Man Ray

Emmanuel Radnitzky becomes Man Ray

He was born in 1890 in South Philadelphia, the eldest child of Russian Jewish immigrants, and grew up in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. His father worked in a garment factory and ran a small tailoring business out of the family home, enlisting the children to help; his mother made the family's clothes and invented patchwork objects out of scraps. The family changed its surname to Ray in the face of the antisemitism of the period, and Emmanuel, nicknamed Manny, became Man.

He spent the rest of his life refusing to discuss any of this. He would not acknowledge that he had ever had another name, and his autobiography contains almost no dates. Yet the tailor's shop never left the work: irons, mannequins, sewing machines, needles, pins and swatches of fabric run through six decades of it, most famously in the flatiron with a row of tacks glued to its sole.

Offered a scholarship to study architecture, he turned it down to paint, taught himself in New York museums, and found his direction at the anarchist run Ferrer Centre and at the Armory Show. He befriended Marcel Duchamp, published two short lived Dada magazines, and with Duchamp and Katherine Dreier founded the Societe Anonyme, an itinerant collection that was in effect the first museum of modern art in the United States and whose holdings later went to Yale. Of New York he wrote that Dada could not live there, because all New York was dada and would not tolerate a rival.

Paris, rayographs and solarisation

He moved to Paris and settled in Montparnasse. There he rediscovered the cameraless photogram, made by laying objects straight onto sensitised paper, and named the results rayographs after himself. Tristan Tzara called them pure Dada creations. He fell in with Alice Prin, known as Kiki de Montparnasse, who became his companion and the subject of his most famous images, including the photograph of her back overlaid with the f holes of a violin. Later, with the photographer Lee Miller, who was his assistant and his lover, he reinvented solarisation, the tonal reversal that gives so many of his portraits their silver outline.

He was the portraitist of his generation in Paris. Picasso, Joyce, Stein, Cocteau, Dali, Peggy Guggenheim and Artaud all sat for him, and his photographs of African sculpture in Paris collections did as much as anything to fold that material into a modernist way of seeing. He directed a run of avant garde short films, among them Le Retour a la raison, Emak Bakia and L'Etoile de mer, and in 1925 he hung in the first Surrealist group exhibition at the Galerie Pierre alongside Arp, de Chirico, Ernst, Masson, Miro and Picasso.

Hollywood and the return to Paris

The Second World War drove him back to the United States, and he spent eleven years in Los Angeles, painting hard and enjoying photography rather less. There he met the dancer and model Juliet Browner, whom he married in a double wedding with Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning. In 1948 the Copley Galleries in Beverly Hills gave him a solo exhibition that introduced the Shakespearean Equations, canvases worked up from photographs of mathematical models.

He returned to Paris and a studio near the Jardin du Luxembourg, and spent his last quarter century revisiting his own past, remaking earlier objects in new form and authorising limited edition replicas of them, first with Marcel Zerbib and later with Arturo Schwarz. He died in Paris in 1976 and lies in the Montparnasse cemetery under the words Unconcerned, but not indifferent.

What comes to auction

His market divides sharply. At the top sit vintage prints, unique objects and paintings; his best known photograph of Kiki set a world record for any photograph sold at auction. Below that come the portfolios and photogravures, and below those the authorised editions of his objects, which exist in very large numbers.

Both ends are worth knowing. In 2023 Rago sold a complete Electricite portfolio, ten photogravures after rayographs from an edition of five hundred published by a Paris electricity company, for a low five figure sum. In 2024 the same house sold a Cadeau, the tacked flatiron, from an edition of five thousand cast in Venice and published in Turin, for a low four figure sum, with its numbered card, pamphlet and original packaging.

For anything bearing his name the decisive questions are when the print was made relative to the negative, whether an object comes from one of the authorised late editions and which one, and whether the numbering and the accompanying paperwork are still with it. A photolithograph or a late replica is a real Man Ray and should be described and priced as exactly that.