(August 27, 1890, Filadelphia, USA – november 18 1976, París France)

Man Ray, Pseudonym Emmanuel Radnitzky was an American modernist artist who spent most of his career in Paris, France. He was a major contributor to the Dadaist and Surrealist movements, even though his ties to each were informal. He was known in the art world for his avant-garde photography, and was also recognized as a portrait photographer.

Man Ray started singing at the age of five and two years later he moved to Brooklyn with his family, where he went to school. He receives a scholarship to study Architecture and rejects it as well as the idea of an academic education. He was a dancer in the Odeon.

In New York, he works as a printmaker and an advertising agency, while attending night classes at the National Academy of Design. His first contacts with the New York avant-garde took place during his visits to the Alfred Stieglitz gallery and at the Arensberg gatherings.

In 1908 she married Adon Lacroix, a Belgian poet. His first solo exhibition takes place at the Daniel Gallery in New York in 1915. He founded, together with Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia, the New York Dada movement.

In 1918 he worked with airbrushes on photographic paper and in 1920, with K. Dreier and M. Duchamp, he founded the Société Anonyme, a company from which they manage all kinds of avant-garde activities (exhibitions, publications, installations, films, conferences, etc.).

Paris

Man Ray in Paris in 1975. Photo by Lothar Wolleh.

In 1940, escaping from the Nazi occupation of Paris (1940-1944), he settled in Hollywood and in New York. During his stay in California he earns a living teaching as a teacher. In 1946 he married Juliette Browner, in a double wedding together with the couple of Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning.

Ray’s fertile output eludes net categorizations and reflects his nimble and humorous sensitivity. Paintings and photographs include films, objects, collages, graphic work, drawings, advertising design and fashion. As a pioneer of Dada and Surrealism, his approach is characterized by the irrational and incongruous, causing eroticism and scandal. «The search for freedom and pleasure; that occupies all my art », he will say.

He returned to France in 1951. In 1963 he published his Autobiography. In 1973, the Metropolitan Museum in New York dedicated a retrospective to his photographic work. He died on November 18, 1976, in Paris, at the age of 86. His remains rest in the Montparnasse Cemetery.