New York where he found what he later described as "a spirit of freedom in the art class which probably did not exist anywhere else in New York."

He married the Belgian poet Adon Lacroix in 1914, spent time at an art colony in Grantwood, New Jersey, and held his first solo painting exhibition in 1915. His paintings of the period, including *The Rope Dancer Accompanies Herself with Her Shadows* of 1916, were ambitious and unmistakably modern. But the decisive turn came in 1918, when he picked up a camera for the strictly practical purpose of documenting his own canvases. The servant became the master. Photography, which he had approached as a reproductive convenience, would make him famous and leave the paintings in shadow — a reversal he resented for the rest of his life.

New York Dada, and Its Impossibility

With Marcel Duchamp he produced the single issue of *New York Dada* in 1920, following his own small magazines *The Ridgefield Gazook* (1915) and *TNT* (1919). His verdict on the venture is one of the sharpest things anyone has said about the city: "Dada cannot live in New York. All New York is dada, and will not tolerate a rival." From this period comes *The Gift* (1921), a household flatiron with a row of metal tacks fixed to its sole — an object that promises domestic order and delivers laceration, and which needs no explanation in any language.

Paris, July 1921

He arrived in Paris in July 1921 and settled in Montparnasse, and the city gave him what Manhattan could not: a milieu that took the joke seriously. Britannica calls him the only American to play a major role in both the Dada and Surrealist movements, and that double citizenship was the making of him. He met Alice Prin — Kiki de Montparnasse — soon after arriving, and she became the subject of some of his most famous images and appeared in his films.

He also became, improbably, the portraitist of record for the European avant-garde and a working fashion photographer, and he photographed African sculpture in the Paris collections of Paul Guillaume and Charles Ratton. That commission fed directly into *Noire et blanche* (1926), in which Kiki's smooth pale face lies on a table beside a Baule mask — an image of formal beauty and unresolved colonial discomfort that has been argued over ever since.

Accidents Committed on Purpose

His two signature techniques were both rediscoveries rather than inventions, and both were arrived at by mishandling the equipment. Laying objects directly onto photographic paper and exposing it to light produced cameraless images he named rayographs, folding his own name into the process; Tristan Tzara hailed them as "pure Dada creations." Solarization — the partial tonal reversal that puts a black outline around a figure like a drawn line — he rediscovered with Lee Miller, who came to him as an assistant and left as a major photographer in her own right.

In cinema he did the same thing to the strip of film. *Le Retour à la raison* (1923) was the first cine-rayograph, a motion picture made without a camera, and he followed it with *L'Étoile de mer* and other shorts. *Space Writing (Self-Portrait)* of 1935, made by moving a penlight in front of an open shutter, was the first light painting, predating Picasso's celebrated 1949 experiments by fourteen years.

Hollywood Exile

The war drove him back to America in 1940. He spent eleven years in Los Angeles, living at the Chateau des Fleurs and later the Villa Elaine, and — characteristically stubborn — poured his energy into painting rather than the photography the world wanted from him, showing his *Shakespearean Equations* series at the Copley Galleries in Beverly Hills in 1948. In 1946 he married Juliet Browner, a trained dancer, in a double wedding with Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning.

Why Man Ray Is Called a Genius

The quality on display is not intellectual depth but an almost unfailing instinct for the productive accident — the ability to recognise, in a botched exposure or a mishandled sheet of paper, an image nobody had seen before, and then to build a body of work from it. Tzara's phrase "pure Dada creations" was a contemporary's verdict; ARTnews in 1999 named him one of the twenty-five most influential artists of the twentieth century, citing the photography alongside his work in film, painting, sculpture, collage and assemblage. Britannica's judgement — the only American central to both Dada and Surrealism — is the historically precise claim, and it is a large one.

The honest counter-case is that he was not primarily an original thinker. The photogram, solarization and the readymade all existed before he touched them; his contribution was to make them beautiful and to make them his, which is closer to the genius of a couturier or a jazz player than of a theorist. He fought his whole life to be taken seriously as a painter and largely lost that argument. Duchamp supplied more of the ideas; Man Ray supplied the eye, the wit and the finish. Whether that constitutes genius depends on whether you believe seeing counts as thinking. The evidence of *Le Violon d'Ingres* suggests it does.

Afterlife

He returned to Paris in 1951, settling with Juliet at 2 bis rue Férou near the Jardin du Luxembourg, remaking his early objects in limited editions with Marcel Zerbib and later Arturo Schwarz, and publishing his memoir *Self-Portrait* in 1963. The Royal Photographic Society gave him its Progress Medal and an Honorary Fellowship in 1974. He died of a lung infection on November 18, 1976, and lies in the Cimetière du Montparnasse under an epitaph he chose himself: "Unconcerned, but not indifferent." Juliet joined him there in 1991, beneath the words "Together again."

Achievements

• Notable work: Ingres's Violin
• Notable work: Gift
• Educated at Art Students League of New York, Boys and Girls High School and Boys High School
• Worked as film director, photographer and cinematographer