St. Olaf College

Man Ray


United States
1890 - 1976

View objects by this artist.

Emmanual Radnitzky, pseudonym Man Ray, was born in 1890 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to two Jewish immigrants from Russia, and was raised primarily in Brooklyn, where the family moved in 1897. He did not take on his full pseudonym until 1909, but it was not until 1912 that Man Ray’s family changed their surname to Ray, a fact which Man Ray denied in his lifetime. Interestingly, this was one year after he graduated high school in 1908, when he was offered a scholarship to study architecture. His parents, who owned a small tailoring shop and had employed all their children there, were unhappy but nonetheless supportive of their son’s artistic career, even providing a studio space for him in their living room. Man Ray was initially intrigued by Expressionism and Cubism, the works of Alfred Stieglitz in his studio, 291, and so he studied painting for 4 years, taking on odd jobs in Manhattan. At age 25, Man Ray held his first one-man painting fair.

When Man Ray met Marcel Duchamp, he became interested in Dadaism and quickly rose to the ranks as one of the most prominent artists of the Dada movement. In the 1920s, as the works of Sigmund Freud fueled the new Surrealist movement, Man Ray again shifted styles slightly and began to use found objects in his works. By 1921, with encouragement from Duchamp, Ray moved to Paris where he spent the rest of his life -- barring a decade during WWI where he fled to Hollywood, California, before returning to Paris in 1951 -- rubbing shoulders with many of the most influential Surrealist and Dadaist artists. It was in 1921 that Man Ray began to experiment with photography, possibly having been introduced to the photogram by Tristan Tzara. While he went on to have a career as a fashion photographer, he is best known for his “Rayogrammes,” which involved placing a found object onto a piece of photographic paper and taking a snapshot of its shadow with direct light, rather than using a camera. Ray experimented with a number of techniques in both photography and videography, and was one of the first artists whose photographs were sought out as fine art, just as important as paintings and sculptures.

After returning to Paris in 1951, Man Ray shifted his focus back to painting. In 1963, he published his autobiography, Self-Portrait, and continued to exhibit his works for many years until he died in his Paris studio in 1976.

Madison Duran ‘20
September 2019

Sources:
“Man Ray,” Union List of Artist Names, The Getty Research,
http://www.getty.edu/vow/ULANFullDisplay?find=&role=&nation=&subjectid=500015030.
“Man Ray and his artworks,” Man Ray, https://www.manray.net/#.