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Man Ray (1890-1976) Emmanuel Rudnitsky was born in 1890 in Philadelphia (United States). He practiced various professions and in the same time studied drawing at the Centre Ferrer of New York (1910-1911). In 1911 he took the pen name Man Ray. He settled down for a while in an artists' community (New Jersey, on 1913).American painter, sculptor and filmmaker. Interested in art from childhood. In 1913 he married and moved with his wife and the poet Alfred Kreymborg to Ridgefield, New Jersey, where they hoped to establish a community of artists. In this crucial year in American art, he, like most of his contemporaries, was strongly influenced by the current European trends exhibited at the Armory Show. He was one of the few American artists to produce genuine Synthetic Cubist works directly after this exhibition (The Rope Dancer Accompanies Herself with Her Shadow, 1916, New York ' Museum of Modern Art). The year 1915 was also an important one for him - he was given his first one-man show, launched his experiments in photography and began a life-long friendship with Marcel Duchamp. His literary interests began to develop at this time and he, Duchamp and Francis Picabia prompted the publication of two magazines - The Blind Man and Rongwrong (1917). In 1918 he began his aerograph series-paintings executed with a spray gun whose softness of form emulates photographic effects (First Object Aerated, 1918, Paris, Coll. Mr. and Mrs. Man Ray). In 1921 he went to Paris where he was warmly received by the Dadaists and was given a one-man show. In 1922 he published a collection of photographs entitled Les Champs dilicieux and was included in the first international Dada exhibition: Salon Dada. In 1923 film-making became hi; chief outlet of artistic expression (Le' Retour a la raison was his first film) and the next year he appeared with Duchamp, Picabia and Erik Satie in Rene Clair's Entr'acte. Throughout the 1920s he participated in a number of films (Anaemic Cinema, Emak Bakia, L'Etoile de mer, Les Mysteres du Chateau de de). In the 1930s he published several albums of photographs and rayographs (photographic impressions made on a sensitized plate) accompanied by essays and poems by Andre Breton, Duchamp, Tristan Tzara and himself. His painting style of the 1930s was overtly Surrealistic, giving rise to a variety of psychological interpretations (The Misunderstood One, 1938, Paris, Coll. Mr. and Mrs. Man Ray), but periodically he returned to a vaguely Cubistic aesthetic (Diamond Cactus, 1948, Paris, Coll. Mr. and Mrs. Man Ray). In 1940 he fled the Nazi occupation of Paris and eventually made his way to Hollywood. In the 1940s he was included in many exhibitions and was given almost annual one-man shows. His interest in collage and mixed media objects extends from the second decade of the century to the present. The former were done as early as 1916: Theatre (Stockholm, Modema Museet); while the objects continue even today. His Indestructible Object (1958, Coll. Mr. and Mrs. Morton G. Neumann) is a replica of the 1923 original Object to be Destroyed which was destroyed by a group of students in 1957 at a Paris exhibition, in response to its title. |
