We’re Still Living in Man Ray’s Shadow

The Met’s stress on quartz gun and fern—that is, on the rayographs—is a welcome departure from Man Ray’s familiar cast of naked and famous people. His first batch, “Champs délicieux” (Delicious Fields), appeared in one of the most interesting years of the twentieth century: 1922, the annus mirabilis of literary modernism, which saw the publication of “The Waste Land,” “Ulysses,” and “Jacob’s Room.” Art-historically speaking, you can stand on 1922 like a mountain ridge. Behind you is the Valley of Dada (roughly 1916-22) and before you is the Jungle of Surrealism (1924-onward). Where you’re standing, wrapped in fog, is the so-called mouvement flou: the blurry zone between the two. Man Ray is one of the few Dada-Surrealist cusp figures who finessed affiliations with both movements without alienating either one. With Talleyrand-levels of aplomb, he navigated the affections of Tristan Tzara, the monocle-wearing high priest of Dada (who visited Man Ray’s room at the Hôtel des Écoles the day after the rayographs were invented), and Breton, whose ancient sculpture of a head dreamed up the Surrealist manifesto. Tzara supposedly hailed the rayographs as “pure Dada creations.” Breton praised Man Ray for forcing photography to abandon its “pretentious claims” to veracity, to fact. In a single stroke, Man Ray had pushed photography to its limit and put painting on its heels.

In “Les Champs Délicieux,” there are a dozen rayographs. We find silhouettes of recognizable items—hair comb, smoking pipe, metal coil—or just glowing lunar shapes: a gyre of white, a pattern of holes, the slightest intimation of an egg, but not an egg. Most of the rayographs don’t have titles, which seems fitting. They all feel like they belong to the same dream, one in which you keep leaving objects behind and forgetting what they’re for. Part of the pleasure is how the rayographs wobble between metaphor and utensil, abstraction and figuration. They’re somewhere between a Rorschach blot and an X-ray.

One of the best tricks for looking at the rayographs is to think of Ezra Pound’s comment about Man Ray “painting with light.” Imagine that, just for a minute: that the rayograph isn’t a flytrap for random silhouettes on a tabletop but a canvas filled with precise strokes of white and black pigment. (Once you see it, it’s hard to unsee.) Before Man Ray hitched his career to photography—a choice he always half regretted—he was a devoted painter. The exhibition briefly lurches back to 1915, to the paintings and prints that he made in his twenties, and though a lot of what you’ll find is downstream Cubism, the thrill is seeing how Man Ray figured out what he wanted from the rayographs before he found them. His defining painting from the period, “The Rope Dancer Accompanies Herself with Her Shadows” (1916), shows a tightrope walker umbilically linked to large swatches of shadow that cover more than three-quarters of the canvas. As in the rayographs, shadows are the main character.

The surprise delight from this early period are the so-called aerographs. With an airbrush borrowed from his job at an ad agency, Man Ray would blast droplets of gouache onto board or heavy paper and use stencils to organize the spray. “Admiration of the Orchestrelle for the Cinematograph” (1919) is a wonderfully finicky diagram for nothing, with clean geometries offset by the occasional umbrella. Man Ray fantasized about making a picture as “a purely cerebral act,” escaping the gooeyness of the medium; the aerograph presented a nifty solution. For him, painting was more than just using a “stick with some hairs attached to it,” he liked to say. It was the art of creating an idea.

The nineteen-twenties were a boom time for Man Ray. Glossy magazines like Vanity Fair and Vogue wanted his portraits and rayographs, and he started making short films, like “Retour à la Raison” (Return to Reason) and “L’étoile de mer” (The Starfish). His objets d’art proliferated: deconstructed lampshade, tack-iron, metronome with eye, baby’s arm coming out of a bucket. In 1929, he struck gold with another darkroom accident—“solarization.” One night, Man Ray and Lee Miller exposed a series of negatives to light while they were still developing. The glitch smoothed out the eccentricities of texture in the image and cast a dusky halo around every shape. Man Ray’s signature trick—setting up his camera far from the sitter, capturing them with a telephoto lens, and then enlarging and cropping in postproduction—gives his standard portraits a remote intimacy, like you are looking at someone across the room while also standing next to them. Solarization deepens that effect and adds a third dimension, as if you are also seeing them outside of time. The results are magic.

The exhibition winds down in the thirties, after Man Ray soured on photography. He tried to beat a path back to painting, with results that excited pretty much no one. The paychecks from fashion magazines had been nice, as were the social benefits, but he wasn’t getting the recognition that he craved as an artist. If any American feels a slight throb of pride to know this country produced at least one bona-fide Dada-Surrealist, we should remember that Man Ray disliked the U.S., and felt no one here understood him, or attempted to. The only time he moved out of France was during the Second World War, when, by some cruel twist of fate, he ended up in Hollywood.

Who was Man Ray? It’s a mystery that even his four-hundred-page memoir doesn’t satisfyingly answer. Here was a multi-hyphenate artist and commercial photographer, with an invented name, who could be asocial at times and take off his clothes at a dinner party at others. He liked fast cars and white wine, freedom and pleasure. One historian described him as “humorous and defensive,” not unlike a caged monkey. Another said he was “half longshoreman, half professor.” Kiki de Montparnasse liked the way he spoke out of the side of his mouth. That detail stands out, if only because he approached everything indirectly. Even in his self-portraits, he’s sometimes nowhere to be found. In one, from 1916, he created a penguin-looking assemblage with sound holes for hips and a doorbell for a belly button. In another, from 1920, it’s just a blurry head wearing a straw boater. His preference was to be behind the camera, not in front of it. He liked the remove of a lens, a pun, an airbrush, the shadow cast by a ray of light. ♦