In the winter of 1921, Man Ray, who had moved that year from New York to Paris to be a painter, was earning a living through photography. One night he placed some objects on an unexposed piece of printing paper that had landed by mistake in the developing tray in his darkroom.
When he flicked on a light, ghostly images of a funnel and thermometer appeared on the sheet. He quickly put aside the fashion photographs he was preparing. He had discovered a new way of making pictures, which he called rayographs.
At least, that’s the story Man Ray told. One of the achievements of “Man Ray: When Objects Dream,” a revelatory exhibition opening on Sept. 14 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is the diligent effort by the curators, Stephanie D’Alessandro and Stephen C. Pinson, to pierce the legends that surround Man Ray, many of them woven by the artist himself. Some riddles remain unsolved. “We’ve spent years working on this and pulled in lots of experts and conservators,” D’Alessandro said. “But there’s still a lot that is a mystery. That is a wonderful thing about his work.”
The curators have brought together 64 rayographs with about 100 other works (including films and objects) by Man Ray that date from the artist’s most fruitful period, the late 1910s and 1920s. They suggest that the rayographs, although occupying the artist for a relatively short time, provide a key to understanding the entirety of his richly varied career.
About a fifth of the rayographs on view are part of a promised gift to the Met, previously unannounced, by John Pritzker, a museum trustee who is a private equity investor and an heir to the Hyatt hotels fortune. In the Pritzker donation of 188 artworks by Man Ray and his Dada and Surrealist cohort (including Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia and Max Ernst), the showstopper is the most expensive photograph ever sold at auction: “Le Violon d’Ingres,” Man Ray’s celebrated image of his lover, Kiki de Montparnasse (born Alice Prin).
In 2022, Pritzker bought this unique print of “Le Violon d’Ingres” for $12.4 million at Christie’s in New York. Sitting next to his wife, Mo KC Pritzker, during the auction, he watched as the price climbed well past the $7 million high end of the pre-auction estimate. “It was getting pretty heavy, and I thought, ‘I’ve got to pull out,’” Pritzker said in an interview. “My wife said, ‘You tell me you’ve been chasing this for 30 years. If you walk away, you’ll never see it again.’” He persisted and won.
Pritzker said that he had been buying “pretty pictures” by such photographers as Imogen Cunningham and Edward Weston until he bought his first Man Ray in 1997, a rayograph of a shaving brush and a candle, which is in the show. “It’s more about what he was doing and must have been thinking than the picture itself,” Pritzker said. “The Dadaists were troublemakers. I got so addicted to Man Ray, it became also about Kiki and blossomed out to the whole community of writers and artists.”
The rayograph was a rediscovery by Man Ray, not his invention. Since the beginnings of photography, people had been placing objects on light-sensitive paper to create images without a camera. Photograms, as these prints are usually known, were made in the 1830s by William Henry Fox Talbot, one of the pioneers of photography, and a few years later by his friend Anna Atkins.
In Man Ray’s day, photograms were explored earlier by the modernist Christian Schad. Indeed, Tristan Tzara, the Dada artist and provocateur, was staying in the same hotel as his friend Man Ray and had a portfolio of photograms he called schadographs, so it is very possible that Man Ray saw them before he made the first rayograph. The Hungarian Laszlo Moholy-Nagy began creating photograms a year later. Like Man Ray, these artists used the technique for abstract compositions.
However, Man Ray brought his combination of creativity and thoroughness to every new genre he embraced. Born Emmanuel Radnitzky in 1890 and raised in Brooklyn, he remade himself as an artist in New York. Before his move to Paris, he tirelessly investigated how to use shapes, colors and textures to animate the flat plane of a painting. Excited by ideas, he grudgingly regarded brushes and pigments merely as means to his ends.
With rayographs, he found himself carrying over his former methods to a new technology. It is a great virtue of the exhibition that you can compare the old work with the new. Arranging objects on photosensitive paper, he once said, was like cutting and assembling shapes to produce a collage. (The show also includes a more direct transposition: a set of hand-colored stenciled prints, “Revolving Doors,” which he made in 1926, reproducing a now-lost collage series he had done almost a decade earlier.)
And raising and lowering the objects to produce blurs and different degrees of transparency in a rayograph was akin to moving back and forth from the canvas with an airbrush, a method of painting with a pressurized aerosol spray, which he had pursued in New York. Several aerographs that he produced that way are on view at the Met.
Before the rayographs, Man Ray used objects — either ones he created for this purpose or everyday appliances — to make moody, enigmatic photographs, like the eggbeater he lit to cast arabesques of shadows and called “Man.” (An arbitrary title, as he later inscribed a print of it, “Woman.”)
He also explored the effects of time duration and shifts in scale, as when he focused on a small section of Duchamp’s in-process “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass),” and left his camera aperture open for hours in dim light to record the clumps of dust that had formed on the glass plate. The close-up photograph, “Dust Breeding,” could be an aerial view of an arid landscape.
In the months after his serendipity in the darkroom, Man Ray worked obsessively, producing as many as 100 rayographs in 1922. That April, he wrote to Ferdinand Howald, an American patron, “In my new work I feel I have reached the climax of the things I have been searching the last ten years.” He added exultantly, “I have finally freed myself from the sticky medium of paint, and am working directly with light itself.”
Although Howald was unimpressed, his artist friends in Paris raved about the rayographs. For the practitioners of Dada and its successor, Surrealism, irrational juxtapositions and the unconscious mind were the wellspring of art. Praising the rayographs, Tzara wrote, “These are projections surprised in transparence, by the light of tenderness, of objects that dream and talk in their sleep.” For Jean Cocteau, they challenged the primacy of painting.
The magic of the rayographs is that everyday objects remain identifiable yet become strange and otherworldly, transfigured by the artist’s skillful manipulations of luminescence, shadows, and gradations of gray and black.
Man Ray was so excited by rayographs that he temporarily gave up painting, until, in 1923, working with a painting knife on cheap composition board, sandpaper and wood, he began painting versions of rayographs. For example, he stippled a white surface with pokes of black, to reproduce the dots he had formed in a rayograph by shining a light through the holes in a grater or slotted spoon.
Restlessness animated Man Ray’s art, especially during the years covered by this exhibition, which ends with his first forays into what he called “solarization,” another previously known technique that he claimed came to him by chance.
Lee Miller, the artist who was then his companion and studio colleague, first produced a solarized print accidentally in 1929, when (according to one account) she felt a mouse run over her foot in the darkroom and turned on the light for a moment. In the view of the curators D’Alessandro and Pinson, the resulting black outline of the subject against a gray background in a solarized print continued Man Ray’s lifelong project to treat everything he saw, from household implements to celebrities, as objects to be manipulated aesthetically.
André Breton, who was called “the pope of Surrealism,” wrote in 1927 that the women who posed for Man Ray were in the same relationship to him as “a quartz gun, a bunch of keys, hoarfrost or fern” in a rayograph. Perhaps Breton was thinking of the “Violon d’Ingres.” In French, the title is an idiom for a hobby, derived from the story that the great painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres prized his amateur violin playing as highly as his art.
To make his image, Man Ray photographed Kiki de Montparnasse from behind, nude to just below the waist and wearing a turban, a pose that Ingres had used in the painting known as “The Valpinçon Bather,” on view in the Louvre. On Kiki’s lower back on the print, Man Ray drew the f-holes of a violin in black ink.
Afterward, he had another idea. He enlarged the print of Kiki in the darkroom and masked it with a sheet of paper or cardboard on which he had cut two f-holes. Then he flashed the light again, so that the shapes were burned black, to make what he called “a combination of a photo and a rayograph.”
From this unique hybrid — the print that Pritzker bought — Man Ray produced multiple copies. Along with an ingenious melding of techniques, he had transposed a verbal pun into visual reality. In its beauty and absurdity, “Le Violon d’Ingres” encapsulates, arguably better than any other artwork, the insouciant wit of Surrealism and, as displayed so well in this exhibition, the originality and craftiness of Man Ray.
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