On photography of man Ray

A biography of the elusive but celebrated Dada and Surrealist artist and photographer connecting his Jewish background to his life and art Man Ray (1890-1976), a founding father of Dada and a key player in French Surrealism, is one of the central artists of the twentieth century. He is also one of the most elusive. In this new biography, journalist and critic Arthur Lubow uses Man Ray's Jewish background as one filter to understand his life and art. Man Ray began life as Emmanuel Radnitsky, the eldest of four children born in Philadelphia to a mother from Minsk and a father from Kiev. When he was seven the family moved to the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, where both parents worked as tailors. Defying his parents' expectations that he earn a university degree, Man Ray instead pursued his vocation as an artist, embracing the modernist creed of photographer and avant-garde gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz. When at the age of thirty Man Ray relocated to Paris, he, unlike Stieglitz, made a clean break with his past.

Man Ray (1890 –1976) was a pioneer of the Dada movement in the United States and France and a central protagonist of Surrealism. Today he is one of the best-known American artists of the twentieth century, celebrated above all for his innovative and often seductively glamorous photography. Surprisingly, given Man Ray’s key role in the history of early-twentieth-century Modernism, a comprehensive collection of his writings on art has not been published in English until now. Man Ray: Writings on Art fills a conspicuous gap in scholarship on the artist and his period. It brings together his most significant writings, many of them published here for the first time. These occasionally quixotic texts, which include artist books, essays, interviews, letters, and visual poems, reveal the incredible scale of the artist’s output and the remarkable continuity of his aesthetic and political beliefs. This volume offers a long overdue vision of Man Ray as someone who used words both as a creative medium and as a means of articulating ideas about the nature and value of art. With richly reproduced illustrations, it provides powerful insight not only to scholars of art history and academics, but also to working artists and those who count themselves as Man Ray fans.

In this book, to which the artist actively contributed right up to his death, every aspect of Man Ray's constantly self-renewing life and work is studied and and documented in depth. The author has used the interpretative tools of mdoern psychology and, in addition, has drawn insight from studies on alchemy, for, as he points out, the artist and the alchemist unconsciously tap the same archaic sources.

Man Ray (1890-1976) has long been considered one of the most versatile and innovative artists of the twentieth century. As a painter, writer, sculptor, photographer, and filmmaker, he is best known for his intimate association with the French Surrealist group in Paris during the 1920s and 1930s, particularly for his highly inventive and unconventional photographic images. These remarkable accomplishments, however, have tended to overshadow the importance of his earlier work--significant not only for comprehending Man Ray's future artistic development, but also for fleshing out our understanding of the visual arts in America during one of the most important and crucial phases of the evolution of modernism. The book, and the exhibition for which this work will serve as the catalog, concentrate on Man Ray's production from 1907 to 1917. Conversion to Modernism will be the first comprehensive, fully illustrated work to examine this artist's seminal years. The show and the catalog begin with Man Ray's high school years in Brooklyn, his studies at the Art Students League and the American Academy in New York, and the time he spent in life drawing classes at the more progressive Ferrer Center From 1913 to 1915, Man Ray lived in a small artists' colony in Grantwood, New Jersey. It was here, studying with Samuel Halpert (a former student of Matisse), that Man Ray began to become the artist we know today. The last section of the show and of the book include recently discovered photographs and other works that are influenced by a knowledge of the emergent Dada movement. Here is Man Ray in recognizable form just before he leaves the country for France in 1921. This exhibit will first be on display at the Montclair Art Museum from January 26 through March 2003. It will then travel to museums in Athens, Georgia, Philadelphia, and Chicago.

American artist Man Ray spend the most productive years of his career, during the 1920s and 1930s, in Paris.

Suzanne Churchill's well-researched and superbly crafted study is the first book-length treatment of Others, an important and neglected little magazine that served as a laboratory for modernist poetic experimentation. In discussions of influential poets such as Mina Loy, Marianne Moore, and William Carlos Williams, whose careers Others helped launch, Churchill counters the notion of Modernism as aesthetically self-isolating and socially disengaged. Rather, she traces a correspondence between formal innovation and social change in American modernist poetry and argues that this dimension of modernist formalism is lost when poems are studied in isolation. Others provides a framework for reassessing the scope and significance of modernist formalism. The little magazine not only anchors modernist poetry in a social context but also leads to new insight into major modernist texts. Churchill's commitment to her subject's broad cultural contexts makes her book important for students and teachers of Modernism as well as for those working in the fields of American poetry and poetics, gender studies, queer theory, periodical studies, and cultural studies.

A dazzling portrait of Paris’s forgotten artist and cabaret star, whose incandescent life asks us to see the history of modern art in new ways. In freewheeling 1920s Paris, Kiki de Montparnasse captivated as a nightclub performer, sold out gallery showings of her paintings, starred in Surrealist films, and shared drinks and ideas with the likes of Jean Cocteau and Marcel Duchamp. Her best-selling memoir—featuring an introduction by Ernest Hemingway—made front-page news in France and was immediately banned in America. All before she turned thirty. Kiki was once the symbol of bohemian Paris. But if she is remembered today, it is only for posing for several now-celebrated male artists, including Amedeo Modigliani and Alexander Calder, and especially photographer Man Ray. Why has Man Ray’s legacy endured while Kiki has become a footnote? Kiki and Man Ray met in 1921 during a chance encounter at a café. What followed was an explosive decade-long connection, both professional and romantic, during which the couple grew and experimented as artists, competed for fame, and created many of the shocking images that cemented Man Ray’s reputation as one of the great artists of the modern era. The works they made together, including the Surrealist icons Le Violon d’Ingres and Noire et blanche, now set records at auction. Charting their volatile relationship, award-winning historian Mark Braude illuminates for the first time Kiki’s seminal influence not only on Man Ray’s art, but on the culture of 1920s Paris and beyond. As provocative and magnetically irresistible as Kiki herself, Kiki Man Ray is the story of an exceptional life that will challenge ideas about artists and muses—and the lines separating the two.

Between the two world wars, Paris served as the setting for unparalleled freedom for expatriate as well as native-born French women, who enjoyed unprecedented access to education and opportunities to participate in public, artistic and intellectual life. Many of these women--including Colette, Tamara de Lempicka, Sonia Delaunay, Djuna Barnes, Augusta Savage, and Lee Miller--made lasting contributions to art and literature.

Is there a Jewish art? Is there a single "Jewish experience"? Matthew Baigell, the acknowledged American expert on Jewish art, offers the first book ever on the history of Jewish American art from the early settlements to the present.