Man Ray Revealed

Was one of Dada's fathers really such a mystery or did he show his true self in his art? Philip Gefter on an enlightening new exhibit. VIEW OUR GALLERY.

Once, at a party in the mid-1980s, I asked Gracie Mansion, the Manhattan gallerist, if she would mind divulging her given name. She complied, albeit sheepishly, mouthing one that was surprisingly conventional and all-American. The discrepancy between her childhood name and the punk-Dadaist persona she chose to assume emboldened me enough to confess that I, too, had been seriously thinking of changing mine. “To what?” she asked. “Philip Lord Byron,” I said. At that, Gracie Mansion, née Joanne Young, shot me a look of contempt and snarled: “Don’t you think that’s pretentious?” At that point I half expected Emmanuel Radnitsky to appear with a pot and a kettle, and paint them both black.

Manny Radnitsky, you see, was a Jewish kid from Brooklyn who had changed his own hyper-ethnic name at the age of 21, to become the internationally recognized legend of the Paris avant-garde, Man Ray.

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Alias Man Ray: The Art of Reinvention, a comprehensive exhibition of the artist’s work at the Jewish Museum in New York, through March 14, 2010, is a lucid, revisionist examination of Man Ray’s life and work. According to Mason Klein, the museum’s Curator of Fine Art, who organized the show, the dichotomy to conceal and to reveal himself at once is in evidence throughout Man Ray’s career. Klein refers to this contradiction as a “dialectic of assimilation” that has its roots in Man Ray’s Jewish upbringing as the son of Russian immigrant parents; his refusal to be classified—whether as a painter, sculptor, poet, photographer, object maker, Dadaist, or Surrealist—is deliberate and persistent and shifts back and forth from the artist to his art throughout the course of his life.

“Self-Portrait, 1916,” which Man Ray made at the age of 26, is notably considered the “first proto-Dada assemblage.” He would later recall it to be the object of much ridicule: “On a background of black and aluminum paint I had attached two electric bells and a real push button. I had simply put my hand on the palette and transferred the paint imprint as a signature. Everyone who pushed the button was disappointed that the bell did not ring.”

• Art Beast: The Best of Art, Photography, and DesignThe piece taunts the viewer to take the bait but doesn’t deliver the reward. The artist’s hand imprint, in the position of a nose but, also, intimating, perhaps, the gate of his soul, has several layers of meaning. The imprint is at once a pronouncement of Man Ray’s physical presence in the work but, also, a gatekeeper denying access. Man Ray’s wit comes through with his predilection for word play: His surrogate signature is the hand, which, in French, is main, a phonetic spelling of his adopted first name.

Man Ray was first introduced to the work of the European avant-garde through the exhibitions he saw at Alfred Stieglitz’ 291 Gallery. His early artistic explorations had emulated and appropriated the entire cast of European modernism. In the mid-1910s, he took up residence in a progressive artistic enclave in Ridgefield, New Jersey. He was briefly married to a Belgian poet, Adon Lacroix, and, while he painted and she wrote, they would collaborate in designing and editing a number of one-of-a-kind literary journals. It was in Ridgefield that Man Ray met Marcel Duchamp. At the time, neither spoke the other’s language, but “the simplicity and pragmatism that would mark their long, easy collaboration and mutual affection was instantly apparent as they established a playful camaraderie,” writes Klein in the exhibition’s catalogue essay. When they were introduced, according to Man Ray, the two men decided to mime a tennis match without a net or a court: “I called the strokes to make conversation: fifteen, thirty, forty, love, to which [Duchamp] replied with the same word: yes.”