Man Ray
Man Ray [ mæn reɪ ] (born August 27, 1890 in Philadelphia , Pennsylvania ; USA ; † November 18, 1976 in Paris ; actually Emmanuel Rudnitzky or Emmanuel Radnitzky ) was an American photographer , film director , painter and object artist . Man Ray is one of the most important artists of Dadaism and Surrealism , but due to the complexity of his work is generally assigned to modernism and is considered an important source of inspiration for modern photography and film history through to experimental film . His numerous portrait photographs of contemporary artists document the high phase of cultural life in Paris in the 1920s.
Life
Childhood and early years
Man Ray was the first of four children of Russian-Jewish parents, Melech (Max) Rudnitzky and Manya nee. Luria, born in Philadelphia. The boy was recorded on his birth certificate as "Michael Rudnitzky", but according to his sister Dorothy he was called "Emmanuel" or "Manny" by the family. The family later called themselves "Ray" to Americanize their name . Man Ray himself was also very covered in later years about his origins.
Together with his siblings, the young Emmanuel received a strict upbringing. The father worked at home as a tailor and the children were included in the work; They learned to sew and embroider at an early age, and how to join a wide variety of fabrics using the patchwork technique. This experience was later to be reflected in Man Ray's work: the playful use of different materials can be found in many of his assemblages , collages and other pictures, and he also liked to quote tools from the tailoring trade, for example needles or spools of thread, in his visual language.
In 1897 Man Ray's family moved to Williamsburg , Brooklyn . There the stubborn boy began to make his first colored pencil drawings at the age of seven, which his parents did not consider to be good, so that he had to keep his artistic inclinations a secret for a long time. “From now on I will do the things that I am not supposed to do” was his early motto, which he should follow for life. In the higher school age, however, he was allowed to take courses in art and technical drawing and soon acquired the tools for his artistic career. After graduating from high school, Emmanuel was offered a scholarship to study architecture, which he declined despite his parents' persuasion, as technical training ran counter to his firm resolve to become an artist. At first he tried, rather unsatisfactorily, in portrait and landscape paintings; finally he enrolled in 1908 at the National Academy of Design and the Art Students League in Manhattan , New York. As he later said, he actually only took the nude painting courses because he “wanted to see a naked woman”. The didactically conservative, time-consuming and tiring lessons were not for the impatient student. On the advice of his teachers, he immediately gave up his studies and tried to work independently.
New York 1911-1921
In the fall of 1911, Man Ray enrolled at the Modern School of New York's Ferrer Center , a liberal - anarchist school; there he was accepted the following year and attended evening courses in the arts. At the Ferrer Center he was finally able to work freely and spontaneously thanks to the unconventional teaching methods. The sometimes radical convictions of his teachers, shaped by liberal ideals, were to have a decisive influence on his later artistic career. a. his devotion to Dada. In the following years the artist worked - he had meanwhile simplified his first and last name to "Man Ray" - as a calligrapher and map artist for a publishing house in Manhattan. In Alfred Stieglitz 's well-known “ Galerie 291 ” he first came into contact with works by Rodin , Cézanne , Brâncuși as well as drawings and collages by Picasso and immediately felt more connected to these European artists than to their American contemporaries. Through Alfred Stieglitz, Man Ray quickly found access to the completely new artistic concept of the European avant-garde . He tried out various painting styles in quick succession as if obsessively: starting with the Impressionists , he soon came to expressive landscapes that resembled a Kandinsky (shortly before he took the step to abstraction ), and finally to his own futuristic - cubist figuration, the he kept modified throughout his life.
The Armory Show , an extensive art exhibition that took place in New York in early 1913, left a lasting impression on him . The size of the European paintings alone overwhelmed him. Man Ray later said: “I didn't do anything for six months - it took me that long to digest what I had seen.” In contrast to the, in his eyes “two-dimensional” art of his country of birth, “[...] he almost did had an aversion to paintings that left no room for your own reflection. "
Also in the spring of 1913 Man Ray left his parents 'house and moved to an artists' colony in Ridgefield , New Jersey , where he met the Belgian poet Adon Lacroix, real name Donna Lecoeur ; the two married in May 1913. Around 1914/15 Man Ray bought a camera to reproduce his own works. On March 31, 1915, he published an edition of The Ridgefield Gazook , a self-designed anarchic-satirical pamphlet , which already had the basics of the later Dada magazines, and A Book of Diverse Writings with texts by Donna and illustrations by him. In the fall of 1915, Man Ray had his first solo exhibition at New York's Daniel Gallery, where he sold six paintings. Presumably there he met Marcel Duchamp , who had just become known in America for his sensational picture Nude, Descending a Staircase No. 2 , which he had shown on the Armory Show. Above all, it was Duchamp's revolutionary ideas and theories that suddenly but lastingly impressed Man Ray. Duchamp and Man Ray soon became good friends.
Development of your own style
Man Ray was fascinated by Duchamp's work, in particular by his representations of simple, technically “absurd”, illogical machines with their pseudo-mechanical forms that simulated an apparently “mysterious” function, as well as by Duchamp's way of declaring simple everyday objects as objet trouvés as art objects which he called readymades . Another important source of inspiration was Francis Picabia with his train of thought on “exaggerating the machine”: “The machine has become more than just an addition to life [...] it is really a part of human life - maybe even its soul.” Probably towards the end of 1915 Man Ray began to experiment with such objects and slowly made the step from two-dimensional to three-dimensional art. Man Ray soon created his first assemblages from found objects, e.g. B. the Self Portrait from 1916, which formed a face from two bells, a handprint and a bell button. Now Man Ray began to participate regularly in exhibitions; This is how the collector Ferdinand Howald became aware of the young artist and began promoting him as a patron for several years .
At Marcel Duchamp's suggestion, Man Ray soon began to focus intensively on photography and film . Together with Duchamp, whose work Man Ray documented in numerous photographs, numerous photo and film experiments were carried out in New York. Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray invented the art creature Rose Sélavy around 1920 . The name was a play on words from "Eros c'est la vie", Eros is life. Rose Sélavy was Duchamp himself, disguised as a woman, who signed works under this name while Man Ray photographed him.
The artist was increasingly interested in the unconscious, the apparent and the hinted mystical, which seemed to be hidden behind what was represented and “not represented”. In the course of 1917 he experimented with all available materials and techniques and discovered, in addition to glass cliché printing (cliché verre), aerography , an early airbrush technique , by spraying photo paper with color or photo chemicals.
He called an early aerography Suicide (1917), a topic with which Man Ray - like many other Dadaists and Surrealists from his circle of acquaintances - often dealt (cf. Jacques Rigaut ). Man Ray quickly became familiar with the techniques in the darkroom . At first he did this for the simple motive of reproducing his paintings, but in the photographic enlargement process he soon found a similarity to aerography and discovered the creative possibilities of this "light painting".
The rayography
Alongside his work in the darkroom, Man Ray experimented with photograms around 1919/20 . As he said, when he discovered the technology, he acted “completely mechanically and intuitively”.
“Taking photos without a camera” fully corresponded to his wish to be able to “automatically capture and reproduce the metaphysics that he was already looking for in his paintings and objects” like a machine. In a letter to Katherine Dreier he wrote: "I am trying to automate my photography, to use my camera the way I would use a typewriter - in time I will achieve that." This thought works with the method of " automatic writing " , which André Breton adapted for surrealism.
Although the idea of arranging and exposing objects on photosensitive paper is as old as the history of photography itself - Fox Talbot had already created the first photograms in 1835 - Man Ray immediately used the term rayography to describe the process he had further developed . In the following years he produced a number of such "rayographs" as if on an assembly line: Almost half of his entire oeuvre of rayographs or "rayograms" was created in the first three years after the discovery of "his invention". At the beginning of 1922 he had already tried out all the technical possibilities of the time on the photogram.
Later, in Paris, at the end of 1922, he published a limited edition of twelve rayographs under the title Les Champs délicieux (The delicious fields); Tristan Tzara wrote the foreword , who once again clearly referred to the neologism "rayography". Vanity Fair magazine took up this “new” type of photo art in a full-page article. From that moment on, Man Ray's photographic work should make the rounds in all European avant-garde magazines. This resulted in numerous reproductions of the cliché verre - works by Man Ray from his time in New York (Man Ray had made the originals on 18 × 24 cm glass negatives).
In his entire artistic career, Man Ray never committed himself to a particular medium: “I photograph what I don't want to paint and I paint what I can't photograph,” he once said. Due to the diverse possibilities of photography, painting initially fulfilled its artistic purpose for him. He thus drew level with his role model Duchamp, who made his last painting in 1918; Ultimately, however, the eternal puzzle of painting and photography ran through Man Ray's oeuvre. He himself explained contradictingly: "Maybe I wasn't so interested in painting as I was in developing ideas."
From "photo object" to "object photo"
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Object photographs 1918–1920 Selection of external web links ! |
In the years 1918–1921 Man Ray discovered that photo and object art served him for the time being as the best means of formulating his ideas. In fact, Man Ray had temporarily given up traditional painting in 1921 and only experimented with the possibilities of arranging and “de-arranging” objects. In contrast to Duchamp, he did this through the deliberate “misappropriation” of objects or through the representation of a known object in a different context. Mostly he photographed these objects and provided them with titles that deliberately evoked other associations; for example the high-contrast photograph of a whisk with the title Man and, analogously, Woman (both 1918), consisting of two reflectors that can be seen as breasts and a pane of glass with six clothespins as the “backbone”. One of the best-known objects based on Duchamp's ready-mades was the later Cadeau (1921): an iron studded with thumbtacks, which was intended as a humorous “gift” for the musician Erik Satie , which Man Ray gave to the bookstore at an exhibition in Paris and Galerie Librairie Six .
Even if his marriage to Adon Lacroix, who introduced him to French literature and works by Baudelaire , Rimbaud or Apollinaire , was short-lived - the marriage was divorced in 1919 - the artist continued to study French literature. The influence is particularly evident in Man Ray's 1920 photography The Riddle or The Enigma of Isidore Ducasse , which shows a parcel tied with burlap, the contents of which remain hidden from the viewer. The solution to the riddle could only be accomplished by knowing the writings of the French author Isidore Ducasse , also known as the Comte de Lautréamont . Man Ray took the famous passage from Canto 6 of the “ Gesänge des Maldoror ” as a starting point, in which Lautréamont had described “the accidental meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissection table” as a metaphor for the beauty of a young man . The Dadaists' interest in Ducasse, who had died 50 years earlier, was aroused by André Breton , who saw early Dadaist-surreal ideas in the writings. The subject of the object wrapped in fabric can also be interpreted as a reflection of Man Ray on his childhood in the father's tailoring workshop; Man Ray had created the object “in itself” only for the purpose of photography.
Société Anonyme Inc. & New York Dada
On April 29, 1920 Man Ray founded the Société Anonyme Inc. together with Marcel Duchamp and the artist Katherine Dreier as an association for the promotion of modern art in America. In April 1921, New York Dada was published together with Duchamp. In New York, Man Ray was now considered the main exponent of the little-noticed American Dadaism; Exactly when he came into contact with the European Dada movement is unknown. A “triangular contact” was probably written around 1919/20 between Marcel Duchamp, who was never active in Dada, and Tristan Tzara , the spokesman and Co-founder of the movement. In a letter to Tzara, Man Ray complained about the ignorance of the New York art scene: “... Dada cannot live in New York. New York is dada, and will tolerate no rival [...] it is true. Every effort to make it public were done, but there is no one to support us " . Man Ray later stated that "there never was such a thing as New York Dada because the idea of scandal and provocation as one of the principles of Dada was completely alien to the American spirit."
Man Ray's ambivalence towards America and his enthusiasm for France as well as the urgent wish to finally belong to the progressive European art world culminated in July 1921 with the artist's decision to follow his friends Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia to France.
The Parisian years 1921–1940
Man Ray arrived in France on July 22, 1921. Duchamp immediately introduced him to André Breton, Louis Aragon , Paul Éluard and his wife Gala (who later became the muse and wife of the Spanish artist Salvador Dalí ) and Jacques Rigaut in the popular Dadaist meeting place Café Certa in the Passage de l'Opéra in Paris . The Europeans quickly accepted Man Ray, who soon spoke fluent French, as one of their own.
Man Ray initially spent a lot of time exploring the metropolis of Paris, but soon concentrated on the center of the Parisian art scene: Montparnasse . In the cafés on the Rive Gauche , on Boulevard du Montparnasse, he met a wide variety of artists: Matisse , Diego Rivera , Piet Mondrian , Salvador Dalí , Max Ernst , Yves Tanguy , Joan Miró and many others. Most of them later found their way into Man Ray's photographic work as portraits.
Towards the end of the year Man Ray moved into the famous artist hotel Hôtel des Ecoles on Montparnasse. At the beginning of November, Man Ray took part in a collective exhibition together with Max Ernst, Hans Arp and Marcel Duchamp in the gallery of the art dealer Alfred Flechtheim in Berlin . Man Ray, who did not travel to Berlin himself, sent a picture of Tristan Tzara with an ax over his head and sitting on a ladder, next to him an oversized portrait of a female nude (portrait of Tristan Tzara / Tzara and the ax, 1921). At the request of Tzara, who wanted to establish the new Dada artist from America for “his movement”, Man Ray's first exhibition in Paris took place in December of that year in the Librairie Six .
At the same time, Man Ray's “official photograph” of the now divided Dadaists was taken. In the egocentric Dada group, which indulged in excessive debauchery, Man Ray did not find the support he had hoped for, especially since visual artists in this scene dominated by writers received little attention. The Dadaists had already laconically and jokingly declared Dada dead in their absurdity: "You read everywhere in the magazines that Dada has been dead for a long time [...] it remains to be seen whether Dada is really dead or has just changed tactics;" and Man Ray's first exhibition with the Dadaists was more of a farce; the artist was also secretly troubled by the lack of sales. Caused by a controversy that the rebellious André Breton had sparked in preparation for his “Surrealist Manifestos”, and a related dispute between Breton and Tzara, Satie, Eluard and other Dadaists, a split came about on February 17, 1922 with a censorship decision against Breton Dadaists and Surrealists. Man Ray was among the 40 signatories to the resolution. This was the first and last time Man Ray took a stand on an artistic doctrine.
The photography
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Photographs 1922–1926 Selection of external web links ! |
Unsuccessfully in painting, Man Ray made the decision in early 1922 to devote himself seriously to photography. Although he had already made numerous portraits of Picabia, Tzara, Cocteau and many other protagonists of the Parisian art scene since his arrival in Paris, he now wanted to secure portrait photography as a source of income and specifically look for clients. “I have now turned my attention to renting a studio and setting it up so that I can work more efficiently. I wanted to make money - not wait for recognition that might come or might never come. ” This decision was accompanied by an urgent desire to free myself from the previous stressful situation“ in competition with the other painters ”. His first commissioned works naturally came from the art scene: Picasso, Georges Braque , Juan Gris , Henri Matisse and many others had their photos taken by him in the spring / summer of 1922. Man Ray still lived and worked in a hotel room and so he complained in a letter to his friend and sponsor Ferdinand Howald: “I still live and work in a hotel room that is very cramped and expensive. But the studios here are impossible - without water or light for the night, if you can't pay a very high price, and even then you have to find one first. "
In July 1922, Man Ray finally found a suitable studio with kitchen and bathroom at 31 Rue Campagne Première . His new studio quickly became a popular meeting place for painters and writers. Another important source of orders were the Anglo-American emigrants, and so over the years numerous portraits of traveling artists were created, primarily writers such as James Joyce or Hemingway . a. met in literary salons such as that of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas , or in Sylvia Beach's renowned bookstore Shakespeare and Company . Although this was the established Parisian literary scene, Man Ray did not immortalize any of the leading French writers with the exception of Marcel Proust on his deathbed, whom he photographed at Cocteau's express request. The Parisian aristocrats soon became aware of the unusual American: the blurred portrait of the eccentric Marquise Casati, a former lover of the Italian poet Gabriele D'Annunzio , which shows the marquise with three pairs of eyes, became one of Man Ray's most significant photographs despite the blurred motion . The marquise was so enthusiastic about the blurred photo that she ordered dozens of prints which she sent to her circle of friends.
It was at this time that Man Ray discovered nude photography and found his muse and lover in Kiki de Montparnasse , bourgeois Alice Prin , a popular model among Parisian painters. Kiki, who Man Ray met in a café in December 1922 and who was his partner until 1926, quickly became the photographer's favorite model; Countless photographs of her were taken in the 1920s, including one of the most famous by Man Ray: the surrealistic and humorous photo Le Violon d'Ingres (1924), which shows the bare back of a woman (Kiki) with a turban on which the two of them are standing painted f-shaped openings of a violoncello . Photography became one of Man Ray's most widely published and reproduced works. Man Ray presumably chose the title Le Violon d'Ingres (The Violin of Ingres) as a French idiom for “Hobby” or “Hobby Horse” in an ambiguous allusion to the painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres , who preferred to play the violin and nudes would have. Ingres' painting La Grande Baigneuse (The Turkish Bath) was evidently the model for Man Ray's witty photo puzzle.
The film
Man Ray had already shot several experimental short films with Marcel Duchamp in New York, for example the "most disreputable" flick showed a pubic hair shave by the eccentric Dada artist Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven . Later in Paris, Tristan Tzara immediately brought him in connection with this film and boastfully introduced Man Ray as a "prominent American filmmaker" at a Dada event that was appropriately called Soirée du cœur à barbe (The Evening of the Beard Heart). That evening in July 1923, Man Ray screened his first “feature-length” 35mm film : the three-minute black and white silent film Retour à la raison (Return to the Ground), a commission from Tzara. The film shows staccato-like animated rayographies: dancing needles, grains of salt, a thumbtack and other objects that Man Ray had placed on the film strip and then exposed, and finally fragments of writing, rotating paper rolls and egg cartons. The film ends with the rotating torso of Kiki de Montparnasse, on which a window cross emerges as a play of lights. The experimental film received a lot of attention and Man Ray's studio at 31 Rue Campagne Première soon became a point of contact for many film enthusiasts and young filmmakers seeking advice. In 1924 Man Ray himself appeared as an “actor”: In the films Entr'acte and Cinè-Sketch by René Clair , he played alongside Duchamp, Picabia, Eric Satie and Bronia Perlmutter, Clair's later wife.
1926 finally came a financial success for Man Ray: the American stock market speculator Arthur S. Wheeler and his wife Rose approached the artist with the intention of entering the film business. The Wheelers wanted to promote Man Ray's film projects "unconditionally", only one film should be completed within a year. Arthur Wheeler pledged Man Ray a sum of $ 10,000. In short, Man Ray handed over all commercial commissions to his new assistant, Berenice Abbott, and concentrated entirely on the new film project because of the newly gained artistic freedom. In May 1926, Man Ray began filming in Biarritz .
In the fall, the almost twenty-minute film Emak Bakia, with jazz music by Django Reinhardt, was shown in Paris; the premiere in New York took place the following spring. Man Ray sketched his work as a “break for reflections on the current state of cinema.” Emak Bakia was based on improvisations without any specific action, which play with rhythm, speed and light and thus reflect on the medium of film itself. The film should be a cinepoeme , a "visual poetry", as Man Ray emphasized in the subtitle.
The film was received ambivalently. Man Ray, who mostly planned everything exactly, already had a suitable explanation for possible critics: "You can also deal with the translation of the title 'Emak Bakia': This is a nice old Basque expression and means: give us a break." The critics gave Man Ray this break and ignored the film. The medium of film was not considered art at the time and so Emak Bakia remained unknown outside the New York avant-garde.
Man Ray returned to Paris about a month after making his disappointing New York film debut. With his assistant Jacques-André Boiffard , he produced two other surreal films of a similar nature: L'Étoile de mer (1928) and Le Mystère du château de dés (1929). With the introduction of talkies and the sensational success of Buñuels and Salvador Dalí's L'Age d'Or (The Golden Age) , however, Man Ray largely lost interest in the medium. In 1932 he sold his film camera. During his “exile” in Hollywood in the early 1940s, he turned to film one last time.
At the beginning of the 1930s, Man Ray devoted himself almost exclusively to photographic art, after he had once again clearly rejected painting : “Painting is dead, over […] I only paint sometimes to fully convince myself of the nullity of painting. " . Rayography - he meanwhile used the term for his entire photographic oeuvre - meanwhile came to be equal to painting for Man Ray. At the time, only Raoul Hausmann , El Lissitzky , Moholy-Nagy and Christian Schad worked in a comparatively similar manner .
Fashion photography, solarization, color
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Photographs 1930–1936 Selection of external web links ! |
In addition to progressive publications such as VU or Life , which were primarily devoted to artistic photography and published large series of photos, fashion magazines such as Vogue or Harper's Bazaar soon became aware of the inventive photo artist. As early as 1922, Man Ray had made fashion photographs for the fashion designer Paul Poiret . From 1930 onwards he made regular fashion shoots for Vogue and Harper's. Well-known photos from that period show, for example, the fashion designers Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli (approx. 1934/35). In the course of "real" fashion photography, Man Ray left the purely abstract photogram style and concentrated on surreal, dreamlike arrangements, which he mixed with experimental techniques: during that time he often worked with reflections and double exposures . A well-known series was the portfolio electricité (1931) as a noble advertising publication for the Paris electricity company CPDE. The portfolio was created in collaboration with Lee Miller , a young, good-looking ambitious and ambitious American who was determined to become Man Ray's student. Miller had come to Paris in February 1929 on a letter of recommendation from Edward Steichen and was soon working with Man Ray in front of and behind the camera. With it, Man Ray perfected his previously kept top secret technology of solarization and pseudo-solarization (Sabattier effect) and achieved completely new possibilities in visual language thanks to the sharp, high-contrast separation of the effect. Lee Miller was also convincing as a model in front of the camera: the elegant nudes and fashion photos with the beautiful, cool-looking blonde resembled anatomical studies thanks to the new accentuating, but not completely abstracting solarization technique. At this time, Man Ray also experimented with color photography , discovering one of the first methods to produce printable paper prints from color negatives. In 1933/34, the surrealist artist magazine Minotaure published a color picture by Man Ray, two years before the first Kodachrome film came onto the market. In Minotaure , Man Ray had previously published Les Larmes as a black and white photo series.
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Lee Miller
Working with Lee Miller had an irritating effect on Man Ray. Unlike his earlier models and lovers, such as the uninhibited Kiki, Miller was sexually independent, intelligent, and very creative. The fascination for Lee soon developed into a strangely obsessive-destructive love affair, which was also reflected in Man Ray's work. His subjects increasingly revolved around sadomasochistic fantasies, took on a sexual fetishistic character and toyed with the idea of female submission , already hinted at in his famous Object of Destruction (1932), a metronome , which in its most famous version was provided with a photograph of Lee Miller's eye and was smashed to pieces in the original, up to his most famous oil painting A l'heure de l'observatoire - Les Amoureux (The Observatory Hour - The Lovers, 1932–1934), which allegedly shows Lee's lips, but the association with an oversized vagina awakens that hovers over a landscape. The artist destroys "his" model, reduces or idealizes it, as in earlier works, to the object of his desire. Man Ray was increasingly fascinated by the writings of the Marquis de Sade ; some of his works point directly to de Sade's ideas; For example, a portrait of Lee Miller with a wire cage over his head, a woman's head under a bell jar or photographs with tied, depersonalized female bodies. Ultimately, the artistic and private relationship between Man Ray and Lee Miller failed, and Miller returned to New York in 1932. She later became a famous war photographer .
The end of the Parisian years
With the departure of Lee Miller, a creative intrusion into Man Ray's work took place. In the years that followed, up to his flight to America in 1940, he attracted attention more through exhibitions that cemented his international reputation as an artist than through stylistic innovations. Although his commercial fashion photographs were perfectly and routinely staged, they did not provide any real new creative impulses. In addition to the emerging modern photojournalism with its "new" innovative photographers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson , Chim and Robert Capa in their political emotionality, Man Ray's cool studio productions now seem "static" and outdated.
Lively street reports, such as that of the much younger Robert Doisneau or that of a Brassaï , who had initially pursued equally surrealistic approaches, soon pushed Man Ray's art photography out of the magazines. At a Paris cultural symposium in 1936, the surrealist Louis Aragon drew a direct comparison between the “snapshot photographer” Henri Cartier-Bressons and the studio photographer Man Ray: “... he (Man Ray) embodies the classic in photography [...] a studio art with everything that is The term means: above all the static character of photography [...] in contrast to the photographs of my friend Cartier, which contrasts with the peaceful post-war period and really belongs to this time of wars and revolutions due to its accelerated rhythm. "
Man Ray observed this development as did Aragon, but ultimately did not join the “new” trend of fast-paced realistic photography; rather, he withdrew even more into his own dream world. At times he even gave up photography - with the exception of a few commercial fashion photos - and turned back to painting. His decision was confirmed when A l'heure de l'observatoire - Les Amoureux was well received at a major retrospective of surrealist art in the New York Museum of Modern Art . The painting was so important to Man Ray that he repeatedly included it in numerous photographs: fashion photos, self-portraits and nudes.
The sculptor Alberto Giacometti introduced Man Ray to the young artist Meret Oppenheim around 1934 . Oppenheim was his model in the photo series Érotique voilée (1934). The most famous shot shows Oppenheim naked, with a hand smeared with printer's ink, in front of a copper engraving press. Two other important works were also produced around this time: the books Facile (1935) and La Photographie n'est pas l'art (1937). Facile was created with Man Ray's old friend Paul Éluard and his second wife Nusch . The book impressed with the finest, partly solarised partly inverted or double-exposed nude photographs by Nusch Eluard and a new layout, which, balanced between text and image, left a lot of meditative white space to evoke the feeling of infinity. In addition to Nusch Eluard, only one pair of gloves is shown. The other work, La Photographie n'est pas l'art, was more of a portfolio that was created in collaboration with Breton. It was supposed to become a photographic antithesis to Man Ray's photographs of the 1920s: If these were characterized by the depiction of “beautiful” things, La Photographie n'est pas l'art provided a sarcastic response to them with hard, sometimes repulsive and disturbing subjects Society of the late 1930s threatened by war and disintegration.
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Painting 1938/39 Selection of external web links ! |
The fatal effects of National Socialism soon became apparent in Paris. By 1938 at the latest, the situation in the once hospitable metropolis had changed drastically; the discrimination and persecution of the Jewish population escalated into acts of violence against everything “foreign”. For Man Ray, the immigrant with Jewish ancestry, this was no longer the place where he was received so warmly almost twenty years ago. The end of his time in Paris had come. The last big appearance before he went to America was in 1938 at the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme in Georges Wildenstein's gallery Beaux-Arts in Paris, which marked the very personal climax of surrealism for him. From then on, Man Ray's imagery became increasingly gloomy and pessimistic. The painting Le Beau Temps , which was created in 1939 shortly before the start of the Second World War and his departure for America, was to be an important painterly summary of his “beautiful Paris times” . It is both an autobiographical balance sheet and an artistic description of the situation. The picture has a structure similar to many of the works of the Pittura metafisica :
A harlequinade of two strikingly colored, geometric figures in front of a nightmarish, gloomy landscape separated by destroyed masonry. The left apparently male figure, whose head forms a lantern, stands in front of pointed, fork-like trellises ; next to the harlequin lies an open book with geometrical studies and two patterned stones. The Harlequin turns the doorknob of an apparently immobile door that looks more like a screen , while a trail of blood trickles down from the keyhole to the floor. Delicate nudes in various positions are indicated on the four fields of the screen door. An oversized pinhead peeks out from behind the door. On the right side of the door is a female figure wearing a brightly colored skirt that resembles a brightly colored circus tent; the figure has a mechanical body reminiscent of a spool of thread with a propeller; in the background Man Ray cited his earlier's painting La Fortune (1938): three balls, like an undulating snake line subsequent to a collision roulette table or a game of bowls are Bahn, which eventually ends at a lit building that presumably Man Ray's former country house should be; an easel and the silhouette of lovers can be seen in the house, while a minotaur is depicted on the roof of the house devouring a reptile while making love.
The picture is not only a balance sheet of his previous oeuvre, but also shows a number of autobiographical elements at the same time; the Minotaur, for example, is a stylistic pointer to Picasso, with whom Man Ray was friends and whom he admired all his life. With Picasso, Dora Maar , the Eluards, as well as Lee Miller and Roland Penrose, Man Ray and his lover Adrienne at the time had spent many happy hours in the south of France. Finally, the door is an allusion to André Breton, the confrontation with surrealism and its clauses as a “door to reality”. For Man Ray it seemed to mean the painful entry into a new reality or a symbol for "close the door behind you".
Very soon after the work was completed, an odyssey across Europe should begin. After a failed flight from Paris by plane, he finally got to Portugal by train via Spain. On August 8, 1940, he embarked in Lisbon on board the Excambion for New York.
In exile in America 1940–1951
In the late summer of 1940, Man Ray arrived in New York Harbor. Although still an American citizen, he was a stranger in his native country. He left behind not only his friends and his status as an artist in Paris, but also his most important works of the last twenty years: photographs, negatives, objects and numerous paintings, including his masterpiece A l'heure de l'observatoire - Les Amoureux . He probably hid most of his works with friends, but numerous works were destroyed or lost during the war. Upon his arrival, Man Ray was gripped by a deep depression. Moreover, his traveling companion and friend, the exalted Salvador Dalí , immediately caught the attention of photojournalists while he sank into insignificance. Dalí had known all the years before to publicize his name and his art overseas, whereas Man Ray had stayed almost exclusively in Europe; so it was not surprising that the Americans knew next to nothing about him. When he participated in an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in December 1940, only three old photographic works from the 1920s were shown, which, along with a large number of newer works by those who stayed at home, Edward Weston and Alfred Stieglitz, received little attention. Despite his lack of artistic fame, Man Ray quickly found jobs as a commercial photographer, but the struggle to ever find recognition as an artist again should keep Man Ray busy for the rest of his life.
Without a sponsor or a respectable gallery, the situation for him as an artist in New York looked bad, and so nothing held him there. If the Francophile Man Ray had initially considered New Orleans , he probably followed the general call that many Europeans followed at the time to go to Hollywood . During the war, Los Angeles , especially the local film studios, supported the art scene more than any other American city. Man Ray arrived in Hollywood in November 1940. Since his former colleagues like Luis Buñuel and Fritz Lang were already working successfully there, he hoped to gain a foothold in the film business again; but this turned out to be a mistake: The commercially oriented studio bosses were not interested in “art” in Man Ray's sense. He soon saw the end of his film career. Man Ray later recapitulated disappointedly in his autobiography that he "... put the camera aside knowing that his approach to filming was completely different from what the industry and the public expected of him . " Nevertheless, he stayed in Hollywood for eleven years and worked as an unofficial advisor on film projects or contributed objects or paintings as props. His only noteworthy contribution was Ruth, Roses and Revolvers (1945), a script episode for the film Dreams That Money Can't Buy by Hans Richter , which was completed two years later and also featured Alexander Calder , Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst and Fernand Léger participated. In these years Man Ray devoted himself to painting again, only occasionally he took up his camera and when he did, his second wife Juliet was the main motif. Juliet Browner, who met Man Ray in Hollywood in 1940, was young and lively and always inspired new ideas. Juliet created numerous series of portraits, which he supplemented throughout his life. Only his first wife Adon Lacroix, Kiki de Montparnasse and Lee Miller had a similarly strong influence on the artist.
In the mid-1940s, Man Ray began to give occasional lectures on Dadaism and Surrealism. During this time, numerous objects were created that Man Ray called Objects Of My Affection . He exhibited ten of these objects at the 1946 Pioneers of Modern Art in America exhibition at the Whitney Museum in New York . The new works testified to humor and a certain self-irony, as Man Ray described the Object Silent Harp (1944), which consisted of a violin neck, as the “Violon d'Ingres of a frustrated musician. He can hear color as naturally as he can see sound. " On October 24, 1946, he and Juliet Browner married in a double wedding with Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning in Beverly Hills . Around 1947 Man Ray received the good news from Paris that his house in Saint-Germain-en-Laye and much of his work had been spared the war. Together with Juliet, he made his way to Paris in the summer to sift through the fund. With the exception of the painting Le Beau Temps, Man Ray shipped all of his works to Hollywood. In the fall of the same year he returned to America. In 1948 he combined the works transferred from Paris with the new abstract geometric painting cycle Equations for Shakespeare for an exhibition under the title Paintings Repatriated from Paris at the William Copley Gallery in Los Angeles. Strictly speaking, the Equations for Shakespeare were a new take on a series that had started ten years ago in Paris. For the exhibition in the Copley Gallery, the elaborate catalog To Be Continued Unnoticed was created, which as an unbound folder in addition to the exhibition directory also summarized numerous reproductions of work drawings, objects and photographic works as well as exhibition reviews from earlier years in the characteristic nonsense style of the Dada magazines of the time in a conceptual context. The opening of the exhibition on December 13, 1948 was a big event and once again reminded of the “good” Paris years. Numerous international visual artists, writers and filmmakers were among the guests of Café Man Ray , as the vernissage was called in reference to the Parisian coffee houses. Man Ray's exhibition was both the culmination and conclusion of his work in Los Angeles. Regardless of the respectable success on the West Coast, Man Ray found the response from the US public to be too little, so it was only natural that he would return to Paris in 1951.
Return to Paris 1951–1976
In May 1951, Man Ray and his wife Juliet moved into a Parisian studio apartment on Rue Férou , which he lived in until the end of his life. In the years that followed, despite intensive participation in exhibitions in Europe and overseas, things became quieter around the artist, who now preferred to devote himself to abstract variations or the reproduction of earlier works (including Cadeau , Reproduction 1974) and occasionally experimented with color photography . He also continued to pursue portrait photography; so emerged in the 1950s / 1960s a. a. Photographs by Juliette Gréco , Catherine Deneuve and other artist colleagues. At this time he also created works in acrylic , such as the so-called Natural Paintings between 1957 and 1965, in which he experimented with random arrangements of pastose acrylic paints ( Decembre ou le clown , Othello II , 1963). In 1958 he took part in the exhibition Dada, Documents of a Movement in the Kunstverein Düsseldorf and in a Dada exhibition in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam . In the following year 1959 he worked as a cinematographic consultant on the short film documentary Paris la belle by Pierre Prévert . In 1960 he was represented at the Photokina in Cologne ; At the Venice Biennale in 1961 he received the gold medal for photography. In 1963 Man Ray presented his autobiography Self-Portrait in London . For the fiftieth anniversary of Dadaism in 1966, Man Ray took part in a major Dada retrospective, which was shown in Paris at the Musée National d'Art Moderne , the Kunsthaus Zürich and the Civico Museo d'Arte Contemporanea in Milan . In 1966, Man Ray received his first major retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art . On the occasion of his 85th birthday, a solo exhibition organized by Roland Penrose and Mario Amaya with 224 works under the motto Man Ray Inventor-Painter-Poet took place in the New York Cultural Center in 1974, which was then held in 1975 at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, the Alexander Iolas Gallery in Athens and finally at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome . Man Ray died in Paris on November 18, 1976. He was buried on the Cimetière Montparnasse . The inscription on his tombstone reads: “unconcerned, but not indifferent” (unconcerned, but not indifferent).
His wife Juliet Browner Man Ray looked after Man Ray's estate until her death in 1991 and donated much of his work to museums. She founded the “Man Ray Trust” foundation. The foundation owns a large collection of original works and holds the artist's copyrights . Juliet was buried next to Man Ray.
Works
Photographs
- Man - Woman , 1918
- Dust Raising , 1920
- The Enigma of Isidore Ducasse (The Riddle) , 1920
- Larmes (Glass Tears) , various versions, 1920–1933
- KEEP SMILING-dadaphoto , 1921
- Marquise Casati , 1922
- Kiki in the café , around 1923
- Le Violon d'Ingres , 1924
- Noire et blanche , 1926
- Mr and Mrs Woodman , 1927-1945
- La Prière , 1930
- L'œuf et le coquillage , 1931
- Nature Morte , gelatin silver print, 1933; ex: Ambroise Vollard
- Érotique voilée , 1934
- Dora Maar , 1936
- Space Writings , 1937
- Self-portrait , 1963
- La Télévision , 1975
Further:
- Various portrait photographs (series) of famous people from art and culture, most of which were taken in the 1920s
- Numerous, partly untitled photo series showing the picture A l'heure de l'observatoire - Les Amoureux in the background
painting
- Ramapo Hills , 1914/15
- Arrangement of Forms, No. 1 , 1915
- The Revolving Doors , 1916/17, ten serigraphs
- La Volière (Aviary) , 1919
- Une nuit à Saint-Jean-de-Luz , 1929
- A l'heure de l'observatoire - Les Amoureux , 1932–1934
- La Fortune , 1938
- Le Rebus , 1938
- Imaginary Portrait of DAF de Sade 1938
- Le Beau Temps , 1939
- Juliet 1943
Objects
- Lampshade , 1919
- Obstruction , 1920
- Chess game (Chessboard) , 1920 (revised 1945)
- The Object to be Destroyed , 1921 ( Object of Destruction , 1932, Lost Object 1945; Indestructible Object , 1958; Last Object , 1966; Perpetual Motif , 1972)
- Catherine Barometer , 1920
- Cadeau , 1921, iron with drawing pins (new version 1971)
- Table for Two , 1944, wooden table
- Silent Harp , 1944, violin neck, mirror and grid with horse hair
- Optical Hopes and Illusions , 1945, wooden banjo frame with ball and mirror
Many of Man Ray's objects were created solely for the purpose of being photographed and were then destroyed
Filmography
- 1923: Le retour à la raison
- 1923: Rue Campagne-Première
- 1924: À quoi rêvent les jeunes films
- 1927: Emak Bakia
- 1928: L'Étoile de mer
- 1929: Corrida
- 1929: Les mystères du château de Dé
- 1930: Autoportrait ou Ce qui manque à nous tous
- 1933: Poison
- 1935: Essai de simulation de délire cinématographique
- 1935: L'atelier du Val de Grâce
- 1937: Course landaise
- 1937: La Garoupe
- 1938: Ady
- 1938: Dance
- 1940: Juliet
reception
«I am toujour envié ceux pour qui une oeuvre est un mystère. »
"I've always envied those for whom a work is a secret."
Man Ray remained a mystery to many people, was difficult to access and only received late attention. The scope of his multi-layered oeuvre alone makes formal development and therefore categorization into certain styles difficult . He united almost all directions of modern art of the beginning of the 20th century , which is why he was often referred to as a “modernist” or “innovator of modernism”. Along with Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia, Man Ray was the driving force behind the New York Dada, but was already clearly on the threshold of surrealism. André Breton called Man Ray a “pre-surrealist” because many of his works pointed the way for the later movement. Although Man Ray wrote many papers with art theoretical approaches and considerations throughout his life, he was never really interested or involved in a manifestation or in the dogmatic superstructure of a particular art direction. With this “outsider position”, partly born of necessity, and the urgent desire to constantly reinvent himself, he probably followed his friend and mentor Duchamp.
The French museum director and exhibition organizer Jean-Hubert Martin outlined Man Ray as “a tireless wanderer in the limitless realm of creativity. [...] In photography he tried everything without ever allowing himself to be locked into conventions. His work is incredibly diverse and still not fully recorded in terms of quantity. [...] His numerous object assemblages, which are composed of everything possible, stimulate the imagination. "
Typical of Man Ray's work is the idea of constant mechanical repetition and reproduction, also in commercial terms, with which he anticipates a fundamental principle of Andy Warhol and of Pop Art in general. Man Ray also has biographical similarities with Warhol: Both came from poor immigrant families and later moved to higher society, from which they mostly got their assignments, but were essentially loners.
Importance to photography
Man Ray came from painting to photography, removing the boundaries between "documentary- utilitarian " and "creative" photography: On the one hand, as a contemporary witness, he provided important photo documents from the "childhood" of modern contemporary art in the 20th century, on the other hand, through his enthusiasm for experimentation, he expanded the spectrum of “photography” at that time, at a time when it was believed that “everything had already been photographed.” He portrayed and created almost all the important people in contemporary cultural events in the creative zenith of Paris in the 1920s thus an oeuvre like only Nadar before him .
Man Ray triggered an important impulse for surrealism with his variety of techniques, the photo collage, the rayogram - respectively the solarization. By abolishing the usual meaning of the objects and giving them a dreamlike, sensual, even erotic component, he distinguished himself from his European contemporaries such as Moholy-Nagy or Lissitzky , who, following the ideas of Bauhaus and Constructivism , were sober, non-objective Looking for image.
The art theorist Karel Teige , on the other hand, described him as a “secondary Cubist painter who, thanks to the fashion of the time, became a Dadaist, stopped painting and began to construct metamechanical constructions - similar to the suprematic constructions of the Russians Rodchenko and Lissitzky - in order to finally construct them with precise knowledge of the photographic craft to take photos. ". With which Man Ray's dilemma that photography was not regarded as “art” for a long time becomes clear: The Dadaists, ruled by writers, value him as a friend and documentarist, but they denied him artistic recognition as a painter and photographer.
While most contemporary American artist colleagues and critics such as Thomas Hart Benton viewed him rather distantly and disparagingly as a "craftsman" - since photography is "inextricably linked" to mechanics and recognized at best Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand and Edward Steichen - Georgia was the only one O'Keeffe , who dealt herself with the possibilities of photography, prepared to highlight him as a "young painter with ultra-modern tendencies" . On the occasion of an exhibition at the Vallentine Gallery in New York, the critic Henry McBride called him "... an original Dadaist and the only one of importance America has produced."
For many photographers and filmmakers, Man Ray was a consultant, explorer, teacher and spiritus rector at the same time: among them are well-known names such as Eugène Atget , Berenice Abbott , Bill Brandt and Lee Miller .
Meaning for the film
Man Ray produced only four short films in the 1920s, which, along with Buñuel's and Salvador Dalí's sensational works An Andalusian Dog (1928) and L'Age d'Or (The Golden Age) , are considered pioneering works in poetic-surrealist experimental film . In addition, he mostly worked in an advisory capacity on other film productions. Through his acquaintance with René Clair , Jean Cocteau and other filmmakers in the early 1930s, Man Ray also dealt with the poetic realism of French film. Man Ray's stylistic influence on cinematography can be found in numerous art films; for example in Marcel Carné , Jean Genet or Jean Renoir or in the underground films of the post-war period by, for example, Kenneth Anger , Jonas Mekas or Andy Warhol.
Importance for painting
In painting, Man Ray recapitulated and reproduced almost all the styles of his contemporaries within a very short time, explicitly from 1911 to 1917: Starting with Impressionism, the almost compulsive search for his own iconography led him to futurocubist style elements, some of which can also be found in Picabia's works. Man Ray stood at a crossroads in painting, which was characteristic of the incipient precisionism as the first “own” American art direction and at the same time as a separation from European modernism. However, Man Ray did not follow the traditional path of the panel painting . The process of his image creation was more like a serial process driven by the search “for a system that could replace the brush, even surpass it.” Between 1917 and 1919, Man Ray carried out the aerography he had further developed with the help of spray guns and stencils as a "machine" multifunctional stylistic device in painting. In doing so, he anticipated the concept of Warhol's serigraphs and their arbitrary reproducibility. In the lyrically abstracted cubist work Revolving Doors (1916/17) Man Ray shows in collages made of transparent paper chromatic overlays that follow a constructivist principle and seem to be “still images” of a kinetic art apparatus, as he later, in 1930, independent of Man Ray can be found at the Bauhaus as a “light-space modulator” by Moholy-Nagy . The Revolving Doors laid Man Ray in 1926 as a series.
In contrast to his significant photographs and objects, Man Ray's painterly work appears less “playful” and more inaccessible and ultimately culminates in his surreal masterpiece A l'heure de l'observatoire - Les Amoureux (1932–1934), which Man Ray was so taken with that he received it again and again. His later works draw on synthetic cubism , take up ideas from his New York years or, in pictures like La Fortune II, lean on René Magritte's encrypted tautologies and the stage-like compositions of Pittura metafisica . However, Man Ray was unable to tie in with the painterly tendencies of modernism after 1945. Critics such as the surrealism expert René Passeron classified Man Ray's importance for painting as less relevant: "If Man Ray had only been a painter, he would certainly not be one of the most important visual artists of Surrealism."
Honors
In 2017 a spider native to Cuba was named after him: Spintharus manrayi .
literature
Writings by Man Ray (selection)
- Alphabet for Adults . Copley Gallery, Beverly Hills, 1948.
- Illiterate . Nadada Editions, New York, 1974.
- Les Champs délicieux . Société Generale d'Imprimerie, 1922.
- New York Dada . Self-published with Marcel Duchamp, New York, 1921.
- A Note on the Shakespearean Equations . Copley Gallery, Beverly Hills, 1948.
- La Photographie n'est pas l'art . GLM, Paris, 1937.
- Man Ray, self-portrait. An illustrated autobiography . New edition, Schirmer / Mosel, Munich 1998, ISBN 978-3-88814-149-2 .
Monographs
- Merry Foresta, Stephen C. Foster, Billy Klüver, Julie Martin, Francis Naumann, Sandra S. Phillips, Roger Shattuck and Elisabeth Hutton Turner: Man Ray 1890–1976. His complete works. Edition Stemmle, Schaffhausen 1989, ISBN 978-3-7231-0388-3 .
- Man Ray Photographer. New edition, Schirmer / Mosel, Munich 1997, ISBN 978-3-88814-187-4 .
- Arturo Schwarz : Man Ray: The Rigor of Imagination . Rizzoli International, New York 1977.
- Patterson Sims (foreword), Francis M. Naumann: Conversion to Modernism: The Early Works of Man Ray. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick et al. a. 2003, ISBN 978-0-8135-3148-9 , limited preview in Google Book Search.
- Herbert R. Lottman: Man Ray's Montparnasse. Harry N. Abrams Verlag, New York 2001, ISBN 978-0-8109-4333-9 , (English).
- Man Ray, Manfred Heiting, Emmanuelle de L'Écotais: Man Ray 1890–1976. New edition, Taschen Verlag, Cologne 2004, ISBN 978-3-8228-3483-1 .
- Man Ray - From everyday finds . In: Markus Stegmann: Architectural Sculpture in the 20th Century. Historical aspects and work structures , dissertation , Wasmuth, Tübingen 1995, ISBN 978-3-8030-3071-9 , pp. 69-73.
- stern special photography: Man Ray. teNeues Verlag, 2004, ISBN 978-3-570-19444-7 .
Movie
- Love at work: Lee Miller & Man Ray. (OT: L'amour à l'œuvre - Lee Miller et Man Ray. ) Documentary, France, 2019, 26:22 min., Script and direction: Stéphanie Colaux and Agnès Jamonneau, production: Bonne Compagnie, arte France, series: Love at work (OT: L'amour à l'œuvre. Couples mythiques d'artistes ), first broadcast: April 28, 2019 on arte, synopsis by ARD .
Web links
- Man Ray Trust - Official Site (English)
Databases
- Literature by and about Man Ray in the catalog of the German National Library
- Works by and about Man Ray in the German Digital Library
- Man Ray on kunstaspekte.de
- Man Ray in the Internet Movie Database (English)
photos
- Man Ray Photo (French / English)
- Man Ray at photography-now.com
various
- Dada in New York (English)
- Man Ray - Movies at ubu.com (English)
- artcyclopedia.com - link collection
Notes, references and sources
Unless otherwise stated, the main article is based on the chronologically divergent monographs and reviews of works by Merry Foresta, Stephen C. Foster, Billy Klüver, Julie Martin, Francis Naumann, Sandra S. Phillips, Roger Shattuck and Elisabeth Hutton Turner, some of which are abridged Version in the English-language original edition Perpetual Motif: The Art of Man Ray (German edition: Man Ray - His complete work ), Edition Stemmle, Zurich, 1989, ISBN 3-7231-0388-X . Notes on the technique are based on Floris M. Neusüss : The photogram in the art of the 20th century , DuMont, Cologne, 1990, ISBN 3-7701-1767-0 .
- ↑ Man Ray's original birth certificate was destroyed in a fire. The question of the exact family name is unclear. In some sources the name is given as "R a dnitzky" or as "Radinsky"; The family probably only Americanized the name in "Ray" in 1911/12 (Francis Nauman, Man Ray - His Complete Works , Edition Stemmle, Zurich 1989, p. 52).
- ↑ Interview with Arturo Schwarz: Arts 51 , No. 9, May 1977.
- ↑ a b c Francis Nauman: Man Ray - His Complete Works , 1989, pp. 52-55.
- ↑ Photo: Francis Picabia. In: Library of Congress , accessed May 18, 2019.
- ^ Francis Picabia - His Art, Life and Times , Princeton University Press, 1979, pp. 71-100.
- ↑ In his brief life's work, the French writer Jacques Rigaut was exclusively concerned with the idea of suicide . Rigaut committed suicide in 1929.
- ^ Foresta, Man Ray - His Complete Works , 1989, pp. 29f.
- ^ Letter to Katherine Dreier, February 20, 1921
- ↑ a b Floris M. Neusüss, The photogram in the art of the 20th century , DuMont, Cologne 1990, p. 68f.
- ^ Vanity Fair , November 1922
- ^ Susan Sontag : About Photography , Frankfurt 1989, p. 176.
- ^ The photograph The Enigma of Isidore Ducasse was published on December 1, 1924 in La Révolution surréaliste , No. 1.
- ^ The Société Anonyme Inc. was dissolved on April 30, 1950 for the 30th anniversary of their first exhibition by Duchamp and Dreier at a dinner.
- ↑ Man Ray: Letter to Tristan Tzara in June 1921.
- ^ Helmut Schneider: Dada in New York. Exhibited in Munich: Man Ray, Duchamp, Picabia. ( Memento from August 13, 2018 in the Internet Archive ). In: Die Zeit , January 4, 1974, No. 2.
- ↑ Divergent sources date his arrival in Paris on the French national holiday , July 14th, ( Man Ray Photograph , Schirmer / Mosel Munich, 1982, p. 253).
- ↑ Martin Klüver, Man Ray - His Complete Works, p. 102ff.
- ↑ Martin Klüver, Man Ray - His Complete Works, p. 108ff.
- ^ Letter to Ferdinand Howald, May 28, 1922.
- ↑ The photograph was first published in June 1924 in Issue No. 13 of Littérature magazine.
- ↑ Photo: Le Violon d'Ingres (Ingres's Violin). In: Getty Museum . Accessed August 25, 2019 .
- ↑ a b Elisabeth Hutton-Turner, Man Ray - His Complete Works, 1989, p. 152ff.
- ↑ Berenice Abbott (1898–1991), who later became known for her black and white photographs of New York, learned the craft of photography as a student with Man Ray.
- ^ Elisabeth Hutton-Turner, Man Ray - His Complete Works , p. 164.
- ^ Sandra S. Phillips, Man Ray - His Complete Works , p. 179.
- ↑ Nicole Heinicke: “Man Ray” presents a retrospective with the ingenious unique pieces by the famous photo pioneer. ( Memento from January 20, 2013 in the Internet Archive ). In: stern special photography , No. 35, March 9, 2004.
- ↑ a b The often reproduced and differently titled metronome object was called The Object to Be Destroyed (1923) in the original version and was actually destroyed by a visitor to the exhibition; in the new versions it was then called Object of Destruction (1932), Lost Object (1945), Indestructible Object (1958/64), Last Object (1966) and finally Perpetual Motif (1972).
- ^ Sandra S. Phillips, Man Ray - His Complete Works, 1989, pp. 212-220.
- ↑ quoted from Aragon: Painting and Reality - A Discussion , 1936.
- ↑ Published in Minotaure , No. 5, 1934–1935, p. 15.
- ↑ Sandra S. Phillips, Man Ray - His Complete Works, p. 221ff.
- ↑ In 1929 Breton raised the question of where the door between reality and dream is in a dispute with René Magritte . (René Passeron: Lexicon of Surrealism - René Magritte , Paris, 1978)
- ^ Foresta, Man Ray: Self Portrait , reprint 1999, p. 345.
- ↑ Merry Foresta: Man Ray - His Complete Works , 1989, p. 297.
- ^ Graham Spicer: Surreal Things - Surrealism & Design Explored At The V&A Museum London. In: culture24.org , April 2, 2007; see. Large formats in the Guardian , March 20, 2007.
- ↑ The idea of "light painting" ( Light Painting ) d. H. Pablo Picasso later took up drawing figures "in the air" with a small flashlight in a darkened room and capturing them on film or capturing them with a camera with long exposure and had the photographer Gjon Mili fix them in the picture in 1949 .
- ↑ Francis Nauman, Gail Stavitsky: Conversion to Modernism: The Early Work of Man Ray (online)
- ↑ a b c Merry Foresta, Man Ray - His Complete Works , 1989, Introduction.
- ↑ Jean-Hubert Martin (* 1944) was a. a. Museum director of the Center Georges-Pompidou and the Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf.
- ^ Foreword by Jean-Hubert Martin in Man Ray Photographer , 1982, p. 9.
- ↑ Marin Klüver, Man Ray - His Complete Works , 1989, p. 134.
- ↑ Herbert Molderings in Man Ray Photograph , 1982, pp. 15f.
- ↑ Floris M. Neusüss, Das Fotogramm , 1990, pp. 14/15.
- ↑ Karel Teige: The Man Ray case from Neusüss, Das Fotogramm , p. 76.
- ↑ Sandra S. Phillips, Man Ray - His Complete Works, 1989, pp. 177ff.
- ↑ Brett Kashmere, Underground Film, Into the Light - Two Sides of the Projected Image in American Art, 1945–1975 , (online)
- ^ From Janus' introductory essay on Man Ray Photograph. Schirmer / Mosel, Munich 1982, p. 29.
- ^ René Passeron: Lexicon of Surrealism. ( Memento of October 15, 2005 in the Internet Archive ) In: g26.ch , ( Memento of July 14, 2011 in the Internet Archive ), accessed February 28, 2008.
- ↑ Ingi Agnarsson et al .: A radiation of the ornate Caribbean 'smiley-faced spiders', with descriptions of 15 new species (Araneae: Theridiidae, Spintharus). In: Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society , Vol. 182, Issue 4, April 2018, p. 758-790, doi: 10.1093 / zoolinnean / zlx056 .
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Ray, man |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Rudnitzky, Emmanuel (real name); Radnitzky, Emmanuel |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American photographer, film director, painter, and object artist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | August 27, 1890 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Philadelphia , Pennsylvania |
| DATE OF DEATH | November 18, 1976 |
| Place of death | Paris |