Le Violon d’Ingres, 1924 by Man Ray; Museum Ludwig Cologne, Photography Collections (Collection Gruber) © Man Ray Trust / ADAGP © Copy Photograph Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln
Man Ray, born Emmanuel Radnitzky, received his artistic education in New York where in the years before and during World War I he began painting and became involved with the city’s avant-garde Surrealists and devotees of Dada. He took up photography and also become a friend of Marcel Duchamp, which led to his moving to Paris in 1921. There, he became part of the Bohemian art world of Montparnasse where he stayed until World War II, when he moved to Hollywood. During his time in Paris, he rapidly became both an avant-garde photographer and the portrait photographer of choice for the cultural avant-garde. Now, in the first major retrospective of Man Ray’s portraiture, the National Portrait gallery has brought together more than 150 pieces to introduce viewers to his iconic photography.
Man Ray was a true artist of the camera, a technical innovator who drew on his artistic training and his intermittent work as a painter. It was Ray who provided the most famous photographs of the talented people of his own time, the images that still identify and commemorate them in encyclopedias or on the covers of their books. In the exhibition are the classic portraits Coco Chanel (1933), Jean Cocteau (1925), Ernest Hemingway (1923), Aldous Huxley (1934), Pablo Picasso (1933), and Arnold Schoenberg(1923). Our aesthetic pleasure in