Man Ray was the ultimate networker. From the time he was twenty-three years old, when he asked Alfred Stieglitz to sit for a painted portrait, he had an uncanny knack for befriending important people. Through Stieglitz he met the collector Walter Arensberg, who introduced him to Marcel Duchamp, who was waiting at the Gare Saint-Lazare when Man Ray first arrived in Paris and who promptly ushered him to the Certà café, where he met the whole Dada crowd. Man Ray got along with everyone. As the years passed, he became known as the one member of the Dada-Surrealist group who never struck up an argument or abruptly broke off a friendship, the only person to win the approval of rivaling ringleaders Andre Breton and Tristan Tzara. As a member of the movement that specialized in the artful insult, Man Ray was the one who insulted no one.
Man Ray’s relation to the tradition of art was every bit as cordial and deferential as his relation to his peers. While he originally started out as a painter, he realized soon after arriving in Paris that he had no chance of competing successfully with the leading talents of the day. And so he graciously stepped out of the ring. Laying down his brushes, at least for a while, he began experimenting with less conventional media—assemblage, photography, filmmaking, polemics, and so on. His various endeavors were all united not by a vision so much as a strategy, one which exploited the psychological and sexual obsessions of Surrealism for surfacey ends. Long-lashed eyes crying tears of glass, disembodied lips hovering absurdly in Paris skies, two pieces of silverware posing as Mr. Knife and Miss Fork—these images and objects embrace the spirit of Surrealist revolt while remaining undeniably cheerful.
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Central to the Surrealist movement was the notion of the artist as public provocateur, and Man Ray had no trouble fulfilling this role. He could always be counted on to say something shocking, or to show up at a party in an outrageous costume with his latest beautiful girlfriend in tow. Eventually, he came to be regarded as one of the more glamorous figures on the Paris art scene in the fabled years between the two world wars; it’s revealing, I think, that he recently became the first artist in living memory to have a Manhattan restaurant named after him.
Man Ray’s relation to the tradition of art was every bit as cordial and deferential as his relation to his peers.
Man Ray’s reputation has never been stronger than it is right now, and it isn’t only restaurateurs who would have us see him as the epitome of avant-garde chic. The first biography of him has just been published, and Self-Portrait, his own autobiography, has been re-issued in a new, illustrated edition.1 “Perpetual Motif: The Art of Man Ray” is the name of a large retrospective travelling around the country this year (it was organized by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American Art) as well as the six-pound catalogue accompanying the show.2 These various events have been celebrated in the media with a level of hype exceeding even the usual excess; writers are claiming that Man Ray is not only “the greatest artist America ever produced” (as a critic for 7 Days put it) but a prophetic figure whose work fully captures the Zeitgeist of the Eighties. This latter claim is true, and it’s hard to know whom it reflects worse on—Man Ray or us.
At a time when there are still no full-length biographies of Mondrian, Kandinsky, Braque, or Miró, it seems peculiar that we should now be treated to an exhaustive account of Man Ray’s life. Was he really that interesting? To Neil Baldwin, the answer is yes, and his absorbing new biography of the artist is intended as a tribute to the man he perceives as “the quintessential modernist personality.”
Baldwin doesn’t have much to say about Man Ray’s youth. We learn that he was born in Philadelphia in 1890, that his name was Emmanuel Radnitsky, that his father was a hardworking Jewish tailor. He grew up in Brooklyn and became interested in art as a child. By the time we reach page five of the book, Man Ray is already in high school.
Baldwin believes that Man Ray felt a need “to spring free from personal history and the traditions of his background.” While the author never tells us what history or tradition he might be referring to (or why he uses italics gratuitously throughout the book), there can be little doubt that Man Ray, who changed his name at twenty-one, had only contempt for the poverty and provincialism of the immigrant household in which he was raised. Like many Jews who came of age at the turn of the century, Man Ray resented his outsider status and would spend his life trying to escape it through worldly success. In later life, when American tourists stopped by the Hotel des Ecoles in Montparnasse in hope of seeing their old acquaintance Manny from Brooklyn, they were invariably met by a short, owl-like man in fine-tailored clothes who claimed to know no such person. As far as Monsieur Man Ray was concerned, Emmanuel Radnitsky had never existed.
Man Ray early on acquired a taste for things French. By the time he was in his teens, he was a regular visitor to Alfred Stieglitz’s “291” gallery, where he saw Rodin’s drawings and etchings by Matisse virtually the moment they reached these shores. In 1915, when Marcel Duchamp sailed to America, a Dadaist ambassador to the New World, Man Ray immediately befriended him. He became Duchamp’s loyal sidekick, accompanying him to the Arensbergs’ salons, photographing him as he mugged gamely behind his Large Glass, helping him publish New York Dada, which, in the tradition of avant-garde periodicals, died after the first issue. The anarchistic ethos of Dada as expressed in Duchamp’s snow shovels and fountains provided Man Ray not only with an instant ideology but with the very justification he needed for renouncing everything he found oppressive about his life—his plain, humble parents, his lackluster job in graphic design, his failing marriage to a Belgian émigré. In the freedom of Dada he found an excuse for walking out on his wife, his life.
Man Ray’s release from obligation became complete in July 1921, when he sailed for Paris. Unlike Charles Demuth or Marsden Hartley, who also set off for Paris that summer in search of new, enlarged possibilities, Man Ray instantly found his way to the center of the European avant-garde. Four months after his arrival, he exhibited some paintings he had brought from home at the Librairie Six gallery, and virtually all the Dadaists showed up for the opening. In a letter written soon afterward, Man Ray reported that his Parisian debut had been a success, placing him apart “from the huge mass of daubing that goes on here.” Yet none of the paintings sold, and everywhere he looked, Man Ray saw expatriates like himself struggling for recognition. It was at this point that he basically stopped painting and took up photography as his primary medium.
Yet none of the paintings sold, and everywhere he looked, Man Ray saw expatriates like himself struggling for recognition.
By the beginning of the Thirties, Man Ray had risen to prominence as a vastly successful portrait photographer who was just as much at home in the dusty, cluttered studio of his friend Brancusi as he was in the drawing rooms of international socialites. He was able to command a thousand francs for a sitting, and, as Sylvia Beach put it, “to be done by Man Ray meant you rated as somebody.” He earned extra money in the fashion industry; for years he shot spreads for Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. Between assignments, he retreated to the solitude of his darkroom to experiment with photographic techniques; the “myographs” and solarizations that resulted kept him in favor with the Surrealists. He still harbored hopes of gaining recognition as a painter and occasionally turned out a canvas or two.
Man Ray could no more commit himself to one lover than he could to one medium, and much of Baldwin’s book is taken up with chronicling the artist’s amorous exploits. There was his brief, early marriage to Adon Lacroix, a blonde, willowy Belgian poet. Not long after arriving in Paris, he met Kiki, a celebrated chanteuse whose back he immemorialized in Violin d’Ingres. His next paramour was Lee Miller, the American model and photographer. Living in Hollywood in the Forties as a refugee from the war, he met and married Juliet Browner, a striking dancer more than twenty years his junior. Man Ray’s love life, like his career, comes across in Baldwin’s book as a series of happy, slightly scandalous escapades in which ordinary human concerns, such as having children or growing old, seem oddly beside the point.
Baldwin doesn’t seem to care very much about Man Ray’s art. In his longest discussion of the artist’s oeuvre, the author writes: “No matter what ‘instrument’ he employed, Man Ray’s desire came through—to make the thing in the world seem his own, to possess the object or person and by instinctive action bring it into his work. The stylistic twist always identified it as an effort only one artist could have achieved: himself.” Is there any artist of whom this couldn’t be said? Every artist possesses the world, but he possesses it in his own way, and Baldwin never says how Man Ray’s way was different from anyone else’s. He consistently relies on bland, generic statements about self-expression to describe the artist’s achievements.
Baldwin fares much better when the subject turns to Man Ray’s career, which he handles with intelligence and grace. But he doesn’t always analyze his material as carefully as he should. He reports, for instance, that on a nine-day cruise back to Europe after his years in Hollywood, the artist “clacked away on his portable typewriter and knocked off a rough draft of the first four chapters of the memoirs he’d been working on since the late forties.” Four chapters in just nine days? That means Man Ray was writing (judging from the finished book) more than fifty pages a day—on a boat! And that’s not all. During this same prolific boat ride, “he also composed yet another essay on a subject of perennial concern to him: the artist’s function in society.” It’s a claim that stretches credibility, and, like many others in the book, makes one wonder whether Baldwin cares about separating myth from reality. His biography, like Man Ray’s own Self-Portrait, sometimes reads more like a publicity release than a probing consideration of a life.
This is not to imply that Baldwin’s book is simply a rehash of Man Ray’s own autobiography, for it does contain much that is news. Of particular interest, I think, is the light it sheds on the artist’s ambivalence about photography, which he seems to have perceived as a second-class art form. Man Ray himself was notoriously evasive on this subject. In his autobiography, he relates stories of friends who asked him whether he would ever devote himself exclusively to either painting or photography. His answer was that “there is no conflict between the two—why [can’t] people accept the idea that one might engage in two activities in a lifetime, alternately or simultaneously?” Yet Baldwin convinces us that Man Ray was essentially a frustrated painter, an artist who turned to photography to earn a living but who never derived real satisfaction from it. During the Forties, when he was living in Hollywood, he started painting on a full-time basis after a twenty-year hiatus, as if physical distance from the formidable painters he had known abroad gave him the confidence to return to his true ambition. But no one paid attention to his late paintings, which bothered him deeply. In 1951, he received a letter from James Thrall Soby, who was organizing a Gris retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art and wanted to know if Man Ray was willing to lend a photo of Gris to the show. Man Ray felt embittered; he confided to friends that he wished the museum would stop seeing him as a mere chronicler of the art scene. He craved recognition for his paintings—even though he had long ago decided that he couldn’t devote himself to painting if it meant giving up his fancy car and deluxe apartment. There is, of course, nothing wrong with reneging on one’s early dreams; we all try to minimize our losses. But it does make one wonder: is Man Ray really the “quintessential modernist personality” of legend—or just a man who made the most of exceedingly modest gifts?
The Man Ray retrospective, which originated at the National Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C., starts out with a drum roll. No one would ever argue that Man Ray was a great painter, but his early paintings, which were done in the years following the Armory Show, do hold our interest. They consist mostly of figurative images composed of studiously splintered planes and colors that owe everything to the Fauves. Man Ray was never much of a draughtsman—his lines are stiff and mechanical—but he did have a gift for pattern and design. There’s a crude vividness to his A.D. MCMXTV of 1914, in which an army of faceless, blocklike figures marches in rhythmic unison, as if following orders from the generals of Cubism. Man Ray’s early paintings are essentially inspired pastiches, the work of a young man star-struck by the art of Paris.
Before long the show branches out to include assemblages, some of which are quite winning.
Before long the show branches out to include assemblages, some of which are quite winning. Obstruction, which consists of a cluster of wooden coat hangers suspended from the ceiling, is surprisingly intricate and lovely. An unfurled lampshade (Lampshade) looks like a form plucked from an Arp as it gently winds its way to the floor. A household iron studded with a row of fourteen nails (the famous Cadeau) makes one think of Degas’s weary laundresses and how they might have relished the chance to avenge their employers with this wicked object. Man Ray’s assemblages come out of the same rakish humor as Duchamp’s “readymades,” but they don’t try to proclaim the futility of making art. Man Ray is Duchamp minus the nihilism.
Man Ray’s playfulness carried over into his photographs. He holds the patent on the cameraless “rayograph,” in which combs, pipes, and other common objects are placed against photosensitive paper and exposed to light to simulate glowing silhouettes. These works have gone down in the annals of photography as daring new additions to the medium, but their thrill has eroded over time. To be sure, Man Ray brought the techniques of Surrealism into the darkroom, but the images that resulted have more in common with the illustrational Surrealism of Salvador Dali than with the lyrical Surrealism of Arp or Miró. The “rayo-graphs” all feature juxtaposed objects-hotel keys, revolvers, blindfolds, the kind of objects one might find in the home of the Marquis de Sade. They exploit the sadist preoccupations so basic to Surrealism while politely avoiding any hint of menace. Clearly it amused Man Ray to push S&M party props around in dark space. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, by comparison, used similar cameraless techniques to push form to radical extremes.
It is, of course, as a portrait photographer that Man Ray is best known, and the exhibition in Washington dutifully rounds up the usual subjects. The ardent, young face of Ernest Hemingway gazes serenely into the distance, a dreaming folk hero posed in front of a banjo. Brancusi with his flowing gray beard looks as wise and ancient as Moses. Duchamp is dressed up as Rrose Selavy; Breton appears in profile, stoically displaying his high, noble forehead and classical features. Picasso, as usual, glares defiantly. There are many pictures of glamorous ladies—Lee Miller retreating into rich shadow; Peggy Guggenheim modeling a new Jazz Age dress, one hand on her waist, the other waving what must be the longest cigarette holder in history. And then there’s Kiki, who’s sitting on a table coyly displaying her white nakedness, her painted lips parted suggestively, her contours as rounded and seemingly boneless as one of Ingres’s sylphic nudes. As a whole, Man Bay’s portraits are fairly straightforward, but they lean more toward the soft pictorialism of the past than the stark, street-wise candor of his contemporary Brassai or other modern photographers.
There’s a certain temptation to see Man Ray as a prototype of Andy Warhol. They shared a fascination with the American dream of fame, and their best-known work consists in large part of celebrity portraits. They both made plotless movies starring their friends. (Warhol, by the way, made a silkscreened portrait of Man Ray in 1975.) Neither artist knew how to draw, except to produce a mechanical line, yet both were tremendously ambitious men who were able to get around their artistic deficiencies on the basis of technical innovation. Whereas Warhol applied the techniques of photography to painting, Man Ray applied the techniques of painting to photography. But the irony is that Man Ray’s best photographs take their inspiration not from the painting of his own time, but from the conventions of nineteenth-century academic painting. This is particularly the case with his solarized prints, which often show gleaming female nudes entrapped in dark outlines, their flesh compressed into pure form; these works come straight out of Ingres.
The Man Ray show in Washington didn’t end so much as it abruptly collapsed about two thirds of the way through. There was a gallery devoted to the artist’s paintings from the Thirties, when he was working in a Surrealist style, and it was in this room that we were forced to relinquish any hope we may have had of seeing Man Ray evolve into a mature artist. He never did. Easel Painting, of 1938, shows a painting within a painting—a large yellow canvas of a female nude resting on an easel. It’s intended as a high-minded joke, but it comes across as a crude cartoon. Whatever feel Man Ray had for paint when he first started out in New York was eventually stifled by his instinct for design; his late paintings never rise above the level of commercial art. His flair as an assemblagist deteriorated, too. The last galleries of the show, which followed Man Ray up until his death in 1976, mercilessly subjected us to one bad joke after another, such as It’s Springtime, in which a figure made out of heavy metal springs (get it?), flings its arms wide open in corny celebration of the new season.
A key problem with the Man Ray exhibition—and with the artist’s career as well—is that it lacks any sense of inner momentum. It doesn’t build toward a climax or make you feel you’re in the presence of a man with a vision. Instead of depth, we get variety.
The catalogue accompanying the show tries to make the case that variety is enough.
The catalogue accompanying the show tries to make the case that variety is enough. It includes essays by seven scholars, each of whom has been assigned to write on a different chapter of the artist’s life—his New York years, his Paris years, etc. The strange part is that these various essays end up sounding virtually the same, for they all revolve around the assumption that “Man Ray was dazzling in the multiplicity of his talents,” as curator Merry Foresta gushingly puts it. Yes, it’s true, Man Ray worked in many media, but does that alone make him dazzling? What did he achieve in these various media? Weren’t his paintings totally derivative? Weren’t his assemblages just a PG version of Duchamp’s X-rated urinals? Weren’t his portraits distinguished by little else than the fame of their subjects? Throughout his life, Man Ray embraced the spirit of adventure we tend to associate with high modernism while failing to enact the miracles of form inscribed in the work of so many of his contemporaries. He didn’t shape the art of his time so much as it shaped him, and to ignore this fundamental distinction, as the catalogue does, is to fail to come to terms with his achievements.
No exhibition this season has generated more publicity than the Man Ray retrospective. Condé Nast, which for years provided Man Ray with a paycheck, has given him a triple salute—full-length features in Vanity Fair, Vogue, and HG. There have also been articles in Harper’s Bazaar, Interview, Art & Antiques, Smithsonian, and Fame—to mention the few I recently came across in an admittedly haphazard survey of friends’ coffee tables. All of these articles appeared before the exhibition even opened, and all, in their own way, seemed oddly eager to proclaim Man Ray as a man for our time. As one writer put it, “when all is said and done, Man Ray . . . may well emerge as the patron saint of the postmodern.”
Man Ray’s apotheosis as a hero of the Eighties isn’t taking place only in the pages of glossy magazines. A one-day symposium held last December at the National Museum in Washington was devoted to the subject of Man Ray’s (presumably large) influence on contemporary artists. Who, exactly, has he influenced? William Wegman, for one, who came down to Washington to show several short films starring his labrador Man Ray. (The artist told the audience that he originally intended to name his dog Bauhaus—or would that be Bow-haus?—but then changed his mind.) Roberta Smith, an art critic for The New York Times, put on a slide show featuring the work of fashionable SoHo artists and linked them one by one to Surrealism. David Salle, she explained, juxtaposes incongruous images. Elizabeth Murray uses biomorphic forms. Ditto for Terry Winters. Jeff Koons tries to “shock” his viewers by elevating common objects into art. After Smith finished her presentation, Walter Hopps, the director of the Menil Collection in Houston, pointed out that Koons’s chotchkes don’t shock anyone but merely reinforce the consumer mentality of the collectors rushing out to buy them.
Man Ray’s career was eternally divided between art on the one hand and fashion on the other, and at a time when the line between these two worlds is thinner than ever, it’s only logical that he should be looked to as a hero. He taught us that you don’t have to suffer to make art. You can make money, too. You can go to parties. You can have famous friends. Most important, Man Ray taught us that it’s okay to be just minor. He knew he didn’t have a chance of achieving much in an age that was far greater than he was, an age so great that artists today are still living in the shadow of its legacy. How can one ever hope to compete with the amazing achievements of modernism? Like so many contemporary artists, Man Ray got around that problem by forsaking any interest in genuine innovation for the slight but sure rewards of cleverness. This represents a triumph of sorts, but a triumph of attitude rather than of imagination, and one wishes his admirers would stop confusing the two.
- Man Ray: American Artist, by Neil Baldwin; Clarkson N. Potter, 449 pages, $25; Self-Portrait, by Man Ray; New York Graphic Society, 3 20 pages, $ 3 5. Go back to the text.
- “Perpetual Motif: The Art of Man Ray,” organized by Merry Forcsta of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American Art, will be on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles from March 17 through May 28. From there it will travel to the Menil Collection in Houston (June 30 through September 17) and the Philadelphia Museum of Art (October 14 through January 7, 1990). Go back to the text.