The Brooklyn Rail

In my approach, a spirit of liminality dawned in subtle increments: separating from the allée of trees along the bright hurly-burly of Fifth Avenue to the rush of cool air in the ground floor entrance of the encyclopedic museum; to the staircase emerging among antiquities of glowing skylit stone—and, in a turn to the right, at the exhibition portal, a heraldic marble bust of Hermes, “protector [of] doorways and strategic points along the roadside” profiled against the black-and-white perpendicular sign, Man Ray: When Objects Dream. How elegantly surreal, posing this deity from eras past within our “age of technological reproducibility.”

The knowing curatorial hands of Stephanie D’Alessandro and Stephen C. Pinson, with the assistance of research associate Micayla Bransfield, were in evidence, a mise en scène of labyrinthine fluorescent tunnels and corridors leading to and from chalk-white walls, tranquil backdrops for a parade of “cameraless photographs,” bridging Man Ray’s oeuvre from the canvas to photographic paper exposed to light. The curators map far more than a historicized survey, liberating cosmopolitan observers to follow their own instincts and “explore in any number of ways.”

In a modest self-published booklet on display, A Primer of the New Art of Two Dimensions, the twenty-six-year-old artist compares the constraints of “condens[ed] time and space element[s]” in his early oil paintings with an idealized “new two-dimensional medium … [wherein] the artist can really begin to create….” Man Ray sets the tone for the show to come, underscored by the prepossessing nearby canvas lent by the Museum of Modern Art, The Rope Dancer Accompanies Herself with Her Shadows (1916): a silvery, multi-perspectival figure hovers above jagged, off-kilter primary colors laid down flatly, craving emancipation from the picture plane. A contemporaneous series, “Revolving Doors,” presented upon a turnstile, began as collage, then became paintings, then the pochoir edition on view.

His friend Marcel Duchamp in New York wrote to Man Ray, expatriated in Paris. “I am pleased that you’ve dropped painting.” The curators note that rayographs such as the alien landscapes and tricky depths-of-field exercises Les feuilles libres and of Champs Délicieux were praised by Jean Cocteau as “setting painting free.” Man Ray added that “they look like photography … [but are] done with photographic materials … without a camera.”

Man Ray did not invent the photogram process. William Henry Fox Talbot in England in 1835 had been the first to make what he called “photogenic drawings,” harnessing the energy of sunlight on a sheet of fine paper spread with nitrate of silver to cause, he wrote, natural objects to “delineate themselves without the aid of the artist’s pencil.” In 1918, Christian Schad created contact prints with flat objects laid directly upon photosensitive paper. During his Bauhaus years, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy gave up painting, boldly calling for “drawing with light … in place of pigment.”

However, while we make our meandering way through the heart of the exhibition, we are relieved by D’Alessandro and Pinson’s aversion to linear art history. A hermetic picture, 47 West Eighth Street Studio (1920) exploits, they point out, “the creative potential of objects.” The hermetic picture: its crammed, self-choreographed objects and “junk,” the detritus of Man Ray’s multifaceted bricoleur-mind intoxicated by incongruous juxtapositions—chairs angled awkwardly, a chessboard too close to a sofa, a sign found in an alleyway, a lonely tripod, anonymous wall-hangings.

The artist’s Dada co-conspirator, poet Tristan Tzara, whose essay “Quand les objets rêvent,” published at the dawn of rayographs, gives its title to this exhibition, conjures the apt metaphor for Man Ray’s “playful” (curators’ term) appropriations and transmutations from the analog world: “You people this ocean which you accompany with your supreme silence.” The “plastic poetry” motif resurfaces along further chiaroscuro images where we marvel at the multitude of gathered and arranged materials Man Ray has lifted from household and studio surroundings—drinking glasses, kitchen utensils, combs, keys, a grater, tongs—sometimes hazy, ephemeral, “otherworldly and atmospheric;” others razor-sharp; some intimate, others blatant, monumental—all these deformations, Tzara improvised, “filtered like hair through a comb of light … the projections, surprised in transparency, in the light of tenderness.”

I halted in my tracks: “How did Man Ray do this?” Walter Benjamin’s epiphanic concept of “the aura” sprung to mind, when “even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: Its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.” Four decades ago, consumed with writing my biography, Man Ray: American Artist, his niece, Naomi Savage, invited me into her darkroom where she demonstrated her uncle’s negativeless rayograph technique as passed along to her. Once the exposed paper was dipped into the developer and had a chance to swim in Tzara’s “ocean,” the image arose gradually to the surface, quickening, and Man Ray could decide if, “at the place where it happened to be,” it resembled what he had hoped for. Or he might have thrown some items together without a care for the result, to be pleasantly surprised at the “impossibilities.” Or he might decouple halves of a coalescing image to feature a provocative section. The options for a rayograph’s singular “presence” were infinite.

My reminiscences melted into air. I resumed strolling among astute choices on all sides, drawn together from lenders institutional and personal, including thirty-five works by Man Ray, part of a major promised gift of nearly two hundred works of Dada and Surrealist art from Metropolitan Museum Trustee John Pritzker. Many names of poets were cited on wall-labels, aside from Cocteau and Tzara: Paul Éluard, André Breton, Robert Desnos (who enjoyed a cameo role in Man Ray’s collage/montage/assemblage film, also on view, L’étoile de mer [1928]). Others of Man Ray’s poetic Parisian brotherhood leapt to mind—Guillaume Apollinaire and Louis Aragon and René Char and Georges Hugnet and Philippe Soupault. In that collective spirit, I came upon a 1923 framed construct I had never seen before, De quoi écrire un poème. A quill pen penetrates arduously through a barrier of fan-like black cardboard waves. My explication de texte was that poetry is derived from the Ancient Greek poiesis, i.e., making, leading to Man Ray’s mischievously-fabricated “objects of his affection,” and, in turn, to the objets témoins [reference objects] of the nouveau réalistes [new realists].

And here was the second time in years I had witnessed Obstruction (1920/1961), an assemblage, or, better, a subversive chandelier, of sixty-three wood hangers. The first encounter was in the Zabriskie Gallery. I had stepped off the elevator escorting Juliet Man Ray, gripping my arm, and attired in an emerald-green mink bolero jacket. She took off her omnipresent sunglasses and, shaking her head, peered at the floor beneath this 1961 iteration of the 1920 hangers: the piece had been lit unevenly, the shadows faded, unreadable. Now, on display from the Met’s Modern and Contemporary Art department, the overlapping shadows underfoot swayed lucidly, illuminated by the spirit of their progenitors in two coexistent states: dangling as is, as well as in an interpenetrating ghostly web.

A seamless segue to a late theme of the exhibition, “Objects and Bodies”: Man Ray’s lover and muse, Kiki de Montparnasse (born Alice Prin), is given ample space in sensual personae, among them the notorious Le Violon d’Ingres (1924), her curved, naked back overlaid with two curlicue ink “f-holes;” four frontal nude photographs, arranged left to right in gradual progression from explicit to hazy to deconstructed; and the iconic Noire et blanche (1926), published in French Vogue (May, 1926) as Visage de nacre et masque d’ébène [Mother-of-Pearl Face and Ebony Mask], Kiki’s doll-like, somnolent visage nestled against a Baule ceremonial mask. 

There is a dynamic of objectification in the process of photography conceived as taking a picture. One considers the range across two photographers Man Ray knew well, Alfred Stieglitz’s abstract clouds—his “Equivalents”; and André Kertész’s street-life snapshots, moments awaited and seized. Man Ray, smoking his pipe and smiling, painter and patron Roland Penrose recalled, “quick and casual as bantering with him in a café … he didn’t fiddle forever with the lens or the lights,” guided subjects to hold various positions during portrait sessions in his Paris studio; examining the contact prints, however, the artist became rigorously distanced in his final cut. Man Ray’s representations of women, subjects of his obsessive affection since he first laid hands on a Brownie camera, ran the gamut from sadistically raw to à la mode sexy to gauzy Romanticism.

When it comes down to the rayographs that are the impetus and through-line for this captivating exhibition, we turn to an excerpt from Man Ray’s poem/manifesto—Originals Graphics Multiples—written a lifetime after A Primer of the New Arts:

An original is a creation
Motivated by desire.
Any reproduction of an original
Is motivated by necessity.
The original is the result of
an automatic mental process,
the reproduction, of a mechanical
process. In other words:
Inspiration then information;
each validates the other.