Man Ray

Legendary photographer, painter, and maker of objects and films, Man Ray (Pennsylvania, 1890 – France, 1976) was on the most versatile and inventive artists of this century. Grown up in Brooklyn, he knew the worlds of Greenwich Village in the avant-garde era following the 1913 Armory show; Paris in the 1920’s and 1930’s, where he played a key role in the Dada and Surrealist movements; The Hollywood of the 1940s, where he joined others chased by war from their homes in Europe; and finally, Paris again until his death in 1976. Always at the forefront of the avant-garde, he experimented with every conceivable medium, invented a number of his own and influenced several generations of artists. His major contributions fall into the categories of painting, sculpture and photography. Particularly in the inter-war period, Man Ray was very active as portrait and fashion photographer, and was a pioneer of new photographic techniques such as solarizations and camera-less photograms, that he called Rayographs.