visual moment Man Ray in Paris Born Emmanuel Radnitzky in Philadelphia, the artist spent the 1920s and 1930s in the French capital creating iconic photographs of the city’s international avant-garde BY DIANE M. BOLZ
© MAN RAY 2015 TRUST / ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NY/ADAGP, PARIS 2021
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alking through the exhibition of artist Man Ray’s photographs at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts is like stepping into a time machine. One is instantly transported back to the exhilarating, cosmopolitan Paris of the 1920s and 1930s, with its bohemian atmosphere and compelling cast of artists, writers and performers. A sense of teeming creativity emanates from the gallery walls, hung with Ray’s portraits of such cultural and artistic luminaries as Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, Salvador Dali, Igor Stravinsky and Edna St. Vincent Millay. In the years between the two world wars, Paris, a symbol of artistic freedom and modernity, became a mecca for the international avant-garde. Amidst this assembly, a close-knit community of American expatriates formed, prompted in part by the end of World War I, the favorable exchange rate between the dollar and the franc, and the end of the deadly 1918-1919 flu epidemic. Among this group was the artist and photographer Man Ray, a founding father of the antiestablishment, satirical Dada movement and follower of the modernist sensibility of photographer and gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz. The son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, Emmanuel “Manny” Radnitzky, who adopted the pseudonym Man Ray around 1912, was born in South Philadelphia and grew up in Brooklyn, New York. At Brooklyn’s Boys’ High School he learned drafting and other art techniques, and during frequent visits to local museums, he studied works by the Old Masters. Turning down a scholarship to pursue architecture, he decided instead to concentrate on painting. Although he had owned a simple Brownie camera for years, his career as a self-taught photographer didn’t really start 22
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until 1915, when he began making reproductions of his own artwork while living in New York City. Soon he was photographing works for other artists, as well as for organizations such as the Société Anonyme, which he cofounded with artists Marcel Duchamp and Katherine Drier in 1920 to promote modern art in the United States. A sale of his paintings to Ohio art collector Ferdinand Howald earned Ray the funds for a much-coveted trip to Paris. Arriving in the French capital in July 1921, he soon came into contact with American writer Gertrude Stein and American expat Sylvia Beach, owner of Shakespeare and Company, the renowned Parisian bookstore. Both women became champions of his work. Beach commissioned him to do a photographic portrait of Irish writer James Joyce for publicity related to his landmark novel Ulysses, which she published in February 1922. “Shakespeare and Company sent the writer to me to have press photos made,” Ray wrote in his autobiography, Self-Portrait. “I went to work on Joyce because his fine Irish face, although marred by thick glasses—he was between two operations on his eyes—interested me…he seemed to consider the sitting a terrible nuisance.” Although Ray worked in a variety of media, including film, sculpture and painting, photography was the means he favored during his time in Paris. He made his first photographic portraits there around November 1921 and soon set out on a mission to record the city’s bohemian art scene. The remarkable series of portraits he produced documented the international avant-garde gathered in the city and established him as one of the leading photographers of his era. “Man Ray: The Paris Years,” on view in Richmond through February 21, 2022, was planned to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the artist’s arrival in the French capital. Organized by Michael Taylor, VMFA’s chief curator and deputy director for art and education, this revelatory exhibition is supported by extensive archival research. Featuring more than 100 photographs, the show focuses not only on the artist’s achievement as a photographer and portraitist, but also on the friendships and exchange of ideas that took place between
Man Ray created “Self-Portrait with Camera” in 1930 using the innovative process of solarization, which produced the halo-like effect that outlines his profile. Ray is seen adjusting the focal range of his camera, whose lens points outward, as if the viewer were his next subject.
