In the thick of it

Man Ray, born Michael Emmanuel Radnitzky (1890–1976) in Philadelphia, was a maker of images par excellence. He made sculptures, paintings and photographs, but the medium was always secondary to the image. After all, it is the reproduction of his marvellous painting ‘Observatory Time — The Lovers’, in which Lee Miller’s lips are emblazoned across the sky, that one remembers, or the reproduction of his object ‘Gift’, a flat iron with tacks stuck to its ironing face; not the originals. Perhaps the only sculpture one recalls as a three-dimensional presence is his ‘Indestructible Object’, a metronome with a photo of a woman’s eye attached to its swinging arm; and that’s chiefly because it moves.

Man Ray taught himself to take photos in order to record his paintings and sculptures, but he also had an incredible knack for being in the right place at the right time. He ended up being best known as a photographer because he established himself at the centre of a fascinating milieu of artists and he took exceptionally good — and often unforgettable — photographs of them. This highly enjoyable exhibition of his portraits takes us straight to the heart of his world.

The show, of more than 150 vintage prints, begins with classic images of Marcel Duchamp, whom Man Ray had met at the artists’ colony at Ridgefield, New Jersey. It was his friendship with Duchamp that took Man Ray to Paris in 1921, and ensured his involvement with the burgeoning Dada and Surrealist movements. So we see dear Marcel pictured from behind sitting in an armchair exposing a star-shaped tonsure, and as Belle Haleine (or Rrose Sélavy) in drag, quite a few years before Grayson Perry tried on his first frock. We are also offered a straight profile mugshot so we can see what the Father of the Readymade and the Quentin Tarantino of Conceptualism really looked like.

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Among the other sitters for Man Ray’s lens at this point were the Japanese artist Foujita, in what must be a wig, a broad-jawed Ernest Hemingway trying to be confrontational, James Joyce with his head in his hand and Schoenberg looking like a moody method actor.