![]() ![]() The canvas features hard-edged vertical shapes in a variety of solid hues, all attached by slender, curving gray lines. Duchamp’s influence is particularly evident in Man Ray’s The Rope Dancer Accompanies with Her Shadows (1916). Through his relationship with Walter Arensberg, who hosted salons in Manhattan, Man Ray also made a lifelong friend: Marcel Duchamp, the father of Conceptual art. These artists’ experiments with the picture plane inspired Man Ray’s own painting for decades. Visiting photographer and dealer Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 gallery, Man Ray first experienced the work of Paul Cézanne and Pablo Picasso’s radical new Cubist methodologies. He turned down a grant to study architecture, took painting and drawing lessons, worked for a publisher for maps and atlases, and ventured into Manhattan’s blossoming art scene. His parents moved to Brooklyn in 1897, where the young artist learned draftsmanship. Man Ray was born Emmanuel Radnitzky to a Jewish family in South Philadelphia in 1890. Man Ray’s singular legacy bursts with a bold embrace of new forms and a talent for self-invention. The story of Man Ray’s peripatetic life traces major storylines of 20th-century culture: He participated in the Dada and Surrealist movements, fled Europe at the outbreak of World War II, and lived in Los Angeles during Hollywood’s heyday. ![]() He invented “rayographs” by placing objects on photosensitive paper, then exposing the composition to light. Yet throughout his life, Man Ray experimented with sculpture, painting, film, writing, chess sets, and new modes of image-making. ![]() Sensuality and wonder fill his best-loved frames. Female faces and bodies fill Man Ray’s oeuvre, along with curious and suggestive objects including glass teardrops, eggs, a peach, and a reflective orb. Man Ray’s “Noire et Blanche” series from 1926 operates in a similar register, juxtaposing a woman’s pallid face with a West African ceremonial mask. The famous 1924 shot Le Violon d’Ingres (Ingres’s Violin) features a woman’s bare back adorned with two elegant f-holes, connecting her body to the titular instrument. Man Ray’s name is synonymous with moody, seductive black-and-white photographs from the interwar era. ![]()
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