MAN RAY PREFACE
March 15, 2020
Man Ray Preface
In André Breton's work, Surrealism and Painting, written in 1928 then revised and augmented in 1965, it is significant to note a rather discreet presence of Man Ray and the predominance of his photographic production over his painting or his objects. Man Ray's successes with photography have undeniably masked the originality and coherence of his work, the Other Work as one says the Other Scene, of an experimental and transdisciplinary nature, that of an artist who is at once painter, filmmaker, creator of objects, poet and writer. He who declared: "I don't represent my dreams, I live them," went through the Surrealist adventure, like his lifelong accomplice Marcel Duchamp whom he met in 1915 at Ridgefield, with a certain phlegm and real independence of mind. It took Arturo Schwarz's work in the 1960s, the reissue of dada objects for posterity to truly take the measure of this part of 20th century art history and the importance of Man Ray's work.
Marcel Duchamp's formula: "Man Ray: n.m synonym of Joy, play, Enjoy" made the American a worthy heir of the Incoherents who officiated at the Chat noir cabaret in Montmartre at the end of the 19th century. But the word "joy" could mean at the expense of the one to whom it was destined, for narrow-minded and sorrowful spirits, "not serious."
When the avant-gardes of the interwar period were the subject of a large-scale revaluation, Man Ray, who suffered from this lack of historical recognition towards him, reacted to these critical reversals of fortune with the publication of his memoirs in 1963, the book Self Portrait.
Rich, complex, "rhizomatic," today Man Ray's work makes its author an authentic precursor who announces the contemporary mutation of the nature of the artistic act in the 20th century. Man Ray did not ask questions, he proposed solutions. Pragmatic, the artist theorized little; on the other hand, he experimented a lot. His solutions passed through artistic proposals in adequacy with the disciplines he "touched." Man Ray was not concerned with the recognized value of the mediums with which he experimented and suffered from the conservatism of the art world, both American and French, for whom a good half-century was necessary to recognize equal value between traditional disciplines inherited from the Academy and the arts "in the age of mechanical reproducibility": photography and cinema.
"I simply try to be as free as possible. In my manner of working, in the choice of my subject no one can dictate to me to or guide me. They may criticize me afterwards, but it is too late. The work is done. I have tested freedom."[1]
Man Ray also worked on commission, in the field of photography and incidentally in that of cinema. The Tout-Paris of the roaring twenties (aristocrats, artists, women and men of the art world) posed before his camera: with his photographic chamber and his taste for perpetual innovation (Perpetual Motif), Man Ray revolutionized the art of portraiture and inscribed himself in its history and that of photography. He had the ability to transfigure the imposed exercise into a work of creation. His film The Mysteries of the Château of Dice was for these reasons, depreciated. Man Ray himself would declare immediately after finishing it that he did not think of distributing it to the public: as if its author, himself deceived by the contingencies of the project and the appearances of a well-done duty, no longer saw the complex visual work based on a solid mytho-poetic and literary foundation that he had himself imagined.
With Hans Richter and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Man Ray is one of the artists who will develop a consistent cinematographic work during the twenties. However, the signs of recognition will be slow in coming. Barbara Rose's article: "Kinetic Solutions to pictorial problems: the films of Man Ray and Moholy-Nagy," published in the American magazine Artforum in September 1971 was from this point of view revealing and the triggering sign of a rereading of the films.
In 1997 with Patrick de Haas, we published the first book in French entirely dedicated to Man Ray's cinematographic work: Man Ray director of bad movies. Lucien Treillard, former assistant and collector who tirelessly worked for the recognition of the one he had assisted for many years, strongly encouraged us; he entrusted us with unpublished reels from Man Ray which, added to those preserved by the Man Ray Trust, would constitute a comprehensive set of the artist's "post-professional" or "amateur" cinematographic activity. At this precise moment, the National Museum of Modern Art received two determining donations: that of Juliet Man Ray's estate which brought in the entire set of the artist's photographic glass plates, his archives in which Ana Puyol plunged, and a certain number of unpublished films, Man Ray's home movies; the second was that of the heirs of Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles which allowed to receive the archives related to the making of the film The Mysteries of the Château of Dice[2], then the unpublished hand-colored copy dedicated to Marie-Laure with this dedication: "To the Viscountess de Noailles I dedicate these images which will never reveal, alas! all her kindness nor her charm"
In 2002, I received in my conservation office at the National Museum of Modern Art, a young student from Huesca, the author of the present work. She was recommended to me by her professor and thesis director, Agustin Sanchez Vidal. Her project was Man Ray's cinema and the study of its sources.
I had known Agustin and his research work on Buñuel and Dalí in 1993 when I was myself working on the film The Golden Age (1930), around the restoration of the original negative of the film and the abundant epistolary correspondence that Buñuel had maintained with his patron producer of the film. My research had led me towards the formative periods of Buñuel and Dali, which in France we knew very poorly. So Ana Puyol's project resonated strongly. Her approach consisting of going in search of what our own French historiography on dada and surrealism could have neglected, seemed to me from the start the source of new horizons brought to Man Ray's work.
From his childhood, his family origins, his training, his first encounters, we knew what Man Ray himself had been willing to reveal in Self Portrait and what had been meticulously reconstructed by Neil Baldwin's study in the book Man Ray: An Artist's Life published in French in 1990.
Ana Puyol's bias will be to analyze Man Ray's cinematographic production, the subject of the second part of this book, on the one hand by resituating it at the center of a perfectly interdisciplinary problematic in which each medium allows a specific advance to the artist's global approach and on the other hand in the light of a cultural "background" to decipher, an authentic puzzle, which had shaped the young American artist arriving in Paris in July 1921.
The analysis of Man Ray's intellectual construction imposes itself in this work as a veritable hermeneutics of the work. The foundations of a double Jewish and Russian culture (literary, philosophical) of Man Ray, a libertarian ideological construction stemming from Russian nihilism, notably around the writings of Bakunin, Kropotkin but also of Max Stirner, the author of The Unique and His Property[3]. This ideological construction will only consolidate, doubtless even structure itself thanks to Man Ray's frequentation of the Francisco Ferrer Center, a center created in Manhattan in honor of the Catalan anarchist executed in Barcelona and who had been the promoter of an innovative and alternative pedagogical project, the Modern School, a pedagogical model that refused any dogma or prejudice. The Francisco Ferrer Center was animated by Emma Goldman, herself of Russian origin, an anarchist activist, partisan of violent action and feminist. Conceived on the model of Ferrer's Modern School, the center hosted multiple activities: literary readings, idea debates, avant-garde artistic practices, stage art, dance. The teaching hostile to the academic manner, was constantly reinventing itself: Man Ray benefited from it, following in particular the courses of Robert Henri, a professor very imbued with the writings of Bakunin, Nietzsche and Walt Whitman. The life model courses were dispensed in a musical atmosphere, in order to favor a dynamic capture of reality.[4] In Self Portrait, Man Ray obviously evokes his passage at the Ferrer Center and his very specific life model sessions but he describes his erotic emotion before the moving nude model: the erotic of the moving body! He evokes this essential formative period under the sign of freedom and love, two data that must certainly not be neglected; however, this was to pass over in silence an ideological and philosophical context transmitted by personalities like Emma Goldman or Adolf Wolff, at the center of a strong link between creation and anarchism. Later, this training will overdetermine Man Ray's always loose positions with André Breton's directives, notably after surrealism's rapprochement with the Third International in 1929 when the Second Manifesto of Surrealism was published.[5]. This political philosophy of anarchist essence was intimately linked to the American individualist and transcendental philosophy of Samuel Butler, Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau, from which Man Ray will draw inspiration for his own philosophy of art.
Life in the phalanstery of Ridgefield in the company of Adolf Wolff, Adon Lacroix Belgian poetess and Man Ray's first wife, Alfred Kreymborg is imbued with poetry and guided by the necessity of realizing a utopia within a libertarian colony. Two years after the Armory Show and the scandal of the Nude Descending a Staircase, Marcel Duchamp comes to Ridgefield to meet Man Ray. This is the year of the publication of the magazine The Ridgefield Gazook, with a drawing by Man Ray on the cover "The Cosmic Urge" mocking cubism: today in the international history of the dada movement, this magazine to which Adon Lacroix and Kreymborg collaborate, is considered "proto-dadaist."
If Man Ray has already operated a synthesis between a family Russian literature and American poetry, Adon Lacroix allows him access to European avant-garde literature and the symbolist poetry of Mallarmé, Lautréamont, Roussel or even Jarry.
Very often, Man Ray's work seems constituted of a series of hapax, which reason cannot explain. We have interpreted these as isolated experimentations, fruit of an all-out inventiveness, of chances, accidents and fantasies, according to a doxa propagated by their own author. Untitled (Perpetual Motion) is one of these hapax; it dates from 1908 and history only retained a harbinger of "mechanistic" concerns that Man Ray would have ten years later. Art history will credit the dada movement with these realizations alongside those of Duchamp, Picabia, Morton Schamberg or even Juliette Roche. Ana Puyol's research carried out from the context of knowledge and dissemination of scientific knowledge at the beginning of the 20th century, Man Ray's appetite which is incontestably confirmed by his long collaboration as an illustrator at the MacGraw Hill Book Company Inc. publisher between 1913 and 1919 confirm that the link maintained with the industrial universe and the world of the machine to which works like Dancer/Danger (1917-20) will refer is the fruit of a deep personal intellectual maturation and not of a group effect or a passing "trend."
The second part of the book is devoted to what its author calls Man Ray's "conceptual production," on which I myself have worked extensively during my career. Ana Puyol's investigations suddenly lift a veil, perhaps veils on this production. Man Ray has incontestably contributed to it, once again always emphasizing the fortuitous, accidental, even strange character of events. I used the term hermeneutics to qualify this research. The root of the word comes from Hermes: the messenger, the intermediary who allows an interpretation of texts to be deciphered. Deciphering Man Ray himself and his narrative that Baldwin qualified as impressionist. Is it totally to be excluded that there was a cryptic demiurgic will in the writing of Self Portrait on Man Ray's part? In this, Man Ray would have made his autobiographical narrative the equivalent of a sacred text, leaving it to others to search, to interpret so as not to cut short the exegesis, but on the contrary to only introduce and favor it.
More prosaically, several factual explanations are possible. At the time when he writes Self Portrait, André Breton's attempt at rapprochement and collaboration with the Anarchist Federation is already over and the surrealists' mistrust of political parties is strong. This can explain the fact that Man Ray did not want to insist on the structuring character of this political philosophy on his work. But on the other hand, in the field of plastic creation, a new generation of artists emerging after the war and claiming Marcel Duchamp, "neo-dadaists" – from John Cage to artists grouped under the Fluxus movement – claimed for art, chance, play, irony, humor: "art is what makes life more interesting than art"; so many characteristics that had always animated Man Ray and that it seemed to him probably necessary to remind the young generations.
[1] In Tashjan Dickran "Man Ray on the margin" p 98 quoted in the present work p 111
[2] Published in Patrick de Haas and Jean-Michel Bouhours, Man Ray Director of Bad Movies. Paris, 1997, ed. du Centre Pompidou
[3] Which Alain Jouffroy had already pointed out in "Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia and Man Ray". Cf note 39 p 23 of the present work
[4] Cf p 25 of the present work
[5] This link will be evoked very early by Margaret C. Anderson in the American magazine Little Review (n°25, Chicago, New York) of March 1916