Emmanuel Radnitzky, better known as
Man Ray, lived from 1890 to 1976. He was a surrealist visual artist, who not only painted and sculpted, but also pioneered some wild and crazy techniques in photography. In addition to innovative composition, he also played around with exposing images on photo-sensitive surfaces, creating eerie X-ray like images that he called "Rayographs."
He's probably best known for his prolific photographic work, which includes portraits of nearly every major artist of the early 20th century (i.e., his pals), as well as some iconic and much-pilfered images, like the lady violin and the glass bead teardrops seen in my mini-collage below.
He also constructed some innovative 3D pieces. The eye on the metronome seen above was one kind of goofy example -- and his original photographs of his own sculpted creations are interesting in a "meta" kind of way, too. He designed
chess pieces that are simultaneously
abstract, beautiful,
and functional, which have long fascinated me since I first spied a set in a museum.
But, oh, his paintings. Those are what really made me a Man Ray fan. I'm just going to include thumbnails (fair-use-sized, I hope) of some of my favorites.
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| La Fortune |
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| Jazz |
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| Les Beaux Temps |
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| Imaginary Portrait of the Marquis De Sade |
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| A l'Heure de l'Observatoire - Les Amoureux |
Emmanuel Radnitzky, better known as Man Ray, lived from 1890 to 1976. He was a surrealist visual artist, who not only painted and sculpted, but also pioneered some wild and crazy techniques in photography. In addition to innovative composition, he also played around with exposing images on photo-sensitive surfaces, creating eerie X-ray like images that he called "Rayographs."
His art is amazing! Thank you for introducing me.
ReplyDeleteJana @ A Novel Reality
It is great... I could do another post on his photos, and another one on his 3D sculptury objects...
DeleteAh, I love A l'Heure de l'Observatoire - Les Amoureux. I was going to say I appreciated La Fortune but the last one really took my breath away.
ReplyDeleteOf course it did. :-) I think there are variants out there, too. He never seemed to do just one version of something.
DeleteLove the cloud colours in La Fortune- I had oddly forgotten that Man Ray painted too!
ReplyDeleteArgh, I just remembered that I left out another one (with similar cloud colors) that I like even better than La Fortune... see Night Sun: Abandoned Playground.
DeleteThanks for pointing him out!
ReplyDeleteVery cool. Thanks for showing me this artist.
ReplyDeleteShawn at Laughing at Life 2
You're welcome to Tony and Shawn... and to Shawn: stay tuned -- I'm profiling a comedian in next week's batch of posts!
ReplyDeleteSo, here's your E man - wonderful! Some of these works I know - the two photographs on the left for starters. Jazz looks familiar, too. I've never been to the art museum in Columbus so it must have been from a poster or some such. I love the chess set, too.
ReplyDeleteI'm curious which Columbus you mean. (I lived in Columbus, Ohio for a year and a half, a few decades ago.) I saw many of these paintings in a Man Ray show at the Philadelphia art museum in, I think, 1990.
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