by Guido Comis and Antonio Giusa
Man Ray is the author of some of the most famous works of the 20th century, such as Le violon d’Ingres, a female nude with two violin carvings at the level of the kidneys, and Cadeau, an iron with the plate crossed by a row of nails.
The extraordinary inventiveness of an artist who was at the same time photographer, painter, creator of objects and author of experimental films, is narrated at Villa Manin through more than three hundred works that make it possible to follow Man Ray in his long and eventful career between the United States and Europe, loves and friendships. For Man Ray there is no distinction between art and life, between aesthetic and sentimental interest, desire and visual invention. While highlighting the different expressions of the artist’s style, sometimes almost disorienting in their enigmatic character, the exhibition allows us to grasp the elements of continuity in Man Ray’s work, the curiosities and obsessions that punctuate it.
Man Ray’s creativity is also expressed in the experimental films he shot in the 1920s: Retour à la raison, Emak Bakia, Les Mystères du Chateau du dé, Etoile de mer, today unanimously considered among the masterpieces of surrealist cinematography.
Villa Manin will also host this further manifestation of the artist’s visual talent.
MAN RAY/EMMANUEL RADNITZKY
‘I paint what cannot be photographed. I photograph what I don’t want to paint. I paint the invisible. / I photograph the visible.’
Man Ray is the pseudonym of Emmanuel Radnitzky who was born in Philadelphia in 1890 to a Jewish family that had recently immigrated from Eastern Europe.
After an apprenticeship in New York where he became acquainted with the work of the avant-garde and made friends with some of the most important artists of the time, such as Marcel Duchamp with whom he shared a passion for chess.
Man Ray landed in Paris in 1921, welcomed by numerous fellow artists. It was not a choice dictated by nostalgia for his origins, but by the conviction that new art could not take root in New York. Man Ray was in fact an experimenter and an innovator and the artistic movements he approached, first and foremost Dadaism and Surrealism, would represent the starting point for ever new inventions in photography, such as rayographs and solarization, in painting, in cinematography and in the creation of objects and assemblages.
At the outbreak of the Second World War, after twenty years of very intense artistic activity, he returned to the United States. It was a temporary stay, however. In 1951, the artist, this time accompanied by Juliet, whom he had met in California and married in 1946, returned to Paris where he lived until his death in 1976.
ARTISTIC TRAINING
Man Ray discovered his inclination for art early on, so much so that he decided to give up a university scholarship to devote himself to painting while working a multitude of different jobs. Starting in 1908, he attended Alfred Stieglitz’s Gallery 291 where he became acquainted with the work of the most innovative European artists: Cèzanne, Rodin, Van Gogh, but also Brancusi and Picasso. In 1913, the Armory Show, the international art exhibition, shook up the still sleepy New York artistic scene. Man Ray was able to admire the works of those who would soon become his friends, first and foremost Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia. In the course of a few years, Man Ray moved ahead experimenting with different techniques – from painting to airbrushing, from collage to cliché verre – and different styles, shortly arriving from Cubism to Dadaism. Photography, at first an opportunity to reproduce and disseminate his work, soon became a new form of expression for the artist, and thanks to his commitment as a portrait painter, an opportunity to combine passion and profession. The conviction that avant-garde art could not assert itself in New York induced Man Ray to leave the city in 1921 to seek better fortune in Paris, where he arrived preceded by the notoriety that his friend Duchamp had already brought him in avant-garde circles.
LIFE AS AN ARTIST IN MONTPARNASSE
Man Ray arrived in Paris in 1921, at a time when the metropolis, after the war, was going through a phase of extraordinary vitality. The city was then the cradle of European and, in many respects, world art, fashion and music. Artists, musicians, writers, aristocrats and fashion designers – and of course models – are the exponents of the society into which Man Ray is projected as soon as he lands in France. Almost every work he creates leads to almost mythical figures from the life of the time. Cadeau, the iron with the iron plate bristling with nails, is linked to the memory of the musician Eric Satie, who presided over the creation of that object by helping the artist to procure the materials needed to make it. Le Violon d’Ingres, the famous violin-woman, portrays Kiki de Montparnasse, an artist’s model, singer and actress with whom Man Ray had a passionate love affair. The celebrated Erotique voilée series restores Meret Oppenheim’s beauty and allows us to grasp the uninhibited and vaguely restless charm that we find in her artist’s works.
FROM NEW YORK TO PARIS
Dissatisfied with the results obtained in New York, in July 1921 Man Ray decided to try his luck in Paris, and managed to convince a rich collector to finance his trip. In Paris he was welcomed by Marcel Duchamp who introduced him to avant-garde circles. Man Ray’s luggage consists only of a travel bag. A crate and a trunk containing some works were collected by the artist a few days after his arrival. ‘I went to customs to collect my works,’ Man Ray recounts in his autobiography. ‘They first opened the large crate, which contained half a dozen canvases. ‘Cubist,’ the inspector ruled with an air of connoisseurship, and let them pass […] It was the turn of the trunk, which was very heavy. Two men lifted it by placing it on a platform, but I could not find the key [and invited them to force the lock…]. The inspector lifted a vase full of steel ball bearings, dipped in oil; it bore a label: New York, 1920. That, I explained to the interpreter, was a decorative element destined for my future Parisian studio; artists sometimes have nothing to put under their teeth, and that vase would give me the illusion that there was something to eat in the house.’
PARIS – LOS ANGELES AND BACK
Between the 1920s and 1930s, Man Ray produced numerous images for the fashion world and for Vogue and Harper’s Bazar magazines. The eccentricity, but also the freedom of that society made up of brilliant and often excessive figures can be found in the extraordinary portraits taken by Man Ray of writers such as James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, of aristocrats such as the Marchesa Casati – already counted by D’Annunzio among his lovers – of fellow artists, from Picasso to Braque, from Henri Matisse to Max Ernst, and of course of women whose charm Man Ray managed to transfer onto photographic paper appears still irresistible. In 1940 he moved to Los Angeles where he lived until 1951, devoting himself mainly to painting, before returning to Paris. In the last decades the artist revisited his own themes, accentuating erotic allusions as an expression of a new libertarian charge. Man Ray produced many portraits of his wife Juliet, demonstrating a great ability to imagine ever different formal solutions.
