A supersonic sprinter might run a mediocre mile. A sublime poet may write leaden prose. Genius must find its medium, and polymaths like Picasso are vanishingly rare. The Metropolitan Museum’s splendid Man Ray exhibition When Objects Dream chronicles the trajectory of a visionary groping towards his métier. He tried painting and passed through sculpture before he landed on photography and found he could perform gymnastics with light.
That sense of breathless discovery, honed by constant refinement, permeates the show. A surrealist in search of a dream world, Man Ray ruthlessly edited his own subconscious, infusing it with wit, charm and technical perfection. He claimed that two of his most dazzling innovations, the rayograph and the solarisation, came about by accident; if so, they were the sort of accident that is thoroughly prepared and carefully monitored, then repeated until it hardens into a multi-step technique.
Emmanuel Radnitzky was born in Philadelphia in 1890 into a family of Jewish immigrants who started out in Russia and wound up in Brooklyn. Setting his sights on a career in art, he worked as an adman and technical illustrator, internalising the graphic clarity that commercial work demanded. In 1913, he attended the landmark Armory Show, where a mind-blowing encounter with cubism and Duchamp converted him into an enthusiastic acolyte of the avant-garde.
But how to earn his bone fides? We see him struggling to master a paintbrush, animate pigment, place forms on canvas and exert control over colour. Muddy browns and greens bleed into each other in “Dance” (1915) and “Mime” (1916), works in which he tried to render bodies in motion the way Duchamp did in “Nude Descending a Staircase”. In these clunky, derivative works, you can sense his discomfort with what he later called “the sticky medium of paint”.
He had more success with sculpture. Emulating Duchamp, he constructed clever Dadaist ready-mades: a chandelier made of wooden hangers, big enough for a ballroom (“Obstruction,” 1920/1961); an upturned iron with a ferocious-looking row of thumbtacks protruding from its base (“Gift,” 1921); and a lumpy object (dead animal? obsolete machine? a broken spirit?) trussed up in an army blanket and tied with twine (“The Enigma of Isidore Ducasse”, 1920).
Man Ray habitually took pictures of his assemblages, and those photographs became the finished product, with the sculptures in effect demoted to maquettes. He discovered that shadowy light could make ordinary objects menacing and ambiguous. In “Compass” (1920), a horseshoe magnet hanging by a wire locks on to a (toy) pistol that aims due west. At the flip of a switch the magnet could drop its cargo, scrambling directions and unleashing chaos.
In his hands, photography turned household items into louche characters. A spotlit eggbeater, shot at an angle like a standing figure, casts a sharp shadow, its curved blades bulging like male genitalia. He called it “Man”. Its female companion consists of a pair of concave light reflectors, like negative breasts, mounted atop a row of clothes pegs. Such schematic representations can be rotated, and Man Ray did just that, turning the two photographs upside down so that breasts and testicles traded places.
The Met includes the few photographs so famous that they’ve been turned into merch: the turbaned nude with a cello’s f-holes on her back; the pair of eyes shedding tears of glass; the woman with the mask-like, whiter-than-white face propping up a deep black African mask. But the heart of this beautifully installed show is his shortlived love affair with the rayograph, a technique for making images on light-sensitive paper without using a camera.
In his autobiography, Man Ray recounted its origin story. Working late one night in his darkroom, he left a funnel and a thermometer lying on a sheet of photo paper. When he turned on the light, it acted as a flash. He lifted the objects and found the traces they had left: ghostly silhouettes against a night-black ground.
The description of that eureka moment seems too pat to be genuine, especially since the real act of creation came with repetition. Man Ray liked to pose as a playful dilettante, the beneficiary of happenstance. But the exhibition’s curators, Stephanie D’Alessandro and Stephen C Pinson, demonstrate convincingly that the startling effects he came up with were the product of a meticulous mind. They place dozens of his lyrical and witty rayographs in a darkened sanctum at the centre of the galleries, leading viewers towards it along several distinct itineraries.
That arrangement maps the pathways of his imagination, which in the late teens and early 1920s, kept circling towards a focal point. The appeal of the ready-made, the urge to transfigure the world of prosaic objects into ethereal beings, the desire to master the mysteries of light, even his failed experiments in paint, all lead to an expressive language that mixes clarity and suggestion.
Pale silhouettes jostle on each page, intimating that balls, chains, springs, and nails have inner lives, and awaken in the darkroom when the lights go out. A comb with bright white teeth glows against the grey shadow of a gyroscope. The gyroscope reappears in another frame, alongside a magnifying glass with a pin at the centre of the lens; examine something too closely and you’re liable to get stuck. Jean Cocteau recognised that rayographs balanced whimsy with a creepy sense of threat. “You, my dear Man Ray, will nourish our minds with those dangerous games it craves,” he said. The guru of Dadaism, Tristan Tzara, compared the rayograph to “a game of chess with the sun”.
Tzara picked his simile with care. Chess was a surrealist’s pastime — Duchamp played it, too — and Man Ray designed a turned-wood set of pieces that reproduced some of the undulating and spiky forms that populate his rayographs. The king is a pyramid, the queen a cone, the knight a violin’s scroll like an abstraction of a horse’s mane. That board provides a matrix for Man Ray’s passions: the sensuousness of touch, the magic of symbols, the way we project our humanity on to inanimate things — and, most of all, the romance he fostered between solid object and the residue of light.
To February 1, metmuseum.org
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