MAN RAY
I photograph what I cannot paint and I paint what I cannot photograph.
American artist Man Ray (1890-1976) is well known as one of the greatest photographers of the
20th century. Many of his pictures have been given iconic status and are counted as some of the
most emblematic in the history of photography. But Man Ray was not just a photographer. In a
chain reaction of experimental and innovative creative processes, he expressed himself as both
painter, poet, object artist, filmmaker and photographer. Man Ray refused to be bound by categories
and made a fertile blend of form and idea his artistic trademark. In this way, he became a catalyst
for the development of a new conception of art which is still thriving today. It is therefore necessary
to appreciate the work in all its complexity in order to fully understand Man Ray and his
significance.
This is the aim of Mjellby Konstmuseum´s exhibition entitled Man Ray which runs from
15.06.2013 to 15.09.2013. The exhibition has been created in partnership with the Öregaard
Museum, Gentofte, Denmark. Man Ray is a retrospective look at the ways in which Man Ray
explored the link between object, vision, and thought using every medium and technique. Through a
juxtaposition of paintings, drawings, collages, objects, photographs, films and books, the exhibition
presents Man Ray's cross-aesthetic and conceptual ambit, guiding us through the artist's ideas as
they are expressed in a variety of material guises. The exhibition is accompanied by a
comprehensively illustrated book, which will be a major publication about the artist in Swedish.
Pleasure and Freedom
"My work is about two things: pleasure and freedom." Such was Man Ray's reply when, late in life,
he was asked to characterise his oeuvre. These two concepts do indeed seem a fitting description of
the restlessly inquisitive spirit that marks his artistic production: from the naturalist paintings of his
early youth, which he abandoned in 1913, through modernist abstractions, poems, New York Dada
with
its ready-mades and anti-establishment activities to the Surrealist fascination with the
expansion of consciousness, experimental film and the many opportunities of the monochromatic
world of photography. Man Ray lived through it all and made his impact clearly felt on the early
avant-garde art of the 20th century. He was one of few in his generation to defy all aesthetic
systems - even the ones that were founded on anti-aesthetic attitudes. He made his living as one of
the most sought-after portrait, commercial, and fashion photographers of the interwar years. To
have your picture taken by Man Ray meant you were somebody special.
How (Not) to Play by the Rules
The exhibition traces some of the motifs Man Ray returned to again and again. Games, both in the
everyday and the abstract sense of the word, was one of several main motifs for Man Ray, who
would go on to become a central player within New York Dada alongside artists such as Marcel
Duchamp (1887-1968) and Francis Picabia (1879-1953). To artists with Dada inclinations, the rules
of the game were there to be challenged no matter which artistic categories or social conventions
they might upset. The exhibition pursues this line of enquiry by showing major examples of Man
Ray's teasing and anti-academic ready-mades. He would often give his objects metaphoric and
symbolic meanings as in his work The Gift (Le cadeau) from 1921: a flat-iron with a row of nails
glued to its underside. Through such simple means, Man Ray created an absurd and anti-bourgeois
object, which remains one of his best known works today. That same year, Man Ray and Marcel
Duchamp collaborated on the creation of Duchamp's alter ego Rose (later Rrose) Sélavy - a pun on
Eros, c'est la vie (eros is life itself). Duchamp wore make up and was dressed in female clothing and
thus, through his mere appearance, managed to transgress established gender roles. In this fashion,
the artist became the base material of the work of art and life itself became its stage.
The game of chess in particular would come to have great significance as an ideal manifestation of
Man Ray's views of art and life: the universal geometry of the chessboard, the black-and-white
contrasts of the squares, as well as the overall systematicness of the game rules, would serve as a
framework for a never-ending series of game variations, variations which could be driven by both
well-planned strategy and instinctive impulses. In this way, Man Ray viewed chess as a sort of
metaphor for life or self. He always had a chess set in his studio and even made several actual sets
of both boards and pieces himself. These were used as props for his photography and painting, as
visitors to the exhibition will be able to see for themselves.
The Logic of Daydreaming
In 1921 Man Ray uprooted himself and left America in favour of Paris, which in the coming years
would become a centre of activity for some of the most innovative artists. In Paris, he dedicated
himself to experimenting with photography and moving images, letting his former interest in
painting slide into the background for the time being. The exhibition presents a number of examples
of how Man Ray created his own distinct way of working with images. For him, the photographic
medium would serve as an artistic form on equal footing with the more traditional practices of
painting and drawing. If the old world order was seen to be characterised by the traditional use of
painting and sculpture, the new age could instead be tied to a progressive implementation of new
technological advances, transforming the work of art into the result of a fusion of mechanics and
thinking, free of the old hierarchies. Man Ray was amongst the very first to pursue this new agenda.
Both in photography and film, he was captivated by exploring optic effects and the transitional zone
between reality and dream. Already in 1921, he thus developed a new photographic technique
without the use of a camera: the so-called rayograph or photogram. He would place everyday
objects onto photographic paper, which would then be exposed to light and developed. The result
was images of the objects' silhouettes, full of contrasts as they slowly appeared in the shape of twodimensional abstractions on a one-to-one scale. Thus Man Ray transformed seemingly ordinary
everyday objects into works of art, using relatively simple means in a style reminiscent of the
ready-mades he produced with Marcel Duchamp. Man Ray's choice and composition of objects in
the photograms often had an unconscious and juxtapositional quality and could thus be seen as a
visual equivalent of the logic behind automatic writing as it was used by the surrealists to
revolutionise literature.
The exhibition will also display two of Man Ray's most important films, which he created alongside
his experiments with photography. His first film Le retour a la raison premiered in 1923, initially
without causing much of a stir. However, his later and more worked-through cinematic poem Emak
Bakia from 1926 was continuously shown in the Parisian theatres for an entire 14 weeks. On
account of their experimental nature, both films are today considered groundbreaking from the
points of view of the histories of cinema and art. The expression "emak bakia", which is Basque for
"leave me alone", also referred to an object which in turn became a type of self-portrait: the top of
the neck of a cello with the strings replaced by loosely arranged white horsehair. This object would
also become one of Man Ray's central motifs and it appears in one of his main works: The Artist's
Home from around 1931, a work which will also form part of the exhibition. In this image, Emak
Bakia, the "stand-in" for Man Ray, is placed next to a female head, which is a rendition of a
photograph of the American model Lee Miller, who was also Man Ray's student and lover. For
three intense years, they had an intimate and productive collaboration which had a profound impact
on Man Ray's work.
An Artistic Tower of Babel
In 1932 Lee Miller broke off the relationship with Man Ray, throwing him into a personal and
artistic crisis. He wanted recognition for the entirety of his artistic production, yet he felt
increasingly pigeonholed as a photographer. During the 1930s, he therefore renewed his interest in
painting. The late 1930s onwards thus gave rise to a collection of very important paintings, which
are all characterised by surrealist motifs with figures reduced to a conceptual and symbolic
minimum, if any figures are to be found at all. In this aspect, Man Ray's painting distinguishes itself
from his photography, in which we normally see an abundance of sensual and eroticised bodies.
Nevertheless, Man Ray's paintings and drawings are often based on motifs and experiences which
he had acquired during his work with photography, film and objects. As the exhibition will make
clear, corresponding forms and motifs recur in his work across different materials and techniques.
This shows how the drive behind his work was his inner mental processes and not a desire for new
material expressions for their own sake. For Man Ray there was no perfect image. There was no
picture which was the best conceivable of all. The individual works were more like actors in an
eternal play of differences, like the words in a modernist poem.
Thus Man Ray did not grant painting special status over other forms of visual expression or
communication. He did what to a painter must have been unusual, namely to show that a painting
was not a goal in itself. Painting did not take priority as it was created by mental processes which
could potentially find many other forms of expression. Whether he worked with painting, object art,
photography or film, his goal was the same: to break down the division between inner and outer
worlds, to show ideas rather than things and dreams rather than ideas: "I do not photograph nature, I
photograph my fantasy."