Man Ray (1890 –1976) was a pioneer of the Dada movement in the United States and France and a central protagonist of Surrealism. Today he is one of the best-known American artists of the twentieth century, celebrated above all for his innovative and often seductively glamorous photography. Surprisingly, given Man Ray’s key role in the history of early-twentieth-century Modernism, a comprehensive collection of his writings on art has not been published in English until now. Man Ray: Writings on Art fills a conspicuous gap in scholarship on the artist and his period. It brings together his most significant writings, many of them published here for the first time. These occasionally quixotic texts, which include artist books, essays, interviews, letters, and visual poems, reveal the incredible scale of the artist’s output and the remarkable continuity of his aesthetic and political beliefs. This volume offers a long overdue vision of Man Ray as someone who used words both as a creative medium and as a means of articulating ideas about the nature and value of art. With richly reproduced illustrations, it provides powerful insight not only to scholars of art history and academics, but also to working artists and those who count themselves as Man Ray fans.

A biography of the elusive but celebrated Dada and Surrealist artist and photographer connecting his Jewish background to his life and art Man Ray (1890–1976), a founding father of Dada and a key player in French Surrealism, is one of the central artists of the twentieth century. He is also one of the most elusive. In this new biography, journalist and critic Arthur Lubow uses Man Ray’s Jewish background as one filter to understand his life and art. Man Ray began life as Emmanuel Radnitsky, the eldest of four children born in Philadelphia to a mother from Minsk and a father from Kiev. When he was seven the family moved to the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, where both parents worked as tailors. Defying his parents’ expectations that he earn a university degree, Man Ray instead pursued his vocation as an artist, embracing the modernist creed of photographer and avant-garde gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz. When at the age of thirty Man Ray relocated to Paris, he, unlike Stieglitz, made a clean break with his past.

New York Dadaist, Parisien surrealist, international portraitist & fashion photographer, this work considers how the career of Man Ray was shaped by his turn-of-the-century Jewish immigrant experience & his lifelong evasion of his past.

American artist Man Ray spend the most productive years of his career, during the 1920s and 1930s, in Paris.

Man Ray: Women~ISBN 88-89431-32-6 U.S. $49.00 / Hardcover, 8.5 x 11 in. / 152 pgs / 130 b&w. ~Item / March / Photography

How does one make sense of a purported link between mathematics, William Shakespeare, and art? The answer lies within the oeuvre of Man Ray (1890-1976). The publication sets out to unravel the Surrealist puzzle beginning with his photographs of mathematical models he encountered at the Institut Henri Poincaré in Paris in the thirties. Moreover, it charts a path culminating in his Shakespearean Equations (1947-1954) series of oil paintings, which were inspired by the photographs and painted in Hollywood over a decade later. The arc the images strike from painting back to photography reveals the ease with which Man Ray moved between various disciplines and forged his own path. An inveterate experimenter, he pioneered artistic activities in the realms of painting, object making, film, and photography, challenging conventional boundaries and blurring established aesthetic categories. Exhibitions: The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., February 7-May 10, 2015 - NY Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen, June 11-September 20, 2015 - The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, October 20, 2015-January 23, 2016

"Exhibition dates: The Phillips Collection, Oct. 10, 2009-Jan. 10, 2010; University of New Mexico Art Museum, Feb. 6-May 30, 2010; University of Virginia Museum of Art, Aug. 7-Oct. 10, 2010; University of British Columbia, Museum of Anthropology Oct. 29, 2010-Jan. 23, 2011." --T.p. verso.