Man Ray (1890–1976). American painter, photographer, draughtsman, sculptor, and film-maker, born in Philadelphia, the son of a Russian-Jewish immigrant tailor. He was originally called Emmanuel Radinski, but he was known only as Man Ray from the age of about 15 because other youngsters jeered at his foreign-sounding name. In 1897 his family moved to New York, where he worked as a designer whilst attending evening classes in art. 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. Man Ray also collaborated with Duchamp and Katherine
Dreier in forming the
Société Anonyme in 1920. His activities at this time were very varied, including painting aerographs (see
AIRBRUSH) and making the first packaged objects—a field that
Christo later made his own. 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 (he had a high reputation in these fields), while he pursued his more creative work on the side, but he painted regularly again from the mid-1930s. In 1940 he moved back to America to escape the German occupation of Paris and settled in Hollywood, then in 1951 returned to Paris, where he died. His autobiography,
Self Portrait, was published in 1963.
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 inventive artists in this field, particularly for his development of the technique of ‘solarization’ (the complete or partial reversal of the tones of a photographic image) and for his exploitation of ‘Rayographs'—photographs produced without a camera by placing objects directly on sensitized paper and exposing them to light ( Christian
Schad had earlier used the same method). The models who appear in his photographs include Meret
Oppenheim, his mistress
Kiki of Montparnasse, his assistant Lee Miller (1907–77), who herself became a distinguished photographer and later married Roland
Penrose, and his wife Juliet Browner (Juliet Man Ray), a dancer, whom he married in 1946. In addition to his celebrity as a photographer, Man Ray gained an international reputation as one of the leading figures of Dada and Surrealism; several of his
objects have become icons of the movements, but critics have often been dismissive about his paintings. His most famous object is probably
Gift (1921), consisting of a flatiron with a row of nails sticking out of its smooth face (the original is no longer extant; a reconstruction is in MOMA, New York). His best-known painting is probably
Observatory Time (private collection, 1934), showing an enormous pair of floating lips. He made several experimental (including abstract) films and collaborated with Duchamp on one entitled
Anemic Cinema (1926); ‘anemic’ is an anagram of ‘cinema'.
