Man Ray

Editor Renate Stendhal has selected 360 photographs (more than 100 of those seen here for the first time) of Gertrude Stein, her companion Alice B. Toklas, and the many familiar and famous faces who surrounded her.

"Conversion to Modernism highlights Man Ray's production from 1907 to 1917. This book is the first comprehensive, fully illustrated work to examine this artist's seminal years, beginning with his high school years in Brooklyn, his studies at the Art Students League and the National Academy of Design in New York, and the time he spent in life drawing classes at the more progressive Ferrer Center."--BOOK JACKET.

Officially acknowledged for the first time in Paris in 1924 with the publication of the Manifesto of Surrealism entitled Le Manifeste du Surréalisme by the poet, critic, and founder of the movement André Breton (1896?1966), Surrealism originated as a literary and artistic movement in the late 1910s and early 1920s. 0It was based on the experimentation of new modes of expression called automatic writing. 00Surrealism, influenced by the political ideas of Karl Marx, rapidly became an international intellectual and political movement. The members of this group comprised trained psychiatrists and poets. At first, Surrealist poets and writers did not align with visual artists but as it developed it started to admire the 0work of artists such as Pablo Picasso, one of the founders of cubism, Marcel Duchamp inventor of the Ready Made and Giorgio de Chirico, creator of the Pittura Metafisica.00Artists like Man Ray and Marcel Mariën through their inventiveness, audacity, imagination and questioning of art, characterize the very idea of Surrealism around the world. 00Exhibition: Maruani Mercier Gallery, Brussels, Belgium (21.01.-20.03.2021).

Born in Brooklyn, Man Ray began his career as a commercial artist and photographer, and as a colleague of Marcel Duchamp and the New York Dadaists. He moved to Paris in 1921 and quickly became one of the most celebrated experimentalists of his time, joining Andre Breton, Max Ernst, Tristan Tzara, and Paul Eluard at the vanguard of Surrealism. Among his innovations was the technique of solarization, which bestowed a ghostly silver aura on his sitters. Included here are Man Ray's portraits of Breton, Yves Tanguy, Jean Cocteau, Lee Miller, Salvador Dali, Joan Miro, and Gertrude Stein, now classic images that embody the idea of the creative persona. Here too are his endlessly inventive assembled objects and a selection of his striking fashion spreads for Vanity Fair, Vogue, and Harper's Bazaar, as well as his notorious photograph Le Violon d'Ingres, and Noire et Blanche, which in 1994 attracted the highest price ever paid to date for a photograph at auction.

Artist writes of his life and loves, his art, his techniques, and artistic experiments.

In 1918, Man Ray scandalized the art world when he created his first readymade sculptures: an egg beater and an assemblage of metal light reflectors and clothes pins, which he presented as photographs entitled Man and Woman. In 2005 Sherrie Levine re-photographed Man Ray's Man and Woman photos, called them her own art works, and re-scandalized the art world of a new millennium. At the beginning of the 20th century, as a vocabulary of abstraction was being developed, Man Ray produced a new order of images using the new medium of photography, and challenged the world to accept them as art. Forty years later, when minimal abstract art dominated the art world, Sherrie Levine began to use photography as a way of introducing representational imagery back into art. Man Ray's career was drawing to a close just as Levine's career was beginning, but a lively dialogue between this Man (Ray) and Woman (Levine) exists through the sensibilities they share in their relationships with objects, images, and ideas.

"The artist May Ray (1890-1976) initially taught himself photography in order to reproduce his own works of art, but it became one of his preferred mediums. As a contributor to the Dada and Surrealist movements in Paris during the 1920s, Man Ray was perfectly placed to make defining images of his avant-garde contemporaries, including Jean Cocteau, Peggy Guggenheim, and Gertrude Stein. Man Ray also photographed his friends and lovers, among them Kiki de Montparnasse (Alice Prin), Lee Miller, who helped him discover the solarization printing process, and Ady Fidelin. Man Ray continued to take portrait photographs throughout his career, including little-known images from 1940s Hollywood, and of stars such as Ava Gardner and Catherine Deneuve taken during the 1950s and 1960s. An essential reference on Man Ray's life and work, this book includes an introduction by Terence Pepper and essay by Marina Warner exploring the artist's creativity and appetite for innovation and experimentation. Complete with first-hand testimonies from the artist's sitters and over 200 beautifully reproduced images, this handsome volume provides a survey of the finest portraits from one of the most inventive photographic artists of the 20th century."--Publisher's website.