Man Ray

Man Ray, born Emmanuel Radnitzky on August 27, 1890, in South Philadelphia, and died November 18, 1976, was an American-born visual artist who later became a French citizen. He spent most of his working life in Paris. Though he played a major role in both the Dada and Surrealist movements, his connection to each was informal. He created important works across many mediums, but he always saw himself first and foremost as a painter. He also made his mark as an innovator in photography, working as a fashion and portrait photographer, and is especially known for his photograms, which he dubbed "rayographs" after himself.

Man Ray was secretive about his early life. He never publicly acknowledged having any other name and his 1963 autobiography, *Self-Portrait*, includes very few dates. He was the eldest child of Russian Jewish immigrants: his father, Melach "Max" Radnitzky, was a tailor, and his mother was Manya "Minnie" Radnitzky (née Lourie or Luria). He had a brother, Sam, and two sisters, Dorothy "Dora" and Essie (or Elsie), the youngest born in 1897 shortly after the family settled at 372 Debevoise Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. In early 1912, the family changed their surname to Ray, a choice made by Sam in response to widespread antisemitism. Emmanuel, nicknamed "Manny," changed his first name to Man and gradually adopted Man Ray as his full name.

His father worked in a garment factory and ran a small tailoring business from home, enlisting his children to help from a young age. His mother enjoyed designing the family’s clothes and making patchwork items from fabric scraps. Man Ray wanted to distance himself from this background, but tailoring left a lasting mark on his art. Mannequins, flat irons, sewing machines, needles, pins, thread, fabric swatches, and other tailoring tools appear frequently in his work, and art historians have noted similarities between his collage and painting techniques and tailoring methods. Curator Mason Klein, who organized the exhibition *Alias Man Ray: The Art of Reinvention* at the Jewish Museum in New York, has suggested that Man Ray may have been the first Jewish avant-garde artist. He was also the uncle of photographer Naomi Savage, who learned some of his techniques and used them in her own work.

As a child, Man Ray showed both artistic and mechanical talent. He attended Brooklyn’s Boys' High School from 1904 to 1909, where he gained a solid foundation in drafting and basic art techniques. He educated himself further by frequently visiting local art museums. After graduating, he was offered a scholarship to study architecture but chose to become an artist instead. His parents were disappointed but agreed to rearrange their modest home so his room could serve as his studio. He lived with them for the next four years, working steadily toward becoming a professional painter. To earn money, he worked as a commercial artist and technical illustrator for several Manhattan companies.

Surviving works from this period show mostly paintings and drawings in 19th-century styles. He was already an avid admirer of contemporary avant-garde art, including the European modernists he saw at Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 gallery and works by the Ashcan School, but he had not yet incorporated these trends into his own work. Sporadic art classes at the National Academy of Design and the Art Students League did little for him. However, when he enrolled at the Ferrer Centre in autumn 1912, his artistic development accelerated rapidly. The centre, founded by anarchists in memory of the executed Catalan educator Francisco Ferrer, offered drawing classes and lectures on art criticism. Anarchist writer Emma Goldman noted that the art class had "a spirit of freedom which probably did not exist anywhere else in New York at that time." Man Ray exhibited works in the centre’s 1912–13 group show, and his painting *A Study in Nudes* was reproduced in a review in the centre’s magazine *The Modern School*. This may have been his first published artwork, and the magazine later printed his first published poem, *Travail*, in 1913. During this period, he also contributed illustrations to radical publications, including cover art for two 1914 issues of Emma Goldman’s journal *Mother Earth*.

His work at this time was influenced by the avant-garde European artists he encountered at the 1913 Armory Show. His early paintings show facets of cubism. After befriending Marcel Duchamp, who was interested in depicting movement in static paintings, Man Ray’s works began to show figures in motion—for example, the repeated positions of a dancer’s skirts in *The Rope Dancer Accompanies Herself with Her Shadows* (1916). In 1915, after moving to an art colony in Grantwood, New Jersey, he had his first solo exhibition of paintings and drawings. The following year, he exhibited his first proto-Dada object, an assemblage called *Self-Portrait*. He took up a camera in 1918, initially just to document his own artwork, and produced his first significant photographs that year. He then abandoned conventional painting to immerse himself in the radical Dada movement. He published two Dadaist periodicals, each lasting only one issue: *The Ridgefield Gazook* (1915) and *TNT* (1919), the latter co-edited with Adolf Wolff and Mitchell Dawson. He began making objects and developing unique mechanical and photographic methods for creating images.