Musical Accompaniment: That Dear Old Song by Anton Karas.

 

Man Ray was right at the center of the artistic ex-pat community in 1920s Paris.  His photography is easily recognizable. He photographed many of his friends, who were rising stars—Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Sinclair Lewis, Gertrude Stein—and his favorite model Kiki.

What kind of name is Man Ray? His own pseudonym.  He was born in Philadelphia in 1890 and named Emmanuel Radnitzky. Man Ray suited him better.

He pioneered the rayograph in 1921.  This was a way of taking photos without a camera, using light-sensitive paper.

I want to show you a few of his pictures. The first one is of Max Ernst, the painter. I know a little about him because he was married to Peggy Guggenheim and I got to work at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice for three months, many moons ago. He wasn’t exactly a sweet husband to her. She was an unusual woman. Or maybe people like her, who are born wealthy, and always have so much and seem perpetually bored are just a foreign kind of person to me.

Many people in that ex-pat set came from money. Not Hemingway. Some people were not so good at art or writing and they could buy their way in. Hemingway was working class and earned his way in, but it made him bitter.  A lot of the people in that set I know through his writing.  A Moveable Feast is a beautiful book but it doesn’t put any of his friends , the people who helped him, in a good light.  And all of Hemingway’s sins were due to his naïvity and their manipulations… I’m a little more suspicious now than back when I first read it. Nevertheless, it did give me perhaps an unfair contempt for Gertrude Stein and a few others. And those first impressions are hard to shake, So I’ll present, without comment, Man Ray’s photograph of Stein.

I don’t know much about the Duchesse Eristowa, but I liked this photograph of her. It’s very 1930s looking. Well, how the very rich looked in the 1930s. Hoovervilles and the Dust Bowl were also 1930s, but probably very few duchesses vacationed there.

I mentioned Man Ray’s model Kiki. This is one of his famous photographs of her but he took hundreds, maybe thousands of pictures of this model.

Last picture is one of Man Ray himself with a friend you might recognize, Mr. Salvador Dalí, the Surrealist painter.

Man Ray is an interesting guy. I don’t know a lot about him personally except he was said to be a very intense man. There’s a wild theory that he was associated with the Black Dahlia murder.  I doubt that one was true  but he knew everybody in 1920s and 1930s so he must have had some great stories!