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…
In 1905 a group of Jewish Social Democrats left the party in Galicia in order to found their own organization of Jewish Social Democratic workers. The executive of the international Social Democratic…
Sailor with Guitar is one of Jacques Lipchitz’s early cubist sculptures, an experiment in translating painterly cubist concepts into three dimensions. The figure of the sailor was inspired by sailors…