Man Ray
Self-Portrait with Half Beard, 1943
Vintage silver print, 7 ⅛ × 5 ⅛ inches (18.1 × 13 cm)
© Man Ray Trust/ADAGP 2018
Over the course of his storied career, Man Ray created work spanning a variety of mediums: painting, photography, sculpture, printmaking, film, poetry, and prose. His work aligned variously with Cubism, Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism—all the while retaining its own distinct style. Man Ray is most noted for his profound body of photographic works, which encompass fashion, portraiture, and technical experimentation such as solarization and the widely celebrated photograms or “rayographs”: the artist created these compelling images without a camera, arranging found objects onto sheets of photosensitive paper and exposing them to light. The rayographs wavered between representation and concept, epitomizing the indeterminate forces that have come to define his vast oeuvre. Alluding to relationships between the real and the fictive, Man Ray commanded a deft mastery over the liminal territory between the abstract and figurative form.
Man Ray was born in 1890 in Philadelphia, and died in 1976 in Paris. His work is held in the collections of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and Israel Museum, Jerusalem, among others. Recent solo exhibitions include Alias Man Ray: The Art of Reinvention, Jewish Museum, New York (2009–10); Man Ray Portraits, National Portrait Gallery, London (2013); and Man Ray—Human Equations, Phillips Collection, Washington, DC (2015).
Lee Miller and Tanja Ramm’s friendship took them from New York to Paris and back, in front of and behind many cameras, and into the Surrealist avant-garde. Here, Gagosian director Richard Calvocoressi speaks with Ramm’s daughter, art historian Margit Rowell, about discovering her mother’s early life, her memories of Miller, and the collaborative work of photographers and models.
Sydney Stutterheim meditates on the power and possibilities of small-format artworks throughout time.
The Spring 2020 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Cindy Sherman’s Untitled #412 (2003) on its cover.
Timothy Baum muses on Man Ray’s foray into filmmaking in the 1920s, the subject of the exhibition Man Ray: The Mysteries of Château du Dé at Gagosian, San Francisco.
The Winter 2019 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring a selection from Christopher Wool’s Westtexaspsychosculpture series on its cover.
At the 2018 Frieze Masters fair in London, Gagosian’s stand presented more than ninety works by Man Ray: objects and assemblages, collages, oils, prints, drawings, and photographs. Richard Calvocoressi traces the development of the artist’s wide-ranging work and looks at his legendary three-year collaboration with Lee Miller.
Lawrence Weschler profiles the European exiles in Los Angeles during the 1930s and ’40s, examining how cultural visionaries, from Man Ray to Arnold Schoenberg, navigated the dramatic change in setting.
Timothy Baum explores this period of transition in response to an exhibition of Man Ray’s vintage gelatin silver photographs from his “Hollywood” period.
The Spring 2018 Gagosian Quarterly with a cover by Ed Ruscha is now available for order.
Mary Ann Caws and Charles Stuckey discuss the presence of food and the dining table in the history of modern art.
In the early 1980s, Ira Nowinski visited a studio frozen in time.
Harnessing the gestural, unpredictable, projectile qualities of spray paint, artists have repurposed it as an alternative to the brush, to create hazy textures, drips, puddles, and graffiti-like text. Peter Stevens discusses this history of spray paint as an artistic medium with Alison McDonald.
