1. Man Ray was a significant contributor to the Dada and Surrealist movements, although his ties to each were informal.
45 Facts About Man Ray
1. 2.
Man Ray produced major works in a variety of media but considered himself a painter above all.
3.
Man Ray was best known for his pioneering photography, and was a renowned fashion and portrait photographer.
4.
Man Ray is noted for his work with photograms, which he called "rayographs" in reference to himself.
5.
Man Ray even refused to acknowledge that he ever had a name other than Man Ray, and his 1963 autobiography Self-Portrait contains few dates.
6.
Man Ray was born Emmanuel Radnitzky in South Philadelphia on August 27,1890.
7.
Man Ray was the eldest child of Russian Jewish immigrants Melach "Max" Radnitzky, a tailor, and Manya "Minnie" Radnitzky.
8.
Man Ray had a brother, Sam, and two sisters, Dorothy "Dora" and Essie, the youngest born in 1897 shortly after they settled at 372 Debevoise St in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
9.
Man Ray's father worked in a garment factory and ran a small tailoring business out of the family home.
10.
Man Ray enlisted his children to assist him from an early age.
11.
Man Ray's mother enjoyed designing the family's clothes and inventing patchwork items from scraps of fabric.
12.
Man Ray wished to distance himself from his family background, but tailoring left an enduring mark on his art.
13.
Man Ray was the uncle of the photographer Naomi Savage, who learned some of his techniques and incorporated them into her own work.
14.
Man Ray's parents were disappointed by their son's decision to pursue art, but they agreed to rearrange the family's modest living quarters so that Ray's room could be his studio.
15.
Man Ray earned money as a commercial artist and was a technical illustrator at several Manhattan companies.
16.
Man Ray was already an avid admirer of contemporary avant-garde art, such as the European modernists he saw at Alfred Stieglitz's 291 gallery and works by the Ashcan School.
17.
In 1915, Man Ray had his first solo show of paintings and drawings after taking up residence at an art colony in Grantwood, New Jersey.
18.
Man Ray produced his first significant photographs in 1918, after initially picking up the camera to document his own artwork.
19.
Man Ray abandoned conventional painting to involve himself with the radical Dada movement.
20.
Man Ray published two Dadaist periodicals, that each only had one issue, The Ridgefield Gazook and TNT, the latter co-edited by Adolf Wolff and Mitchell Dawson.
21.
Man Ray started making objects and developed unique mechanical and photographic methods of making images.
22.
Man Ray's readymade The Gift is a flatiron with metal tacks attached to the bottom, and Enigma of Isidore Ducasse is an unseen object wrapped in cloth and tied with cord.
23.
In 1920, Man Ray helped Duchamp make his Rotary Glass Plates, one of the earliest examples of kinetic art.
24.
Man Ray teamed up with Duchamp to publish one issue of New York Dada in 1920.
25.
In 1913, Man Ray met his first wife, the Belgian poet Adon Lacroix, in New York.
26.
In July 1921, Man Ray went to live and work in Paris, settling in the Montparnasse quarter favored by many artists.
27.
Man Ray starred in his experimental films Le Retour a la raison and L'Etoile de mer.
28.
Man Ray was his photographic assistant and, together, they reinvented the photographic technique of solarization.
29.
From late 1934 until August 1940, Man Ray was in a relationship with Adrienne Fidelin.
30.
Man Ray was a Guadeloupean dancer and model and she appears in many of his photographs.
31.
When Man Ray fled the Nazi occupation in France, Adrienne chose to stay behind to care for her family.
32.
Man Ray was a pioneering photographer in Paris for two decades between the wars.
33.
Man Ray was represented in the first Surrealist exhibition with Jean Arp, Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, Georges Malkine, Andre Masson, Joan Miro, and Pablo Picasso at the Galerie Pierre in Paris in 1925.
34.
Man Ray directed a number of influential avant-garde short films, known as Cinema Pur.
35.
Man Ray directed Le Retour a la Raison ; Emak-Bakia ; L'Etoile de Mer ; and Les Mysteres du Chateau de De.
36.
Man Ray assisted Marcel Duchamp with the cinematography of his film Anemic Cinema, and Ray personally manned the camera on Fernand Leger's Ballet Mecanique.
37.
In Rene Clair's film Entr'acte, Man Ray appeared in a brief scene playing chess with Duchamp.
38.
Man Ray lived in Los Angeles from 1940 to 1951, where he focused his creative energy on painting.
39.
Man Ray was a trained dancer who studied dance with Martha Graham, and an experienced artists' model.
40.
In 1948 Man Ray had a solo exhibition at the Copley Galleries in Beverly Hills, which brought together a wide array of work and featured his newly painted canvases of the Shakespearean Equations series.
41.
Man Ray returned to Paris in 1951, and settled with Juliet into a studio at 2 bis rue Ferou near the Jardin du Luxembourg, where he continued his creative practice across mediums.
42.
Man Ray directed the production of limited-edition replicas of several of his objects, working first with Marcel Zerbib and later Arturo Schwarz.
43.
Man Ray continued to work on new paintings, photographs, collages and art objects until his death from a lung infection, in Paris, on November 18,1976.
44.
Man Ray was interred in the Cimetiere du Montparnasse in Paris, his epitaph reads "Unconcerned, but not indifferent".
45.
Man Ray was responsible for several technical innovations in modern art, filmmaking, and photography.