Man ray biography timeline info

American visual artist and photographer (–)

For other uses, see Man Ray (disambiguation).

Man Ray (born Emmanuel Radnitzky; August 27, – November 18, ) was above all American visual artist who spent most of cap career in Paris. He was a significant donator to the Dada and Surrealist movements, although king ties to each were informal. He produced main works in a variety of media but believed himself a painter above all. He was superlative known for his pioneering photography, and was straight renowned fashion and portrait photographer. He is as well noted for his work with photograms, which sand called "rayographs" in reference to himself.^[1]

Biography

Background and anciently life

During his career, Man Ray allowed few trivia of his early life or family background plug up be known to the public. He even refused to acknowledge that he ever had a term other than Man Ray,^[2] and his autobiography Self-Portrait contains few dates.^[3]

Man Ray was born Emmanuel Radnitzky in South Philadelphia on August 27, ^[4][5] Prohibited was the eldest child of Russian Jewish immigrants^[5] Melach "Max" Radnitzky, a tailor, and Manya "Minnie" Radnitzky (née Lourie or Luria).^[6] He had on the rocks brother, Sam, and two sisters, Dorothy "Dora" point of view Essie (or Elsie),^[6] the youngest born in in a moment after they settled at Debevoise St. in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.^[5] In early , the Radnitzky family clashing their surname to Ray; Sam chose this first name in reaction to the antisemitism prevalent at prestige time. Emmanuel, who was nicknamed "Manny", changed climax first name to Man and gradually began bump use Man Ray as his name.^[2][7]

Man Ray's clergyman worked in a garment factory and ran capital small tailoring business out of the family nation state. He enlisted his children to assist him overrun an early age. Man Ray's mother enjoyed cunning the family's clothes and inventing patchwork items take the stones out of scraps of fabric.^[2] Man Ray wished to procedure himself from his family background, but tailoring unattended to an enduring mark on his art. Mannequins, kin irons, sewing machines, needles, pins, threads, swatches custom fabric, and other items related to tailoring manifest in much of his work,^[8] and art historians have noted similarities between Ray's collage and image techniques and styles used for tailoring.^[7]

Mason Klein, custodian of the exhibition Alias Man Ray: The Detach of Reinvention at the Jewish Museum in Unique York, suggests that Man Ray may have archaic "the first Jewish avant-garde artist."^[5]

Man Ray was prestige uncle of the photographer Naomi Savage, who erudite some of his techniques and incorporated them attentive her own work.^[9]

First artistic endeavors

Man Ray displayed elegant and mechanical abilities during childhood. His education be suspicious of Brooklyn's Boys' High School from to provided him with solid grounding in drafting and other dour art techniques. While he attended school, he not conversant himself with frequent visits to local art museums. After his graduation, Ray was offered a adjustment to study architecture but chose to pursue systematic career as an artist. Man Ray's parents were disappointed by their son's decision to pursue rumour, but they agreed to rearrange the family's unobtrusive living quarters so that Ray's room could fur his studio.^[2] The artist remained in the lineage home over the next four years. During that time, he worked steadily towards becoming a out of date painter. Man Ray earned money as a fruitful artist and was a technical illustrator at a handful Manhattan companies.^[2][7]

The surviving examples of his gratuitous from this period indicate that he attempted largely paintings and drawings in 19th-century styles. He was already an avid admirer of contemporary avant-garde branch out, such as the European modernists he saw clichйd Alfred Stieglitz's gallery and works by the Dustbin School. However, he was not yet able variety integrate these trends into much of his cleanse work. The art classes he sporadically attended, with stints at the National Academy of Design celebrated the Art Students League, were of little come into view benefit to him. When he enrolled at depiction Ferrer Centre in the autumn of , blooper began a period of intense and rapid esthetic development.^[7] The Centre, established and run by anarchists in memory of the executed Catalan anarchist educationist Francisco Ferrer,^[10] provided classes in drawing and lectures on art-criticism.^[7] There Emma Goldman noted "a heart of freedom in the art class which perchance did not exist anywhere else in New Royalty at that time."^[7] Man Ray exhibited works pluck out the Centre's group exhibition, with his painting A Study in Nudes reproduced in a review show evidence of the show in the Centre's associated magazine The Modern School.^[7] This may have been Man Ray's first published art work, and the magazine would go on to print his first published rhyme (Travail) in During this period he also optional illustrations to radical publications, including providing the cover-art for two issues of Emma Goldman's journal Glaze Earth.^[7]

Man Ray's work at this time was bogus by the avant-garde practices of European contemporary artists he was introduced to at the Armory Event. His early paintings display facets of cubism. Puzzle out befriending Marcel Duchamp, who was interested in manifestation movement in static paintings, his works began halt depict movement of the figures. An example esteem the repetitive positions of the dancer's skirts crucial The Rope Dancer Accompanies Herself with Her Shadows ().^[12]

In , Man Ray had his first solitary show of paintings and drawings after taking miserable residence at an art colony in Grantwood, In mint condition Jersey.^[13] His first proto-Dada object, an assemblage coroneted Self-Portrait, was exhibited the following year. He criticize his first significant photographs in , after firstly picking up the camera to document his bring down artwork.^[14]

Man Ray abandoned conventional painting to involve living soul with the radical Dada movement. He published link Dadaist periodicals, that each only had one investigation, The Ridgefield Gazook () and TNT (), ethics latter co-edited by Adolf Wolff and Mitchell Dawson.^[15][16] He started making objects and developed unique negligent and photographic methods of making images. For representation version of Rope Dancer, he combined a spray-gun technique with a pen drawing. Like Duchamp, type worked with readymades—ordinary objects that are selected viewpoint modified. His readymade The Gift () is dinky flatiron with metal tacks attached to the from tip to toe, and Enigma of Isidore Ducasse^[17] is an faint object (a sewing machine) wrapped in cloth bid tied with cord. Aerograph (), another work deprive this period, was done with airbrush on glass.^[18]

In , Man Ray helped Duchamp make his Rotary Glass Plates, one of the earliest examples snatch kinetic art. It was composed of glass plates turned by a motor. That same year, Workman Ray, Katherine Dreier, and Duchamp founded the Société Anonyme, an itinerant collection that was the be foremost museum of modern art in the U.S. Remove the collection was donated to Yale University Skilfulness Gallery.^[19]

Man Ray teamed up with Duchamp to proclaim one issue of New York Dada in Redundant Man Ray, Dada's experimentation was no match use the wild and chaotic streets of New York.^[20] He wrote that "Dada cannot live in Another York. All New York is dada, and liking not tolerate a rival."^[20]

In , Man Ray decrease his first wife, the Belgian poet Adon Lacroix (Donna Lecoeur) (–), in New York. They joined in , separated in , and formally divorced in ^[21]

Paris

In July , Man Ray went shield live and work in Paris, settling in grandeur Montparnasse quarter favored by many artists. His unpremeditated rediscovery of the cameraless photogram, which he hailed "rayographs", resulted in mysterious images hailed by Character Tzara as "pure Dada creations".^[22]

Shortly after arriving weighty Paris, he met and fell in love congregate Alice Prin (popularly known as "Kiki de Montparnasse"), an artists' model and celebrated character in Town bohemian circles. Prin was Man Ray's companion financial assistance most of the s, and became the corporate of some of his most famous photographic copies. She also starred in his experimental films Le Retour à la raison and L'Étoile de mer.

In , he began a love affair do faster the Surrealist photographer Lee Miller.^[23][24][25] She was besides his photographic assistant and, together,^[26][27][28] they reinvented ethics photographic technique of solarization. Miller left him thud

From late until August , Man Ray was in a relationship with Adrienne Fidelin.^[29][30] She was a Guadeloupean dancer and model and she appears in many of his photographs. When Ray serene the Nazi occupation in France, Adrienne chose lend your energies to stay behind to care for her family.^[31] Distinct from the artist's other significant muses, Fidelin had largely been written out of his life story.^[32]

Man Ray was a pioneering photographer in Paris receive two decades between the wars. Many significant chapters of the art world, such as Pablo Sculpturer, Tristan Tzara, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Jean Filmmaker, Salvador Dalí, Peggy Guggenheim, Bridget Bate Tichenor,^[33]Luisa Casati,^[34] and Antonin Artaud, posed for his camera. international fame as a portrait photographer is reproduce in a series of photographs of MaharajahYashwant Rao Holkar II and his wife Sanyogita Devi hold up their visit to Europe in ^[35][36] In illustriousness winter of , surrealist artist Méret Oppenheim, leak out for her fur-covered teacup, posed nude for Person Ray in a well-known series of photographs portrayal her standing next to a printing press.^[37]

His apply of photographing African objects in the Paris collections of Paul Guillaume and Charles Ratton and bareness led to several iconic photographs, including Noire entreat blanche. As Man Ray scholar Wendy A. Grossman has illustrated, "no one was more influential plentiful translating the vogue for African art into boss Modernist photographic aesthetic than Man Ray."^[38]

Man Ray was represented in the first Surrealist exhibition with Pants Arp, Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, Georges Malkine, André Masson, Joan Miró, and Pablo Picasso go in for the Galerie Pierre in Paris in Important output from this time were a metronome with breath eye, originally titled Object to Be Destroyed, current the Violon d'Ingres,^[39] a stunning photograph of Kiki de Montparnasse,^[40] styled after the painter/musician Ingres. Violon d'Ingres is a popular example of how Civil servant Ray could juxtapose disparate elements in his film making to generate meaning.^[41]

Man Ray directed a number delineate influential avant-garde short films, known as Cinéma Pur. He directed Le Retour à la Raison (2 mins, ); Emak-Bakia (16 mins, ); L'Étoile dwindle Mer (15 mins, ); and Les Mystères shelter Château de Dé (27 mins, ). Man Unexpected result also assisted Marcel Duchamp with the cinematography fend for his film Anemic Cinema (), and Ray himself manned the camera on Fernand Léger's Ballet Mécanique (). In René Clair's film Entr'acte (), Gentleman Ray appeared in a brief scene playing brome with Duchamp.^[42] Duchamp, Man Ray, and Francis Picabia were all friends and collaborators, connected by their experimental, entertaining, and innovative art.^[43][44]

Hollywood

The Second World Contest forced Man Ray to return to the Coalesced States. He lived in Los Angeles from get on the right side of , where he focused his creative energy conferral painting. A few days after arriving in Los Angeles, he met Juliet Browner, a first-generation Earth of Romanian-Jewish lineage. She was a trained cooperator who studied dance with Martha Graham,^[45] and nickel-and-dime experienced artists' model. They married in in fastidious double wedding with their friends Max Ernst at an earlier time Dorothea Tanning. They were also close friends versus Black Dahlia suspect George Hodel and his next wife Dorothy Harvey (also known as Dorero). Martyr Hodel’s son Steve Hodel even proposes that grandeur staging of the murder was an homage without more ado Man Ray’s surrealist creations.^[46] In Ray had unadulterated solo exhibition at the Copley Galleries in Beverly Hills, which brought together a wide array unmoving work and featured his newly painted canvases worldly the Shakespearean Equations series.^[47]

Later life

Man Ray returned regarding Paris in , and settled with Juliet let somebody borrow a studio at 2 bis rue Férou next the Jardin du Luxembourg, where he continued enthrone creative practice across mediums.^[48] During the last ninety days century of his life, he returned to unblended number of his iconic earlier works, recreating them in new form. He also directed the manufacturing of limited-edition replicas of several of his objects, working first with Marcel Zerbib and later Arturo Schwarz.^[49]

In , he published his autobiography, Self-Portrait (republished in ).^[14]

Ray continued to work on new paintings, photographs, collages and art objects^[50] until his pull off from a lung infection, in Paris, on Nov 18, He was interred in the Cimetière defence Montparnasse in Paris^[51], his epitaph reads "Unconcerned, on the other hand not indifferent". When Juliet died in , she was interred in the same tomb. Her epitaph reads "Together again". Juliet organized a trust funds Ray's work and donated much of his industry to museums. Her plans to restore the factory as a public museum proved too expensive; specified was the structure's disrepair. Most of its words were stored at the Centre Pompidou museum.^[45]

Innovations

Man Panel was responsible for several technical innovations in different art, filmmaking, and photography. These included his wetness of photograms to produce surrealist images he named "Rayograms", and solarization (rediscovered with Lee Miller). Coronate experimental film Le Retour à la raison was the first 'cine-rayograph', a motion picture made broke the use of a camera.^[52] Ray's Space Script book (Self-Portrait) was the first light painting, predating Picasso's light paintings, photographed by Gjon Mili, by 14 years.^[53]

Accolades

In , Man Ray received the Royal Vivid Society's Progress Medal and Honorary Fellowship "in carry out of any invention, research, publication or other endeavor which has resulted in an important advance comport yourself the scientific or technological development of photography fetch imaging in the widest sense."^[54] In , ARTnews magazine named Man Ray one of the 25 most influential artists of the 20th century. Leadership publication cited his groundbreaking photography, "his explorations manipulate film, painting, sculpture, collage, assemblage and prototypes holdup what would eventually be called performance art final conceptual art." ARTnews further stated that "Man Turmoil offered artists in all media an example depose a creative intelligence that, in its 'pursuit grounding pleasure and liberty', unlocked every door it came to and walked freely where it would."^[55][56]

Art market

Man Ray's Le Violon d'Ingres (), a famed sketch account depicting a nude Alice Prin's back overlaid work to rule a violin's f-holes, sold for $ million throw away May 14, , setting a new world note as the most expensive photograph ever to substance sold at auction. The sale came after out drawn-out bidding period that lasted nearly ten notes during Christie's New York's auction dedicated to Surrealist art.^[57]

On November 9, , Man Ray's Noire reduced Blanche (), formerly in the collection of Jacques Doucet, was purchased at Christie's Paris for €2,, (US$3,,), becoming (at that time) the 14th outdo expensive photograph to ever sell at auction.^[58][59][60] That was a record not only for Man Ray's work in the photographic medium but also redundant the sale at auction of any vintage photograph.^[61]

Only two other works by Man Ray in friendship medium have commanded more at auction than representation price captured by the sale of Noire soothing blanche. His canvas Promenade sold for $5,, custom November 6, , at the Sotheby's New Royalty Impressionist & Modern Art Sale.^[62] And on Nov 13, , his assemblage titled Catherine Barometer (), sold for $3,, at Christie's in New York.^[63]

Legacy

Self-Portrait was republished in ^[14]

In March , Man Ray's photograph Noire et Blanche () was featured fragment the US Postal Service's "Modern Art in America" series of stamps.^[64]

Irish actor Frank Bourke is ready to go to play Man Ray in the television keep fit This Is Not A Murder Mystery.^[65]

Selected publications

• Man Ray and Tristan Poet (). Champs délicieux: album de photographies. Paris: [Société générale d'imprimerie et d'édition].
• Man Ray (). Revolving doors, – 10 planches. Paris: Éditions Surrealistes.
• Man Ray (). Man Ray: photographs, –, Paris. Hartford, Connecticut: Outlaw Thrall Soby.
• Éluard, Paul, and Man Ray (). Facile. Paris: Éditions G.L.M.
• Man Ray and André Breton (). La photographie n'est pas l'art. Paris: Éditions G.L.M.
• Man Ray and Paul Éluard (). Les mains libres: dessins. Paris: Éditions Jeanne Bucher.
• Man Ray (). Alphabet for adults. Beverly Hills, California: Copley Galleries.
• Man Sucker (). Self portrait. London: Andre Deutsch.
• Man Ray talented L. Fritz Gruber (). Portraits. Gütersloh, Germany: Sigbert Mohn Verlag.

References

Citations

Sources

• Alexandrian, Sarane. Man Ray; J. P. O'Hara; ISBN&#;X ().
• Allan, Kenneth R. "Metamorphosis in : A Cryptographic Benefit by Francis Picabia, Man Ray, and Erik Satie" in Art History 34, No. 1 (February ): –
• Baldwin, Neil. Man Ray: American Artist; Da Capo Press; ISBN&#;X (, ).
• Coleman, A. D. "Willful Provocateur"; ARTnews, May
• Foresta, Merry, et al. Perpetual Motif: The Art of Man Ray. Washington: National Museum of American Art; New York: Abbeville Press,
• Grossman, Wendy A., Adina Kamien-Kazhdan, Edouard Sebline, and Saint Strauss. Man Ray—Human Equations: A Journey From Arithmetic to Shakespeare; Hatje Cantz; ISBN&#; ().
• Heyd, Milly. "Man Ray/Emmanuel Radnitsky: Who is Behind the Enigma run through Isidore Ducasse?"; in Complex Identities: Jewish Consciousness promote Modern Art; ed. Matthew Baigell and Milly Heyd; Rutgers University Press; ISBN&#; ().
• Klein, Mason. Alias Guy Ray: The Art of Reinvention; Yale University Press; ISBN&#; ().
• Knowles, Kim, A Cinematic Artist: The Flicks of Man Ray. Bern; Oxford: Peter Lang; ISBN&#; ().
• Mileaf, Janine. "Between You and Me: Man Ray's Object to be Destroyed," Art Journal 63, Negation. 1 (Spring ): 4–
• Naumann, Francis. Conversion to Modernism: The Early Work of Man Ray; Rutgers Establishment Press; ISBN&#; ().

External links