Art review: Man Ray: When Objects Dream

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“Man Ray didn’t consider photography to be a form of art,” said Marion Maneker in Puck. That notion may surprise some visitors to the Met’s survey of one of the artist’s most fertile periods, because it’s “easy to get lost” in the 64 experimental photographs that constitute the heart of the show. In 1921, Man Ray moved to Paris from New York City, and he later said he was developing images for a fashion client when he left a couple of random objects atop photographic paper and accidentally exposed the paper to light. Excited by the ghostly images the process produced, he repeated it, dubbed the results “rayographs,” and printed a dozen in a 1922 portfolio, Les champs délicieux, that caused a sensation. Today, those 12 images are “both familiar and otherworldly.” They also suggest how the rayographs provide a key to understanding everything their creator did.

“Conceptual pieces were a part of Man Ray’s practice from the very beginning,” said Rossilynne Skena Culgan in Time Out. Born Emmanuel Radnitzky in 1890, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants grew up in Brooklyn, studied art in Manhattan, and was heavily influenced by the 1913 Armory Show that introduced America to Europe’s postimpressionist avant-garde. Before the rayographs, he created a series of colorful collages titled Revolving Doors, presenting them on a rotating stand that visitors to the Met can spin. He “also had a sense of humor,” as can be seen in 1920’s Catherine Barometer, which looks like a device for gauging weather shifts but suggests a need to monitor its namesake’s moods. By then, he was a friend and collaborator of Marcel Duchamp’s, and took Duchamp’s advice in relocating to Paris to seek greater acclaim.

Before the rayographs, Man Ray was already creating “moody, enigmatic” photographs by focusing on purpose-built everyday objects, said Arthur Lubow in The New York Times. He lit an eggbeater to emphasize its looping shadows in an image he titled Man. He also used an extended exposure to turn accumulated dust into an image that suggests a vast, arid landscape. Similarly, the everyday objects that appear in the rayographs are “transfigured by the artist’s skillful manipulations of luminescence and shadows.” And while those are the works that pushed Ray’s career into overdrive, the “showstopper” in this multimedia gathering of some 160 objects is a variation that also happens to be the most expensive photograph ever sold at auction. In Le Violon d’Ingres, from 1924, his lover Kiki de Montparnasse appears naked to just below the waist and her back, which is turned to the camera, is adorned with likenesses of the f-holes on a violin. The artist used his rayograph process to burn in the suggestive flourishes, and “in its beauty and absurdity,” the $12.4 million work “encapsulates, arguably better than any other artwork, the insouciant wit of surrealism and the originality of Man Ray.”