Man Ray (1890‱978), the enfant terrible of American Modernism, made his greatest contribution to the movement through his pioneering photographs of African masks, headdresses and figures. These images influenced the work of European and American avant-garde artists, and promoted appreciation of African objects as works of art. Man Ray’s Modernist photographic aesthetic had a significant impact on ways in which African art was interpreted at the beginning of the Twentieth Century.
Man Ray was part of a movement between the world wars in which photography emerged as a major vehicle of creative expression. The developing medium was embraced by artists on both sides of the Atlantic in search of new art forms that responded to the profound social upheavals of the era.
Man Ray led the way in introducing radical approaches to the art of photography.
His achievements as avant-garde provocateur and gifted photographer are celebrated in “Man Ray, African Art and the Modernist Lens,” on view at The Phillips Collection through January 10. Organized by International Art and Artists and curated by independent historian Wendy A. Grossman, the exhibition showcases Man Ray photographs and photos by Modernist contemporaries, including Cecil Beaton, Walker Evans, Charles Sheeler and Alfred Stieglitz †men displayed with the African objects they depicted.
Born in Philadelphia to a family of Russian-Jewish immigrants, Emmanuel Radnitzky was raised in Brooklyn, where his parents operated a tailoring shop. In 1909, he changed his name to Man Ray. The entire family followed suit; all became Rays. It was said that Man Ray, who was reluctant to talk about his origins, was “practically allergic to history.” Life to him offered a chance to create something new; he created a new name by streamlining the old one down to its snappiest portions.
Man Ray did poorly in academic subjects in school, but excelled at drawing and lettering. Turning down a scholarship to study architecture at New York University, he set out on his own to learn the fundamentals of making art.
Although largely self-trained, Man Ray studied briefly with Ashcan School artists Robert Henri and George Bellows, where he was delighted by the willingness of female classmates to strip and model during drawing class. Women and sex were driving forces in Man Ray’s life and art. When asked as an old man what inspired him most, he responded, “Women.”
Man Ray was shocked by the Armory Show of 1913, where he saw the work of European avant-garde, and particularly Marcel Duchamp, later his close ally and playmate. Around this time, Man Ray met and impressed Stieglitz, eminent photographer and, at his 291 gallery, champion of avant-garde art.
Among the exhibitions at 291 that influenced Man Ray were watercolors by Cezanne and Rodin; sculpture by Brancusi, and a groundbreaking display of African masks and other items. Until this time, African objects, seen as ethnologic curiosities, were considered primitive works outside the artistic mainstream and housed in cramped American natural history museums.
The 1914 installation at 291, with masks, figural sculptures and utilitarian objects exhibited against walls decorated with Cubist-like geometric forms, encouraged viewing the African sculpture as works of art meriting aesthetic consideration.
These works were of particular interest to Modernists like Man Ray, who were searching for alternatives to high-art traditions; they looked to tribal art for simpler means of representation, potential new forms of abstraction and/or just plain magic. Taken around the time of World War I, the photographs shed light on issues of race, identity and gender in the context of America’s history of slavery, segregation and disenfranchisement.
Encouraged by Stieglitz, Man Ray joined Marcel Duchamp as leader of New York Dada, an anti-art expression of disgust with the carnage of World War I. Between 1916 and 1920, they encouraged improvised, sarcastic expressions of intuition and irrationality among fellow artists. The term, picked at random from a dictionary, meant “hobbyhorse” in French.
Moving to Paris, the international hub of modern culture in the early 1920s, Man Ray took up photography in earnest and began doing fashion shoots and then portraits of society and Surrealist characters. He fell in with Kiki of Montparnasse (aka Alice Prim), an alluring, sexy model always ready to sing, fight or flirt. They met when Man Ray rescued her from being tossed out of a café.
By the end of 1921, she had moved into his studio. She was featured in a number of his subsequent camera shots.
His compelling photograph of Kiki’s head on a table facing an African mask, a representation of pure Modernism, became an icon of the Surrealist movement. By separating the heads from the bodies in “Noire et Blanche (Black and White),” 1926, Man Ray made them both discrete objects. As transformed by photography, the mask (a magical primitive fetish and sign of unconsciousness) comes to life, while the human head (passive and erotic) looks dead. The picture popularized African art, and introduced ideas of avant-garde photography to mainstream audiences.
When the Dada movement dissolved in the early 1920s, Man Ray and other adherents embraced Surrealism, a concept launched by Frenchman Andre Breton in 1924. “While the movement’s Dada roots were evident in its shared rejection of bourgeois norms and values and its provocative activities,” writes Grossman in the exhibition catalog, “the Surrealist program of politically engaged art celebrated the irrational and uncanny, and the unconscious as vehicles for revolutionizing human experience, modes of thought and society as a whole.”
In one memorable image, Man Ray photographed Breton’s wife lying on her back and gazing back at the viewer, while holding on her stomach a severe-looking statuette of a Vanuatu man. In another, taken around 1933, he photographed a tiny brass antelope gold weight from Ghana or the Ivory Coast nestled on a hand of Danish collector Carl Kjersmeier.
In 1937, for a “Mode au Congo” series, Man Ray created a number of photographs of his live-in companion, Adrienne “Ady” Fidelin, a dark-skinned, exotic dancer from Guadeloupe, posing bare breasted and modeling a variety of African headdresses in varied poses to differing effects. Whether leaning playfully over a chessboard as a jester or in more provocative poses, Ady’s erotic manner is palpable. (She nonetheless became the first woman of color to appear on the pages of a major Western fashion magazine, Harper’s Bazaar .)
The contrast between Ady’s relaxed, “exotic and sexualized air&[and] classic come-hither look,” according to Grossman, and Man Ray’s photographs of white European models posed in similar Congo headdresses is striking. “The unusual styles and material †cowry shells and feathers †all signal the alien nature of these millinery forms to Westerners, underscored by the awkward poses and remote expressions on the white models’ faces,” Grossman observes. Case in point: a photograph of a blasé-looking Comtesse de St Exupery in 1937, rather uneasily sporting a Congo headgear and wearing an African bracelet while holding a small bowl. The paradox of modern fashion derived from so-called primitive cultures is fascinating.
Man Ray’s photographs were widely disseminated, in part because he was such an outrageous self-promoter. In 1937, he attended a Parisian masked ball dressed as a turbaned pirate, naked to the waist, accompanied by Ady, as his slave, similarly half-clothed. Needless to say, even blasé Parisians noticed them.
In the mid-1930s, celebrated Czech photographer Josef Sudek snapped several masterful photos of Dan masks from the Ivory Coast. In a particularly striking image that was in keeping with contemporary views of Africa as a dark and dangerous continent, Sudek photographed two masks †one full face and one in profile †ominously emerging from a dark backdrop. “He let the masks slowly emerge from the background using a diffused light, typical in his work,” observes Czech historian Tomas Winter in the catalog.
There are numerous photographs in the show of single, invariably intriguing, African sculptural figures. The standout is Man Ray’s circa 1934 photo of “one of the most acclaimed African sculptures in Western collections at the time,” according to Grossman, a dancing female figure from the Bangwa kingdom of Cameroon. Man Ray’s adroit employment of high camera angle, dramatic lighting and theatrical use of space captured the sense of movement, asymmetrical composition and roughly textured wooden surface of the expressively carved figure, who is likely a royal. The highly esteemed Walker Evans achieved less impressive results with conventional front and rear photos of the same piece.
Other photographers used African objects as demonstrative props, such as Carl Van Vechten’s views of singers Billie Holiday and Pearl Bailey holding African masks. Likewise, Van Vechten, a white cultural critic and novelist about life in Harlem, posed Senegalese dancer and actor Feral “Francois” Benga †known as the male Josephine Baker †against an exotic background holding the sculpted head of an African figure to his lips. These images suggest Van Vechten’s complex primitivist perspective on African art.
In the 1920s, the New Negro movement, spearheaded by Howard University philosophy professor Alain Locke, promoted the idea of an African ancestral legacy in the arts as a means for African Americans to reclaim their cultural heritage and forge a new black identity. Advanced further by the Harlem Renaissance, this approach led to striking visual translations, notably by Locke’s Howard University faculty colleague James Lesesne Wells, who taught studio art. Wells recalled his ancestral African art legacy in compelling linoleum-cut prints, like “African Masks,” 1929, in New Negro publications of the period.
African American photographer James L. Allen’s apt image of Wells shows the graphic artist gazing intently at a head-shaped drinking vessel created by a Kuba carver from Central Africa. The object, borrowed from Locke’s collection, was a symbol of status and nobility. “This image,” says Grossman, “provides insight into diverse creative responses to African art expressed in the photographic medium across racial lines.”
The standout painting in the exhibition, the haunting “Les Fetiches [fetishes],” 1938, by Howard University art teacher Lois Maillou Jones, shows a Cezannesque African mask around which float a number of other masks. This “kaleidoscopic of African objects,” as Grossman puts it, was painted by Jones while studying in Paris.
While Jones saw many African masks in the City of Light, Grossman traces the origins of “Les Fetiches” to her viewing a series of Walker Evans photos of objects in the 1935 exhibition of African art at the Museum of Modern Art. “The resemblance between representations of a Dan mask, a Baule figure and a Lega mask from Evans’s extensive portfolio and corresponding objects in the canvas is undeniable,” Grossman contends. On view is Evans’s 1935 photo of a Lega mask from the Congo.
After a time, the Surrealists tired of African art and turned in other directions for artistic inspiration. By then, Man Ray’s astutely composed, brilliantly photographed images of Africana had left a lasting mark on Modernist art.
Painter, sculptor, photographer, object maker, illustrator, filmmaker and printer, the enterprising Man Ray used whatever medium best suited the picture he had in mind. His hard work and ambition, along with his multifaceted talents, led to international stardom and careers in New York and Hollywood after leaving Paris in 1940.
Man Ray preferred to be known as a painter, but today is recognized as one of the most brilliant photographers ever to click a camera. As the preeminent, most influential Modernist photographer, he created powerful images that reflected the intersection of African art, photography and high fashion. His revolutionary pictures continue to influence our understanding of African art today. In the broadest sense, Man Ray deserves recognition for establishing photography as a potent means of artistic expression.
The 184-page catalog, written primarily by Grossman with short essays by other experts, is published by International Arts & Artists and distributed by the University of Minnesota Press. It sells for $39.95 (softcover).
After closing in Washington, “Man Ray” travels to the University of Virginia Museum (August 7⁏ctober 10) and the University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver (October 29⁊anuary 23, 2011).
The Phillips Collection is at 1600 21st Street NW. For information, 202-387-2151 or www.phillipscollection.org .
