"Man Ray in America" at Francis M. Naumann - New York - exhibition of the photographer's work - Brief Article

Man Ray (1890-1976) was born in Philadelphia, and lived in Brooklyn, Ridgefield, N.J., and then Manhattan before moving to France in 1921. He also worked in Hollywood from 1940 to 1950, then returned to France for the remainder of his life. Yet, because of the Dadaist and Surrealist photography he created in Paris during the 1920s and `30s, he is widely perceived in origins, sentiment and style as a European modernist. This scholarly exhibition of paintings, drawings, sculptures and photographs from the years before he lived in Europe and from the decade of the 1940s when he returned to the States had two ambitions: to emphasize the range of materials and modes within which Man Ray worked (he craved recognition for his painting just as much as for his photography) and to present him as an American artist, however important his sojourns in Paris may have been.

In his early oil paintings, Man Ray experiments with one European modernist style after another: Rooftops Ridgefield (1913) has the same elevated perspective on small houses dotting a landscape that one finds in Picasso's Horta compositions, while the rolling hills and wild vegetation of Ridgefield Landscape (from the same year) borrow the high-key color and undulating forms of the Fauves. Elderflowers (1914) embraces the composition of Monet's Waterlilies, while Sec (1917), an oil-on-board, palette-knife painting of generic bottle and glass motifs, clearly employs the tenets of Synthetic Cubism.

However, certain works of the years just before his departure for Paris evince an original, droll machine esthetic that survives into the European Dada and Surrealist years. Two significant examples are the bronze totemic sculptures By Itself I and By Itself II (both 1918), created from discarded machine parts. They are not quite readymades, though the latter appears to be an arm from an industrial loom or spinning wheel.

Before moving to Paris, Man Ray closely followed currents in European art; he corresponded with Francis Picabia and Tristan Tzara (among others) and associated with like-minded artists such as Duchamp when they visited the States. (The exhibition included a 1949 photograph of Man Ray and Duchamp sitting on the curb of a Parisian street on a Hollywood stage set.) So there was some artificiality in this show's focus on Man Ray's "American Years," just as there is in concentrating on an artist's nationality once modernism became an international phenomenon. But the work assembled here does provide a more comprehensive understanding of Man Ray's creative trajectory, one that, in particular, attends to the eclectic paintings of his later California years. These include Vibration (1940), an abstract composition of brightly colored, squiggly lines suggesting electro-magnetic waves; a 1941 painting of Leda and the Swan, an image conjoining Leger's building-block vocabulary of volumetric cones and the erotic themes of Picasso's Surrealism; and several quite naturalistic paintings, such as a 1948 still life of bananas and a wood-plane, a work that combines dissimilar objects in so laconic a fashion that it intimates, in its own mild way, a form of absurdity.

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