In 1932, his eleventh year as an American émigré in Paris, Man Ray assembled one of his “Readymade” objects, quite simply a cut-out photo image of a woman’s eye attached to a metronome. His lover and assistant, the emerging photographer Lee Miller, had decided to end their three-year relationship, and the eye on the pendulum is hers. Man Ray titled the piece “Object To be Destroyed.” But this wasn’t the first time he had constructed this object. In 1923, he made an identical work and called it “Object of Destruction.” About the copy, he stated in a magazine, “Cut out the eye from a photograph of one who has been loved but is seen no more. Attach the eye to the pendulum of a metronome and regulate the weight to suit the tempo desired. Keep going to the limit of endurance. With a hammer well-aimed, try to destroy the whole in a single blow.”
Was this a Dadaist or Surrealist object? Adherents of the two schools were sniping at – and sometimes punching – each other, but the diminutive (5’2″), determined and affable Man Ray seemed to make friends with and be accepted as major player by everyone – at least in Paris. As for copying his work, he insisted that it’s the concept informing a work that matters, not the resulting hardware. Both he and Marcel Duchamp, the originator of Readymades and his lifelong friend and early collaborator, reproduced their art for sale as they aged. Man Ray said, “I have no compunction about this — an important book or musical score is not destroyed by burning it … An original is a creation motivated by desire. Any reproduction of an originals motivated be necessity. It is marvelous that we are the only species that creates gratuitous forms. To create is divine, to reproduce is human.”
This episode, among many vivid scenes depicted in Arthur Lubow’s both snappy and nuanced Man Ray: The Artist and His Shadows, reminds me of Kafka’s famous injunction, “In the struggle between yourself and the world, side with the world,” a line usually put forth to inspire greeting card sentiments. But the struggle was constant in a life like Man Ray’s, even as he appropriated the world’s ready elements in his Readymades and photographs. From the age of 20, when the young man from Brooklyn, born Emmanuel Radnitsky in 1890, visited Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 gallery in Midtown Manhattan, Man Ray entered into a push-and-shove art contest with his world, though he was not politically engaged. Seeking new effects and sometimes achieving them accidentally, he started as a painter in New York, one of the first artists to use an airbrush; his 1919 construction Lampshade is credited as the first mobile artwork; in photography, he invented the Rayograph by placing objects on photosensitive paper and turning on the light for a few seconds. He employed the camera and photo materials with more inventiveness than anyone at that time.
One of the pleasures of Lubow’s biography is listening to him establish a balance between acknowledging the novelty of and critically assessing Man Ray’s iconoclastic output. Lubow’s descriptions and critiques are spry and astute. “He was at least half a century ahead of his time” when in 1916 he produced Self-Portrait, a ready-sculpture that invited the viewer’s tactile involvement – and when in a 1915 short essay, he wrote, “the essence of painting is preserved in the flat plane.” In Paris, he was renowned for his fashion photography, and as a portraitist he claimed and proved an ability to depict the character of his subjects. (When Proust died, Man Ray raced over to take a photo of the deceased.) But later, when he repeatedly echoed or reproduced his early innovations, Lubow sees a flagging and embittered ex-genius bristling at critics who regarded his paintings as secondary to his photos and Readymades (he thought of himself first as a painter, and painting as a medium above all others).
Man Ray virtually disowned his working-class Jewish family and replaced those affections with those of friends and lovers. As sharp as Lubow is about the art, he has organized his book around, and titled most of his chapters with, the names of those people – Stieglitz, his first wife Adon Lacroix, Tristan Tzara and Francis Picabia, his lover Kiki de Montparnasse, Andre Breton and Paul Éluard, Lee Miller, his lover Meret Oppenheim, and his wife Juliet Browner. Berenice Abbott was his studio assistant for a time as well. His friendship with Duchamp was remarkable for its continuity and mutual support – though Lubow notes that Man Ray often played the role of Duchamp’s “wingman.”
His lovers were often his models. In 1924, he created Le Violin d’Ingres, a French idiom that means “hobby.” The f-holes of the violin are painted onto a photo of and armless (defenseless?) Kiki — with the overt suggestion that he was toying with her. Perhaps his most well-known painting is The Lovers (1933), eight feet long and three feet high, another reaction to his break-up with Lee Miller. But one can’t read about his relations with women without wincing. “The menace of sexual violence flickered over Man Ray’s affair with Miller,” Lubow writes, “as it had throughout his relations with Lacroix and Kiki. What is most disturbing is how accepted this was in his Montparnasse circle … the psychoanalytic writings of Surrealist theorists, such as Michel Leiris and Georges Bataille, normalized pain and coercion within erotic pleasure. Sade in particular was a hero of Man Ray.” Lee Miller had been raped as a seven-year old; it’s hard to imagine that Man Ray was sensitive to her in that regard.
In light of Man Ray’s elusivenessness, Lubow has done a superb job of portraying the person on the slant. But it’s hard to imagine Man Ray in depth by way of this biography, beyond his persistence as an artist. In his final paragraph, Lubow says, “It is my hope that, composed of fragments that are arrayed against different background, in this short life of a long productive life, a whole portrait of Man Ray has emerged.” My reading of this book was gratifying, even if a whole portrait has not emerged. But Lubow does makes a few attempts to limn the inner man and his “shadows.” In one of his tougher assessments, he writes:
“His act of self-creation was so comprehensive that the Man-made armor shielded him, except in a few rare and remarkable instances, from expressing human feelings. Renouncing his family and ethnic origins, he had invented a persona that masked his person. Apparently it was the price he felt was required to become what he most wanted to be: an artist. But the self-absorption and self-protection that first Lacroix and now Kiki perceived also contributed to a missing element in his art – the reliance in inventiveness and wit, the lack of self-revelation and emotion.” Yes, but did any of the Surrealists decant self-revelation and emotion into their art? As for attaining a fuller portrait of Man Ray, there is Man Ray: An American Artist by Neil Baldwin (1988), which Lubow points to for “the testimony of many of Man Ray’s relatives and close friends.”
When the Germans invaded France in 1940, Man Ray fled and sailed for Hoboken where he was met by his sister. He wound up in Los Angeles and lived there for 11 years before returning to France. In California, his reputation as a fashion photographer and portraitist of the famous preceded him, and his work was shown in galleries in museums, but didn’t sell. Throughout Lubow’s biography, the selling of Man Ray’s art, the earning of sufficient funds for a livelihood, and the status of his reputation are tracked so that we experience this rhythm of ups and downs in his domestic and professional domestic life. He returned to Paris in 1951. Juliet Browner, whom he met and married in L.A. (in a double wedding with Max Ernst and bride), was loyal to him until his death in 1976.
In 1957, now back in France, the Gallerie de l’Institut in Paris staged a Dada exhibition with two objects by Man Ray, one of which was the Object To be Destroyed mentioned here at the outset. “Young protesters swarmed the gallery,” Lubow writes, “They stomped on the metronome.” When his insurance company paid out for the damages, “He vowed to use the insurance money to buy fifty metronomes and reproduce the piece.” In 2018, Sotheby’s prepared to auction one of the replicas – estimated price £25-35,000.
[Published by Yale University Press on September 14, 2021 216 pages, $26.00 hardcover.]