He was known in the art world primarily for his avant-garde photography, and was also a renowned portrait and fashion photographer. He spent most of his career in Paris (France).
During his long artistic career, he tried to ensure that hardly any details of his life or family were known, even going so far as to deny that he had any name other than Man Ray.
He was born Emmanuel Radnitzky in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on August 27, 1890, the eldest son of a Russian Jewish immigrant couple. He had a brother and two younger sisters and his father was a tailor. In early 1912 the family changed their surname to Ray to avoid discrimination and anti-Semitism and then Emmanuel, familiarly called 'Manny', also changed his name to Man and began using Man Ray as a name.
Both Man and his brothers helped their father in the tailoring business since they were children and their mother supplemented the family income by doing patchwork work, quilts made from scraps of fabric. Man Ray always wanted to distance himself from his family origins but clearly the tailoring technique and materials are present in his work from the beginning. Art historians note the similarities of his collages with patchwork. Mason Klein, curator of the Jewish Museum in New York, suggests that the artist may have been “the first Jewish avant-garde artist.”
He showed artistic and technical ability as a child, and while attending school, he frequently visited local museums, where he studied the works of the old masters. After graduating from high school, he was offered a scholarship to study architecture, but he rejected it, determined to pursue his path as an artist. Her parents were a little disappointed with her decision, but she helped her convert a couple of rooms in the family house into a studio. For the next four years she sought work as a painter. In New York he worked as an engraver and in an advertising agency, while attending night classes at the National Academy of Design. The surviving work from this period shows that he followed the academic style of the 19th century while his first contacts with the New York avant-garde occurred during his visits to Alfred Stieglitz's gallery and at the Arensberg gatherings.
In 1914 she married Adon Lacroix (Donna Lecoeur, 1887-1975), a Belgian anarchist poetess. They separated in 1919 and formally divorced in 1937. His first individual exhibition took place at the Daniel Gallery in New York in 1915, with paintings influenced by Cubism (an artistic movement developed between 1907 and 1917, created by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque). Shortly afterwards, together with Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia, he founded the Dada movement (a cultural and artistic movement created with the aim of opposing the arts) in New York.
In 1918 he worked with airbrushes for the first time on photographic paper and in 1920, with K. Dreier and M. Duchamp, he founded the Société Anonyme, a company from which they manage all types of avant-garde activities (exhibitions, publications, installations, films, conferences, etc.). But for Ray, such experimentation was no match for the wild and chaotic streets of New York: “Dada can't live in New York. “All of New York is Dada and will not tolerate a rival.”
Paris
Thus, in 1921 he settled in Paris, where he would live until 1940, and there he centralized Parisian Dada. Faced with the impossibility of selling his work, Man Ray returns to photography. His first experimental works are the X-rays (rayograms) from 1921, photographic images taken without a camera (abstract images obtained with objects exposed on light-sensitive paper and then developed). He also takes portraits, in fact he becomes a portrait photographer of cultural personalities.
When surrealism separated from Dada in 1924, Ray was one of its founders and was included in the first surrealist exhibition at the Pierre gallery in Paris in 1925.
He makes surrealist sculptures modeled after the found art created by Marcel Duchamp, such as Object to be Destroyed (Object to be destroyed) from 1923; Man Ray added to a normal metronome (a device used to indicate the tempo or pulse of musical compositions), 26 cm high, a photograph of an eye on the needle. Nine years later Man Ray is abandoned by his partner, Lee Miller, as a result of which Man Ray replaced the eye of someone unknown with that of his former lover, and changed the title of the ready made By the Destruction object. In 1957, a group of students did, in effect, destroy the metronome, but Man Ray rebuilt it in 1963, and definitively titled it indestructible object, giving the work a conceptual turn. In the Reina Sofía Museum there is a giant-scale reproduction of this work preserved in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Inspired by his Parisian model and lover Alice Prin, known as Kiki de Montparnasse, he takes the photograph The Violin of Ingres (1924)
In 1929 he filmed, mainly at the Villa Noailles, his short film Les Mystères du Château de Dé.
In the 1930s he created the series of solarizations, photographic negatives exposed to light, and continued painting in a surrealist style; He publishes several volumes of photographs and rayograms. Towards the end of the twenties he began to make avant-garde films, such as Starfish (1927). In 1936 his work was present in the exhibition 'Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism' at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
In 1940, escaping the Nazi occupation of Paris (1940-1944), he settled in Hollywood and New York. During his stay in California he makes a living teaching as a professor. In 1946 he married Juliette Browner, in a double wedding along with that of Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning.
Ray's fertile production avoids clear categorizations and reflects his agile and humorous sensibility. Paintings and photographs must include films, objects, collages, graphic works, drawings, advertising design and fashion. As a pioneer of Dada and Surrealism, his approach is characterized by the irrational and the incongruous, provoking eroticism and scandal. “The pursuit of freedom and pleasure; That occupies all my art,” he will say.
He returned to France in 1951. In 1963 he published his Autobiography. In 1973, the Metropolitan Museum in New York dedicated a retrospective to his photographic work. He died on November 18, 1976, in Paris, at the age of 86. His remains rest in the Montparnasse Cemetery.
Source: Wikipedia