Man Ray

American, 1890–1976

BiographyBorn Emmanuel Radnizky, the artist adopted the pseudonym Man Ray as early as 1910. He attended drawing classes given by Robert Henri and George Bellows in New York in the 1910-15, but was already involved with more avant-garde activities by that time. He was a frequent visitor to Alfred Stieglitz's influential 291 Gallery, and in 1915 began a lifelong friendship with Marcel Duchamp. With Duchamp and Francis Picabia, Man Ray founded the New York Dada movement; and with Duchamp and patron Katherine Dreier, was a founder-member of the Société Anonyme, one of the first organizations to promote and collect avant-garde art in this country. In 1921 Man Ray collaborated with Duchamp on the periodical New York Dada; later that year he moved to Paris, where he became an influential figure in the international circle of Dada and Surrealist artists and writers.

Although he was also active as a painter, draftsman, and sculptor, Man Ray's greatest impact on twentieth-century art was as a photographer. In 1922 he began creating "rayographs," a personal variant of the photogram, in which images were produced by placing objects directly on photosensitive paper; rayographs transformed ordinary objects into mysterious, allusive entities. From the late 1920s Man Ray also experimented with solarized photographic images, and made important contributions to the avant-garde film genre. Commercial photography earned the artist a steady source of income, both portraits and fashion photography for magazines such as Harper's Bazaar and Vogue.

Man Ray left Paris in 1940 to escape the Nazi occupation. He settled in Hollywood, California, but returned to Paris in 1951, where he resided for the remainder of his life.