Becoming Man Ray - Critical Essay

In 1908, Emmanuel Radhitsky (1) (1890-1976) graduated from Boys' High School in Brooklyn and, to his parents' dismay, declined Columbia University's generous offer of a scholarship in architecture. From the bohemian clutter of an improvised bedroom studio at home, he set out to become a painter. Surviving examples and documents of his earliest work--the imaginative product of art and mechanical drawing courses--demonstrate a facility in line and proportion. Manny Radnitsky showed interest and real ability in landscape painting and portraiture, and signed his work with his initials, ER. He was sufficiently skilled to find a job doing lettering and layout for a New York advertising firm, and for a short time attended studio courses at the National Academy of Design and the Art Students League. He then studied life drawing with Robert Henri and George Bellows in Harlem at the new, progressive Ferris Center, a community of such radical thinkers as Margaret Sanger, Emma Goldman, Upton Sinclair and Lincoln Steffens.

In 1911, he was greatly impressed by an exhibition of Cezanne watercolors at Alfred Stieglitz's Gallery 291. As a frequent visitor, he came to know the great man himself and the work of the artists he exhibited, including Rodin, Picasso, Matisse, Picabia, Brancusi, Marin, Dove and Hartley. In 1912, the Radnitskys changed their patronymic to Ray, and the young artist altered the diminutive of his given name to suit: he would answer to the distinctly avant-garde locution of Mall Ray, signing his work in full or with the initials MR. A loosely rendered, convincingly modern watercolor of a sister, Portrait of Dorothy, dates from that period.

Organized by the Montclair [N.J.] Art Museum, the traveling exhibition "Conversion to Modernism: The Early Work of Man Ray" explores the artist's youthful efforts in depth, charting a path through this little-known material that leads to more familiar ground. Man Ray scholar Francis M. Naumann, curator of the exhibition, traces the artist's attraction to modernism from 1907 to 1917, from ink drawings and watercolors to increasingly Cubistic landscapes and figures; he includes the evidence of magazines, pamphlets, personal photographs and other ephemera. Naumann carefully follows Man Ray's progress by means of a thoughtful selection of works, and concludes with a look at the radical, airbrushed paintings that more explicitly prefigure the well-known photography to come.

Dissatisfied with the uncertain benefits of a shared studio in Manhattan, Man Ray and a colleague visited an art colony across the river in New Jersey, overlooking the town of Ridgefield, and in 1913 he took up full-time residence there. Two landscapes from that first winter are distinguished by a tentative, exploratory use of unprimed canvas serving to represent bare fields, an unfinished quality he admired in the watercolors of Cezanne. (2) Tilting up into the distance, the fields are inflected with trees and buildings, and a snowfall of white pigment is scrubbed onto the canvas. With the change of seasons, Man Ray began to produce vibrant landscapes in watercolor and oil that again bring to mind the precedent of Cezanne. Larger at 20 to 30 inches on a side, the oils Ridgefield Landscape and the more abstracted Ridgefield (both 1913) incorporate receding bands of rolling hills extending to the ridge beyond. The first is largely pastoral, with a repoussoir motif of trees and two farm houses in the foreground and a freight train in the middle distance; the other establishes elongated factory sheds in the foreground and repeats that form in the bands of hills and fields beyond.

Naumann notes the impact of works by Picasso on the first painting Man Ray completed after visiting the Armory Show in February 1913. All angles and planes of somber colors, his Cubistic, architectonic Portrait of Alfred Stieglitz (1913) shows the famed art dealer with signature spectacles pushed up and resting on his forehead. The exuberant Flowers with Red Background (1913) evidences his admiration for Matisse's Red Studio (1911), also included in the Armory Show that year. Man Ray observes a dark, pressed-glass vase casually arranged with country flowers set against the pattern of what may be a decorative wallpaper design appropriated from Matisse's Harmony in Red (1908), a work he might well have seen at 291. (3)

That same year, Man Ray met the painter and poet Adon Lacroix; she soon became the favored subject of photographs, drawings and paintings. His Woman Asleep (1913), painted the year before their marriage, shows Lacroix stretched out on the landscape of her bedclothes. The painting was his first important sale. Encouraged by the validation, Man Ray took to the studio, where he produced a series of watercolors and oils of the Ramapo Hills, in which abstracted arrangements of trees and hills become increasingly Cubistic and also increasingly expressive. In the decorative Elderflowers (1914), relatively large at 30 inches square, he produces an allover field, abstracting the white, saucerlike clusters of blossoms on a dense, crosshatched thicket of leaves. Reduced and compressed to the status of an icon, Man Ray 1914 consists entirely of the date and artist's name, piled up like palisades across the surface of the diminutive oil.