The American multidisciplinary artist Man Ray played a major role in the Dada and surrealist movements of the Parisian avant-garde in the 1920s. Born Emmanuel Radnitzky in Philadelphia, he adopted a pseudonym early on in his career, as did many other Jews working in the period. After meeting and collaborating with the French artist Marcel Duchamp, in 1921 Man Ray moved to Paris, where he opened a photography studio. There he experimented with art film and photography, creating his signature “rayographs,” commonly referred to as photograms, in which objects were collaged onto photosensitive paper and exposed to light, producing quasi-abstract, black-and-white images. During World War II, Man Ray lived in the United States, but in 1951 he returned to Paris.
The 1910s were a time of experimentation for Man Ray. Inspired by the paintings of European modernists at the Armory Show in New York in 1913, he began painting in an abstract style, one that…
These hollow, spool-shaped terra-cotta objects from Beth Shemesh would hold one or more pellets (often small pebbles) that when shaken would produce a sound. They have been considered babies’ toys…
In Alexander Tyshler’s illustration for a Yiddish version of the Sleeping Beauty story, characters seated around a table are packed together like puzzle pieces, enclosed in a rectangular shape from…