Man Ray

Despite his association with Dada and Surrealism, Man Ray retained a degree of independence.

Solarized photograph by Man Ray

Man Ray had a fascination with objects and with ‘magical tinkering’s’.  Man Ray usually constructed images from everyday objects, which were then deliberately transformed by photography. Man Ray believed that ‘it is not the object itself which is given a title, but its representation. It is the fact of being reproduced and relabelled which gives life to the objects’.

Solarized photograph by Man Ray

Man Ray went beyond the use of the camera, any way of employing photographic processes to bring surprises was necessary. In 1917 he revived the cliché-verre, a process used in which a drawing is made on a glass negative with a needle-point and is then printed on sensitized paper; in later years, his Rayographs and solarizations added new method to the photographers art.

Rayograph by Man Ray

Man Ray also used his Rayographs to promote the domestic virtues of electricity, with females as his model he successfully combined the elegance of a naked torso with superimposed abstract shapes, with this he united sex and industry by his skill.

'Untitled' - Man Ray - 1931

Solarization occurs as a result of an error, by switching on the light in the dark room while a plate is being developed. Yet in his dark room Man Ray was able to make use of the mistake to give his work a new and unique quality. Examining the results of this error he discovered that the dark unexposed background in the negative had been exposed by the light which, at the same time, had been insufficient to affect the already exposed areas. A dark, narrow gulf remained between the differently exposed areas, giving the form in the areas originally exposed a sensitive outline. Man Ray believed this offered a new sense of three-dimensional reality into his work.

Rayograph by Man Ray

Any method Man Ray could devise might be used as a means of poetic expression. May Ray argued that he uses ‘photography for those things he does not wish to paint and paintings for what cannot be photographed’.

In most of Man Ray’s paintings he focused on the subjects in his dreams and therefore impossible to photograph, Man Ray also has always claimed his paintings as images are disconcerting, he explains that ‘logic assassinates’, and the irrational haunts the paintings.

Le Beau Temps - 1939

Its bright colours at first appear warm and welcoming. The two figures in the foreground, male and female, are dressed in festive costumes and are separated by a door. If we concentrate on individual components of the composition, we discover that in each one lurks a sinister content. The head of the male figure is hollow like a lantern, reminiscent of the lampshades Man Ray had designed in his youth; the body, is disjointed like a ghost and the left hand holds a knob on the door which blood is trickling from to the ground. The female figure, with black feet below her carnival skirt, is a grotesque manikin.

Le Beau Temps - Man Ray

In the background we find still more disturbing events and signs of violence. Against a darkening sky, to the left, is a ruined wall with sinister tridents growing out of the soil; to the right further back behind the female figure, is a colonnade lit from within and silhouette of an embracing couple who are oblivious of the ferocious battle between two beasts taking place on the roof over their heads. These monsters appeared to Man Ray one night as he slept in the house he had taken in Saint-Germain-en-Laye and the war had awakened him by distant gunfire. With these images from his subconscious Man Ray made this great painting, which is unique in his work in that his inner hopes and fears of the war are symbolically affirmed in vivid contrast.

The Lovers or Observatory Time - 1936

The Lover or Observatory Time - Man Ray - 1936

Man Ray told a story of an evening when he was obliged to leave one of his female models (Kiki) to attend a dinner party in a small restaurant. She gave him a loving farewell kiss and on his arrival to the restaurant he failed to understand his hostess’s critical look; shortly afterwards however he saw in a mirror that a lipstick smear of Kiki’s lips stood out boldly on the whiteness of his collar.

This set Man Ray dreaming of lips detached and floating with the breeze. Here in the painting we see the back of a naked, laying woman and above is a pair of detached, giant floating lips which to me represents the naked body of the female below or the back of any naked human being. However some critics and Man himself have described the lips as two closely joined bodies.

The lips from 'The Lover or Observatory Time - Man Ray - 1936

‘Like an open window into space. The red lips floated in a bluish-grey sky over a twilit landscape, with an observatory and its two domes like breasts dimly indicate the horizon – an impression of my daily walks through the Luxembourg Gardens. The lips, because of their scale, no doubt, suggested two closely joined bodies’.  – Man Ray