A trailblazing figure in Twentieth Century art, Man Ray (1890‱976) revealed multiple artistic identities over the course of his career †Dadaist, Parisian Surrealist, international portrait and fashion photographer †and produced many important and enduring works as a photographer, painter, filmmaker, writer, sculptor and object maker. Relatively few people know that he was born Emmanuel Radnitzky to Russian Jewish immigrants. In fact, he spent a lifetime suppressing his background to the point of denying he was ever called anything but Man Ray.
The Jewish Museum will present “Alias Man Ray: The Art of Reinvention” from November 15 through March 14, a major exhibition considering how the artist’s life and career were shaped by his turn-of-the-century American Jewish immigrant experience and his lifelong evasion of his past. The exhibition explores the deliberate cultural ambiguity of Man Ray, who became the first American artist to be accepted by the avant-garde in Paris. It also examines the dynamic connection between Man Ray’s assimilation, the evolution of his art and his willful construction of a distinctive artistic persona, as evidenced in a series of subtle, encrypted self-references throughout his career.
Visitors to “Alias Man Ray” will be privy to the artist’s endless experimentation in more than 200 works, including photographs, paintings, sculptures and objects, drawings, films and a selection of his writings. As the first major multimedia Man Ray show at a New York City museum since 1974, the exhibition will present many iconic works, such as the photographs “Le Violon d’Ingres,” 1924, and “Noire et Blanche,” 1926; the paintings “War (AD MCMXIV),” 1914, “The Rope Dancer Accompanies Herself with Her Shadows,” 1916, and “La Fortune,” 1938; and the wood screen “La Fôret Dorée de Man Ray,” 1950.
Best known as a photographer, Man Ray in fact moved from one medium to another as he defied aesthetic boundaries. The Jewish Museum show does not confine itself to one period of the artist’s career or a single medium, such as photography. This approach is essential to illustrating how Man Ray continuously broke with aesthetic tradition and forged a new artistic identity.
He came of age at the beginning of the Twentieth Century and the rise of abstract art. Man Ray grew up in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. His father worked as a tailor and his mother was a seamstress. After being introduced to New York art circles by photographer and gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz, he went off to Paris †the center of experimental art †and was embraced by the avant-garde. The year was 1921 and Man Ray was 31. In Paris, he was perceived as neither Jewish nor a New Yorker, but as a free-thinking American who quickly gained notice.
To make ends meet, he took assignments photographing a broad spectrum of literary and artistic figures. That group now reads like a Modernist pantheon †Marcel Duchamp, André Breton, Jean Cocteau, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Marcel Proust and Gertrude Stein, among others. These innovative portraits, all on view in the exhibition, provide a chronicle of the social milieu in which Man Ray thrived.
The Jewish Museum at 1109 Fifth Avenue at 92nd Street. For more information, www.thejewishmuseum.org or 212-423-3200.
