If you peruse the art of Man Ray, who was born August 27, 1890, you’ll see things like sewing machines, flat irons, needles, pins, thread, and other thing having to do with sewing and tailoring. Man Ray was painter, photographer, collagist, and worked in some harder-to-define media as well. He worked in Paris, for the most part, but had been born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Man Ray was always a bit mysterious about his past. He insisted that he’d always been named “Man Ray,” even though his birth name was Emmanuel Radnitzky. He didn’t invent “Man Ray,” though — the family changed their surname to Ray in 1912, and his boyhood nickname was “Manny,” so “Man Ray” sort of came naturally. He also didn’t like to tell anyone about his family background — his father ran a tailoring business, and most of the family helped out. But even without mentioning that verbally, there are all those hints in his artworks about the tailoring business.
Ray started out as a commercial artist and technical illustrator, working for a number of companies in New York City. Then when he was 22 he enrolled in the Ferrer School, sort of an avant-garde community of a sort, and quickly evolved from commercial to fine art. He had his first solo show three years later, in 1915, and began learning photography a couple of years later. Originally he just wanted to document his own art, but by 1918 was creating photographs as art in and of themselves. He also experimented with photograms, which he called “rayographs,” apparently because they were made by him (other people made photograms too, but he reserved the rayograph term for his own work).
Ray moved to Paris in 1921 and got involved in the Dada “anti-art” movement. He began to specialize in photography, although he always referred to himself as a painter. But he was well-connected in the creative world of 1920s Paris, and in the years before WWII photographed people from Pablo Picasso to Gertrude Stein to James Joyce. Toward the end of the 1920s he started creating short experimental art films.
He returned to the US when the war broke out, and settled in Los Angeles. He was apparently a big success there, returned to painting, and had some major solo exhibitions. After the war, he returned to Paris in 1951 and recreated many of his earlier works in new forms, and started marketing his work as well, in some of the world’s first “limited-edition replicas.” He kept going until 1976, when a lung infection struck him down. But his artworks are still around, and these days they sell for millions.
