Man Ray

Man ray (born Emmanuel Radnitzky, August 27, 1890 - November 18, 1976) was an American modernist and artist who spent most of his career in Paris, France. He was a major contributor to the Dada and Surrealist movements, even though his ties to each were informal. He produced great media works, but considered himself a painter above all. [Citation needed] He was best known in the art world for his avant-garde photography, and was also a renowned portrait photographer. Ray is also known for his work with stills, which he called "ray images" in reference to himself. Man Ray begins singing at the age of five and two years later moves to Brooklyn with his family, where he goes to school. He receives a scholarship to study architecture and rejects it as well as the idea of ​​an academic education. He was a dancer at the Odeon. In New York he works as a printmaker and in an advertising agency, while attending night classes at the National Academy of Design. His first contacts with the New York avant-garde took place in his visits to the Alfred Stieglitz gallery and in the Arensbergs' gatherings. In 1908 he married Adon Lacroix, a Belgian poet. His first solo exhibition takes place at the Daniel Gallery in New York in 1915. Together with Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia, he founded the New York Dada. In 1918 he worked with airbrushes on photographic paper and in 1920, with K. Dreier and M. Duchamp, he founded the Société Anonyme, a company from which they manage all kinds of avant-garde activities (exhibitions, publications, installations, films, conferences, etc..). In 1921 he settled in Paris until 1940, and there he centralized the Parisian Dada. Faced with the impossibility of selling his work, Man Ray returns to photography. His first experimental works are the Rayographs of 1921, photographic images taken without a camera (abstract images obtained with objects exhibited on a light-sensitive paper and then developed). He also makes 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 following the model of found art created by Marcel Duchamp, such as Object to be Destroyed from 1923; Man Ray added to a normal metronome, 26 cm high, the 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 an unknown person with that of his former lover, and changed the title of the ready-made to Object of Destruction. In 1957, a group of students did indeed destroy the metronome, but Man Ray rebuilt it in 1963, and definitively titled it Indestructible object, giving the work a conceptual twist. 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 model and lover Alice Prin, known as Kiki de Montparnasse, he makes Le Violon d'Ingres (1924). In the thirties he made the series of solarizations, photographic negatives exposed to light, and continued to paint in a surrealist style; publishes several volumes of photographs and raygrams. In 1936 his work is present in the Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 1940, escaping from the Nazi occupation of Paris, he settled in Hollywood and New York, returning to France in 1951. During his stay in California, he earned his living teaching as a teacher. In 1946 he married Juliette Browner, in a double wedding together with the couple Max Ernst - Dorothea Tanning. 1 Ray's fertile production eludes sharp categorizations and reflects his agile and humorous sensibility. Paintings and photographs include films, objects, collages, graphic work, drawings, advertising design, and fashion. As a pioneer of Dada and Surrealism, his approach is characterized by the irrational and incongruous, causing eroticism and scandal. "The search for freedom and pleasure; that occupies all my art", he will say. In 1963 he published his Autobiography ; Before he died, the Metropolitan Museum in New York dedicated a retrospective to his photographic work (1973). He died on November 18, 1976, in Paris. His remains rest in the Montparnasse Cemetery.