BIOGRAPHY

Man Ray (1890-1976), painter, photographer, and object maker, was the principal American artist in the Dada movement.

Man Ray was born in Philadelphia, Pa. on August 27, 1890. In 1908 he studied painting at the National Academy of Design in New York City. He made his first abstract painting in 1911 and held his first one-man show in 1912. Before meeting the Dadaist artist Marcel Duchamp in 1915, Ray worked in a quasi-cubist fashion. His oil painting The Rope Dancer Accompanies Herself with Shadows (1916) shows the influence of synthetic cubism in the way forms are put together; but the influence of Duchamp is evident in the concern with movement, as seen in the repetitive positions of the skirts of the dancer.

After 1917, the year that Ray became important in the New York Dada group, he gave up conventional methods of painting. He became an object maker and adopted various mechanical and photographic methods of image making. A 1918 version of the Rope Dancer combined a spray-gun technique with pen drawing. Among his “ready-mades” was the Gift (1921), a flatiron with metal tacks. His Enigma of Isidore Ducasse featured a mysterious object (a sewing machine) wrapped in a cloth tied with cord. At that time he was working, too, with airbrush on glass, as seen in the Aerograph (1919).

In 1920 Ray helped Duchamp make his first machine, the Rotary Glass Plate, which was composed of glass plates turned by a motor—one of the earliest examples of kinetic art. With Katherine Dreier and Duchamp in 1920 Ray was instrumental in founding the Société Anonyme, an itinerant collection which in effect was America’s first museum of modern art. (The collection was given to the Yale University Art Gallery in 1941). Before settling in Paris in 1921, Ray teamed up with Duchamp to publish the one issue of New York Dada (1921).