Man Ray

Man Ray (b Philadelphia, 27 Aug. 1890; d Paris, 18 Nov. 1976). American painter, photographer, draughtsman, sculptor, and film-maker, active for much of his career in France. He was born Emmanuel Radinsky, but he was known only as Man Ray from about the age of 15 because other youngsters jeered at his foreign-sounding name. After seeing the Armory Show in 1913 he began painting in a Cubist style. In 1915 he began a lifelong friendship with Marcel Duchamp, and these two together with Picabia were the mainstays of the New York Dada movement. He also collaborated with Duchamp and Katherine Dreier in forming the Société Anonyme in 1920. In 1921 he settled in Paris, where he continued his Dada activities and then became a member of the Surrealist movement. For several years he earned his living mainly as a fashion and portrait photographer, but he painted regularly again from the mid-1930s. In 1940 he went back to America to escape the Nazi occupation of Paris and settled in Hollywood, then in 1951 returned permanently to Paris.

From the 1940s photography took a secondary place in Man Ray's activities, but it is as a photographer that his reputation is now most secure. In the 1920s and 1930s he was one of the most imaginative artists in this field, particularly for his exploitation of the ‘Rayograph’ (also known as photogram), a photograph produced without a camera by placing objects directly on sensitized paper and exposing them to light, and for his development of the technique of ‘solarization’ (the complete or partial reversal of the tones of a photographic image). The glamorous women who appear in his photographs include Meret Oppenheim, the model Kiki of Montparnasse (Marie Prin, 1901–53), with whom he lived for several years, and his assistant Lee Miller, who herself became a distinguished photographer and later married Roland Penrose. In addition to his celebrity as a photographer, he gained an international reputation as one of the most prominent figures of Dada and Surrealism. Several of his objects' have become icons of the movements, notably Gift (1921), consisting of a flat iron with a row of nails sticking out of its smooth face (the original is no longer extant; a reconstruction is in the Museum of Modern Art, New York).