Man Ray (born Emmanuel Radnitzky August 27, 1890 - November 18, 1976) is an American visual artist who spent most of his career in France. He is a significant contributor to the Dada and Surrealist movements, although his relationship with each is informal. He produced great works in various media but considered himself a painter above all. He is famous for photography, and he is a fashion photographer and famous portrait. Man Ray is also famous for his work with photograms, which he calls "rayographs" referring to himself.
Video Man Ray
Life and careers
Background and early life
During his career as an artist, Man Ray let some details of his early life or family background be publicly known. He even refused to admit that he ever had a name other than Man Ray.
Man Ray's birth name was Emmanuel Radnitzky in South Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA, in 1890. He was the eldest child of Russian Jewish immigrants, Max, a tailor, and Minnie Radnitzky. He has a brother, Sam, and two sisters, Dora and Essie, the youngest born in 1897 shortly after they settled in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. In early 1912, the Radnitzky family changed their surname to Ray. Man Ray's brother chose the surname as a reaction to the ethnic discrimination and antisemitism prevalent at the time. Emmanuel, called "Manny" as a nickname, changed his first name to Man and gradually started using Man Ray as his name.
Man Ray's father works in a garment factory and runs a small sewing business outside the family home. He asked his children to help him from an early age. Man Ray's mother loves to design family clothes and creates patchwork items from scraps of cloth. Man Ray wants to break away from his family background, but sew them up leaving a lasting mark on his art. Mannequins, flat irons, sewing machines, needles, pins, threads, fabrics, and other items related to sewing appear in almost every medium of his work. Art historians have noted the similarity between painting techniques and techniques and the Ray style used for sewing.
Mason Klein, curator of a Man Ray exhibit at the Jewish Museum in New York, Man Ray: The Art of Reinvention, suggests that the artist might be a "Jewish avant-garde artist first."
Man Ray is the uncle of photographer Naomi Savage, who studied some of his techniques and incorporated them into his own.
First artistic effort
Man Ray displays artistic and mechanical abilities during childhood. His education at Brooklyn's Boys' High School from 1904 to 1909 gave him a firm foundation in composing and other basic art techniques. When she went to school, she educated herself by frequent visits to local art museums, where she studied the works of the Old Masters. After his graduation, Ray was offered a scholarship to study architecture but chose to pursue a career as an artist. Man Ray's parents were disillusioned with their son's decision to pursue art, but they agreed to rearrange a simple family home so that Ray's room could become his studio. The artist remains in the family home for the next four years. During this time, he worked diligently to become a professional painter. Man Ray makes money as a commercial artist and is a technical illustrator in several Manhattan companies.
The surviving examples of his work from this period show that he tried most of the paintings and drawings in the style of the 19th century. He has become an admirer of contemporary avant-garde art, such as the European modernist he sees in Alfred Stieglitz's "291" gallery and works at Ashcan School. However, with some exceptions, he has not been able to integrate this trend into his own work. The arts classes he attended sporadically, including performing assignments at the National Academy of Design and Art Students League, were of little use to him. When he enrolled at Ferrer School in the fall of 1912, he began an intense and rapid period of artistic development.
New York
While living in New York City, Man Ray was visually influenced by the 1913 Armory Show and gallery of contemporary European works. The painting initially featured a facet of cubism. After making friends with Marcel Duchamp, who was interested in showing movements in static paintings, his works began to portray the movements of the characters. An example is the repetitive position of the dancer skirt at The Rope Dancer Accompanying Himself with its Shadow (1916).
In 1915, Man Ray performed his first solo performances of paintings and pictures after he lived in an art colony in Grantwood, New Jersey, across the Hudson River from New York City. His first proto-Dada object, a collection entitled Portrait of Self , was exhibited the following year. He produced his first important photos in 1918.
Man Ray left a conventional painting to involve himself with Dada, a radical anti-art movement. He began creating objects and developing unique mechanical and photographic methods to create images. For the 1918 Rope Dancer version he combined a spray gun technique with a pen image. Like Duchamp, he does readymades - a common object selected and modified. The readymade gift (1921) is iron-tied with metal spikes attached to the bottom, and Enigma Isidore Ducasse is an invisible object (sewing machine) wrapped in cloth and tied with rope. Aerograph (1919), another work from this period, was performed with an airbrush on the glass.
In 1920, Man Ray helped Duchamp create Rotary Glass Plates, one of the earliest examples of kinetic art. It consists of a glass plate that is rotated by a motor. That same year, Man Ray, Katherine Dreier, and Duchamp founded the Socià © à © tà ©  © Anonyme, a collection of museums that was the first modern art museum in the US.
Man Ray worked with Duchamp to publish a New York Dada edition in 1920. For Man Ray, Dada's experiment was not suitable for wild and chaotic streets in New York. He writes that "Dada can not live in New York. All New York is chest, and will not tolerate rivals."
In 1913, Man Ray met his first wife, Belgian poet Adon Lacroix (Donna Lecoeur) (1887-1975), in New York. They married in 1914, split in 1919, and officially divorced in 1937.
Paris
In July 1921, Man Ray went to live and work in Paris, France. He soon settled in the Montparnasse quarter which was favored by many artists. Shortly after arriving in Paris, he met and fell in love with Kiki de Montparnasse (Alice Prin), a model of artist and famous figure among Parisian bohemians. Kiki was a friend of Man Ray for most of the 1920s. He became the subject of some of his most famous photographic photographs and starred in his experimental films, Le Retour ÃÆ' la Raison and L'ÃÆ' â € ° toile de mer . In 1929, he started an affair with Surrealist photographer Lee Miller. Miller left it in 1932.
Over the next 20 years in Montparnasse, Man Ray is a prominent photographer. Significant art world members, such as James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Jean Cocteau, Bridget Bate Tichenor, and Antonin Artaud, posed for his camera.
Man Ray was represented in the first surrealist exhibition with Jean Arp, Max Ernst, AndrÃÆ' Â © Masson, Joan MirÃÆ'³, and Pablo Picasso at Galerie Pierre in Paris in 1925. The important works of this time were metronomers with eyes, originally titled Object to Be Destroyed , and the Violon d'Ingres, amazing photos of Kiki de Montparnasse, styled after the painter/musician Ingres. Violon d'Ingres is a popular example of how Man Ray can reconcile different elements in photography to produce meaning.
In 1934, surrealist artist MÃÆ' Â © ret Oppenheim, known for his feather-coated tea cup, posed naked for Man Ray in a series of famous photographs depicting him standing next to the printing press.
With Lee Miller, his photography assistant and lover, Man Ray rediscovered the technique of solar photography. He also created the type of photogram he calls "rayograph", which he describes as "pure chest disease".
Man Ray directs a number of influential avant-garde short films, known as CinÃÆ'  © ma Pur . He directed Le Retour ÃÆ' la Raison (2 mins, 1923); Blue-Bakia (16 minutes, 1926); L'ÃÆ' â € ° toile de Mer (15 mins, 1928); and Les MystÃÆ'¨res du ChÃÆ' ¢ teau de DÃÆ' © (27 mins, 1929). Man Ray also helped Marcel Duchamp with his movie cinematography Anemic Cinema (1926), and Ray personally started the camera on Fernand Là ©  © ger's Ballet MÃÆ' © canique (1924). In the film Renà ©  © Clair Entr'acte (1924), Man Ray appeared in a short chess playing scene with Duchamp.
Duchamp, Man Ray, and Francis Picabia are friends and collaborators. All three are connected by their experimental, entertaining, and innovative art.
Hollywood
Man Ray was forced to return from Paris to the United States due to the Second World War. He lived in Los Angeles from 1940 to 1951 where he focused his creative energy on painting. A few days after arriving in Los Angeles, Man Ray met Juliet Browner, the first-generation Romanian-Americans of Romania. He is a trained dancer, who learns to dance with Martha Graham, and models experienced artists. The two married in 1946 in a double marriage with their friends Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning. In 1948, Man Ray held a solo exhibition at the Copley Gallery in Beverley Hills, bringing together a variety of jobs and featuring his freshly painted canvas from the Shakespearean Equations series.
Next life
Man Ray returned to Paris in 1951, and settled with Juliet in a studio on 2 bis rue Ferou near Luxembourg Gardens in St. Louis. Germain des Pres, where he continued his creative practice across the media. During the last quarter century of his life, he returned to his previous iconic works, creating them in a new form. He also directed the production of a limited edition replica of some of his objects, working first with Marcel Zerbib and then Arturo Schwarz.
In 1963, he published his autobiography, Self Portrait , reissued in 1999.
He died in Paris on November 18, 1976, due to a lung infection. He was buried at CimetiÃÆ'¨re du Montparnasse in Paris. The writing on Ray's stone reads "no matter, but not indifferent". When Juliet Browner died in 1991, she was buried in the same grave. The writing on his tombstone reads "together again". Juliet organizes trust for her work and contributes most of her work to the museum. His plan to return the studio as a public museum proved too expensive; like that the structure is broken. Most of the contents are stored in Pompidou Center.
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Accolades
In 1974, Man Ray received the Royal Medal of Photography and Honorary Fellowship "in recognition of any discovery, research, publication or other contribution that has made significant progress in the development of scientific or photographic technology or imagery in the broadest sense." On in 1999, the magazine ARTnews called Man Ray one of the 25 most influential artists of the 20th century. The publication cites its innovative photographs, "the exploration of films, paintings, sculptures, collages, collections and prototypes of what ultimately is called performing arts and conceptual art." ARTnews goes on to state that "Man Ray offers artists in all media examples of creative intelligence that, in his 'pursuit of fun and freedom', unlocks every door in it and runs freely everywhere." fun and freedom is one of the guiding principles of Ray, along with others like doing socially banned things.
Source of the article : Wikipedia