Man Ray American, 1890-1976

Man Ray (1890–1976) was a central figure in Dada and Surrealism and one of the most inventive artists of the twentieth century. Moving freely among painting, sculpture, film, drawing, and photography, he rejected the boundaries between artistic disciplines. He is best known for the rayograph, his term for a cameraless photograph made by placing objects directly on light-sensitive paper and exposing them to light. The poet Tristan Tzara described these images as capturing objects in the act of dreaming.

Born Emmanuel Radnitzky in Philadelphia in 1890 and raised in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Man Ray was the eldest child of an immigrant Jewish tailor. He adopted the name Man Ray in 1909 and worked as a commercial artist while pursuing painting. His meeting with Marcel Duchamp in 1915 led to a close friendship, and together they became central figures in New York Dada. The materials and objects of everyday life left a lasting imprint on his art: mannequins, flatirons, sewing machines, and fabric swatches recur throughout his work. In 1921, he moved to Paris, where he remained at the heart of the Surrealist circle for two decades. Alongside his experimental work, he made portraits of James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and Georges Braque, fashion photographs for Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, and three films.

Emak Bakia, a unique print made in 1926 during the production of his film of the same name, distils movement into arcs and repeated curves without depicting a specific action. The rayographs originated by chance in the winter of 1921. While making contact prints in the bathroom of a Montparnasse hotel, Man Ray discovered an unexposed sheet of photographic paper in the developing tray. Rather than discard it, he placed objects on the wet paper and switched on the light. Tzara was among the first to recognise the significance of the resulting images and wrote the introduction to Les Champs délicieux, the portfolio in which they were published. Man Ray continued to explore photographic experimentation through solarised portraits and nudes, including Larmes (c. 1932), in which a woman’s tears take the form of glass beads. Le Violon d’Ingres (1924), depicting the back of Kiki de Montparnasse marked with the f-holes of a violin, became one of the most widely reproduced photographs of the twentieth century. His sculptural objects are equally celebrated: Cadeau (1921), a flatiron studded with tacks, and Object to Be Destroyed (1923), a metronome bearing a photograph of Lee Miller’s eye.

Man Ray spent the war years in Hollywood, from 1940 to 1951, before returning to Paris, where he established a studio on the rue Férou and lived until his death on November 18, 1976. Retrospectives followed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1966, the Centre Pompidou in 1981, and the National Museum of American Art in 1988. In 2025, The Metropolitan Museum of Art presented Man Ray: When Objects Dream, the first major exhibition to place the rayographs at the center of his practice, bringing together more than 160 works.

Bruce Silverstein Gallery presented Le Baiser de Man Ray in 2024 and has included his work in Photographer as Sculptor, Sculptor as Photographer and In Sequence (both 2025), as well as REWIND (2021) and the travelling exhibition An Outsider’s Eye (2024). His work is held in the collections of major museums around the world, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Pompidou, the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum.