Photo by Man Ray courtesy Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
It's no wonder that the legendary surrealist photographer Man Ray claimed that he was born with his iconic name. It sounds a lot catchier than Emmanuel Radnitzky.
"It's one of the great artist names of all time," says Michael Taylor, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts' chief curator and deputy director for art and education. "At school, his friends would call him Manny, so Manny became Man, and Radnitzky became Ray."
The VMFA's major new exhibit, “Man Ray: The Paris Years,” tells the story of how this son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, born in Philadelphia and raised in Brooklyn, became one of the world's most successful fashion and portrait photographers while also emerging as a leading figure in the heady avant-garde cultural scene of Paris in the 1920s and '30s.
"My works were designed to amuse, annoy, bewilder, mystify and inspire reflection," he said before his death in 1976, and his creations have stood the test of time. ARTnews magazine, for example, named Man Ray one of the 25 most influential artists of the 20th century, and an "American Masters" documentary on PBS called him "the prophet of the avant-garde."
While he's known today for his photographs, Man Ray, who moved to Paris in 1921 at the same time that the city was emerging as a cultural hotspot, was also a filmmaker, painter and sculptor. His experimental film "Emak-Bakia" is included in the exhibit, and a complete program of his movies will be screened at the museum as part of a special program on Jan. 14.
"Man Ray: The Paris Years" concentrates on his iconic portrait photography, Taylor says. "This will document the period in which Man Ray engages in surrealism and includes portraits of the cultural luminaries of Paris, such as André Breton, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Salvador Dalí and Pablo Picasso.” These stunning, sometimes otherworldly pictures were born from Man Ray's pioneering innovations, both behind the lens and in the darkroom.
"He was wildly experimental and had many techniques," says Taylor, a lifelong devotee of surrealist art who personally curated the exhibit. "He made what he called Rayographs, a form of cameraless photography where you take photosensitive paper and expose it to light. It registers in a very shadowy way, like an X-ray. Another technique he pioneered was solarization. That's where the negative is placed in the developing tank and exposed to light. It reverses the tones so that light becomes dark and dark becomes light, and it gives this beautiful edge, especially with portraits, to a nose or a chin. You'll see that he's a lover of chance and accidents while also pushing the limits of portraiture."
The exhibit will also serve as the unveiling of one of the museum's largest and most important acquisitions in recent memory. While many of the 120 works on display are on loan from institutions, such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Getty Museum, and from collectors like Elton John (who owns the world's largest private collection of Man Ray photos), the core of “Man Ray: The Paris Years” will be 50 Man Ray portraits recently purchased for the VMFA's permanent collection.
"We have an amazing photography collection, but at the time, we only had two Man Ray photographs," Taylor says. “But now we have a collection that rivals places like the Getty in New York as the largest collection of Man Ray photographs in America.”
Beyond serving as an enchanting glimpse into a revered time and place, Man Ray's work in Paris also speaks to modern audiences, the curator says. "It's interesting to see how Man Ray documented this change in women's appearances and change in outlook. These subjects were independent, wanted to have careers and didn't want to be defined by having a husband and family. It was an early wave of feminism, and Man Ray managed to capture it."
And at a time in the United States when African Americans were being cast aside, Man Ray's portraits of expatriate Black creatives stand out as both lovely, ethereal photos and statements of purpose.
"In the U.S., it was that Jim Crow era where theaters were segregated, but many of the performers, like Josephine Baker and Ruby Richards and all of the great jazz performers, could come to Paris and become stars and could live with more freedom,” Taylor says. “And Man Ray was there to document all of it."
