Becoming Man Ray - Critical Essay

In 1908 Emmanuel Radhitsky (1) (1890-1976) graduated from Boys' High gymnasium in Brooklyn and, to his parents' dismay, declined Columbia University's generous tender of a scholarship in architecture. From the bohemian confused noise of an improvised bedroom studio at dwelling he set out to become a painter. Surviving examples and documents of his earliest work--the imaginative production 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 piece of work doing lettering and layout for a of recent origin York advertising firm, and for a short time attended studio courses at the National Academy of Design and the Art scholars League. He then studied life drawing with Robert Henri and George Bellows in Harlem at the novel progressive Ferris Center, a community of of the like kind radical thinkers as Margaret Sanger, Emma Goldman, Upton Sinclair and Lincoln Steffens

In 1911 he was greatly impressed by dint of an exhibition of Cezanne watercolors at Alfred Stieglitz's Gallery 291 As a oft-repeated 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 replete or with the initials MR A loosely returned convincingly modern watercolor of a sister, Portrait of Dorothy, dates from that period.

Organized by the agency of 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 deepness charting a path through this little-known material that leads to more familiar surface of land 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 come [i]or[/i] go after [i]or[/i] behinds Man Ray's progress by means of a sedate selection of works, and ends 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 fresh Jersey, overlooking the town of Ridgefield, and in 1913 he took up full-time residence there. sum of two units landscapes from that first winter are distinguished by the agency of a tentative, exploratory use of unprimed canvas serving to exhibit bare fields, an unfinished quality he admired in the watercolors of Cezanne. (2) Tilting up into the distance, the fields are inflected with tree and buildings, and a snowfall of white pigment is scrubbed onto the canvas. With the change of seasons, Man Ray began to bring forward vibrant landscapes in watercolor and oil that again bring to mind the antecedent of Cezanne. Larger at 20 to 30 inches upon 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 tree and sum of two units 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 the agency of Picasso on the first painting Man Ray complet after visiting the Armory present to view in February 1913. All angles and planes of somber colors, his Cubistic, architectonic Portrait of Alfred Stieglitz (1913) displays the famed art dealer with signature spectacles pushed up and resting upon his forehead. The exuberant Flowers with R Background (1913) evidences his admiration for Matisse's R Studio (1911) also included in the Armory exhibit that year. Man Ray eyes a dark, pressed-glass vase casually arranged with region flowers set against the pattern of what may be a decorative wallpaper design appropriated from Matisse's Harmony in R (1908) a work he might well have seen at 291 (3)

That same year, Man Ray met the painter and bard Adon Lacroix; she soon became the favored subdue of photographs, drawings and paintings. His Woman Asleep (1913) painted the year before their marriage, present to views Lacroix stretched out on the landscape of her bedclothes. The painting was his first important sale. Encouraged by the agency of the validation, Man Ray took to the studio, where he produc a series of watercolors and oils of the Ramapo Hills, in which abstracted arrangements of tree and hills become increasingly Cubistic and also increasingly expressive. In the decorative Elderflowers (1914) relatively large at 30 inches square, he exhibits an allover field, abstracting the white, saucerlike clusters of blows on a dense, crosshatched thicket of leaves. Reduc and press togethered 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.