Sale!!! Mega RARE! Unique!!!
Man Ray - Male Nude, Solarized, 1933
Old Authentic Original Drawing Offset print
Beautiful Famous photo! Iconic!!!
Print format: 21.5 cm x 29.2 cm
This is a print that the printer had archived as a reference model and laminated on a support in order to be able to preserve it over time.
A wonderful testimony to traditional art printing which has totally disappeared these days.
Remarkable old print, luminous, with very beautiful dense and contrasting tones.
Its rendering as well as its sharpness, its sharp details and its brilliance, are absolutely magnificent.
Print made in 1994 by a former art printer - Archival model Imprimeur duotone print enhanced with gloss varnish
This unpublished print was found in the depths of an assembly workshop in the archive lockers of a former art printing works, preciously kept flat and protected from light in an envelope. Although it is old with its 29 years of age, it has remained in a good state of conservation. Presence of traces of dirt and marks on the back due to manipulations by the printer. On the other hand, the front is intact, in perfect condition and of a remarkable shine.
This copy was kept by the printer in order to serve as a reference for its setting and coloring on the machine during reprints.
Modernity and historical quotation, a masculine body traversed by the quivering of the solarization of Man Ray and at the same time the memory of a master of the renaissance, that of Michelangelo, a twist, without any break, dadaist first , then surrealist, equidistant from Tzara and Breton, having known how to preserve the link with the past, highlighting the pleasure of beauty, the best weapon to overcome the violence of revolutions.
Man Ray uses in this image, the solarization which is a milestone of his work, from 1929 alongside his assistant and model of the time Lee Miller, by developing negatives of nudes, she feels a mouse pass between her legs , lets out a cry and turns on the light in the lab while the images are in the developer, Man Ray comes running and has the wise idea of plunging the negatives into the fixer, without knowing that he has just performed his first solarization.
The solarization technique is a brief exposure of the negative during development, with a lamp placed above the developer tank, for 1 to 2 seconds. The light radiates and causes the inversion of the values of shadow and light, the blacks becoming white, and creates the appearance of lines on the contours which are shrouded in halos. Man Ray finds there an original way to divert the overly realistic side of photography and to feed the surrealists' thirst for fantasy.
“Everything can be transformed, eliminated by light, its flexibility is the same as that of a brush. » Man Ray
“I started out as a painter. By photographing my paintings, I discovered the interest of their reproduction in black and white. One day, I came to destroy the original to keep only the reproduction. From there, I never ceased to believe that painting is an outdated form of expression, and that photography will dethrone it when the public is visually educated. For me, one thing is for sure, I need to experiment in some form or another. Photography gives me the means, a simpler and faster means than painting.” Man Ray
Man Ray participates in the anchoring of surrealism in popular culture. It is his fantasies that he photographs, he only wants to distract, disturb, disorient and make people think, he abandons the paths of logic, such is his only rule for seeing bodies of flesh arise, meanings which alone can allow the birth of a work of art.
He likes to take pictures, of his muses and of men, from Mina Loy, an English poet with a thermometer as an earring, to Kiki de Montparnasse next to an African ebony mask, then of her assistant and photographer Lee Miller solarized and Juliet with her face covered with a black stocking like a silkworm ready to hatch, Man Ray covers them with objects, incises their skin with violin keys, burns them with the silver of a solarization, multiplies them.
Man Ray is a jack of all trades, he goes from surrealism to the nude, from solarization to portraiture, from rayography to fashion. For the painter with modernist tendencies that is Man Ray at the beginning, photography becomes the mode of expression of modern Art par excellence. The technique replaces the artist for the notions of representation and the latter, free from these contingencies, can explore new modes of expression. As part of a surrealist approach just like Picasso, through his compositions, Man Ray marks the shift from the aesthetics of revolt against beautiful painting towards the poetics of the strange, the fantastic and the dream proper to surrealism.
He is the most inventive photographic artist of the 20th century and undoubtedly the most creative mind in this field. We owe him solarization, the rayogram, multiple exposure, the manipulation of optical surfaces for artistic purposes, the coupling of positive and negative prints and, in the titles of his works, a host of puns that he using his dada and surrealist vocabulary. With his talent as a visionary and his strange, stunning images, he changes the perception of reality.
As soon as you entered his studio in Montmartre, you were bathed in an atmosphere of objectivity, light walls, plain screens, technical luxury which allowed for the most diverse lighting. On the walls, a few photographs of nudes, machines, porcelain and landscapes confirmed that he was a direct photographer, concerned with discovering the photogenic object and not expressing his personality.
He considers the brush, the camera and the typewriter as equals. In his photographic search for beauty in itself, he does not make a preliminary study, he is content simply to surprise himself and the world around him.
Far from letting himself be imprisoned in the straitjacket of traditional rules, he considers the form in which he works as a simple means in the service of his ideas, he widens the boundaries of ordinary photography, being one of the first to liberate photography of its vocation to serve the recording of reality. With a singular talent as a visionary, he remains unclassifiable, through his studies of nudes, his fashion photographs and his portraits, he opens a new chapter in the history of photography, and tirelessly experiments.
"We haven't done anything yet in photography, it's still in its infancy, it's the most primitive of the arts, painting is 20,000 years old, photography barely 100, it's currently at a time that would correspond for painting to that of rock carvings in caves. » Man Ray
Man Ray (1890-1976) American photographer, real name Emmanuel Radnitzky, born in Philadelphia, from a family of Russian emigrants. Known as Man Ray, for reasons of pronunciation of his surname, he chooses to reduce the nickname of his first name "Manny" to "Man" and takes the first 2 letters and the last of his name to form "Ray". . He was at the same time painter, designer, director of avant-garde films, but will be best known as a surrealist photographer from 1918. With his close friend Marcel Duchamp, they will together form the American branch of the Dada movement born in Europe by rejection of traditional art.
In 1908 Man Ray finished high school and was offered a scholarship to pursue studies in architecture, which he abandoned when he decided to become an artist. He works in New York as a draftsman and graphic designer. In 1910 he took drawing lessons at the National Academy of Design in New York. During this period, he frequented the "291 Gallery", directed by Alfred Stieglitz, where Cézanne, Brancusi, Piccasso and the photographs of Stieglitz were exhibited.
In 1911 Man Ray took anatomy classes at the "Art Sudents' League", then studied in 1912 at the revolutionary "Ferrer Center" in New York. In 1913, on the occasion of the famous “Armory show” dedicated to the European avant-garde, Man Ray discovered the work of Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp. He buys his first camera to photograph his paintings. The same year he met the Belgian poet Adon Lacroix, who introduced him to Baudelaire and Rimbaud. The photographer will marry her in 1914.
In 1915 he met the collector Walter Arensberg who introduced him to Marcel Duchamp with whom he became a friend and co-worker. Man Ray holds his first personal exhibition at the "Daniel Gallery" in New York by embarking on photography to reproduce his paintings. After the success of the exhibition, he will move away from traditional painting in favor of photography.
In 1916 with Marcel Duchamp, they together founded the "Society of Independent Artists". He performs his second personal exhibition again at the “Daniel Gallery”. In 1917 Man Ray produced spray paintings and airbrushes. In 1919 Man Ray separated from his wife Adon Lacroix. In 1920 he still founded with Marcel Duchamp and Katherine Dreier the “Société Anonyme”, the first museum entirely devoted to modern art. He began to work as a freelancer for the magazine "Harper's Bazaar" with which he collaborated until 1942.
In 1921 he published with Duchamp the only issue of the review “New York Dada”. Man Ray concludes that "Dada cannot live in New York". In June Duchamp leaves for Paris, Man Ray joins him in July and settles in the Montparnasse district, to live and work there. He frequented the circle of Parisian Dadaists and Marcel Duchamp introduced him to surrealist artists, such as Louis Aragon, André Breton and Paul Eluard. It was there that he fell in love with the French singer Alice Prin, nicknamed Kiki, with whom he moved in.
In 1922 Man Ray decided to earn a living by specializing in portrait photography and tried his hand at fashion photography for the couturier Paul Poiret. He discovered and perfected a technique by beginning to take his first photographs without a camera, photograms which he called "Rayograms". In 1923 on the recommendation of Edward Steichen, Bérénice Abbott became Man Ray's assistant until 1926.
In 1924 his photo "Le Violon d'Ingres" was published in the dada magazine "Littérature", this same year marked the publication of innovative fashion photographs in the French and American editions of the magazine "Vogue" as well as in the "Vanity Fair ". In 1925 with Jean Arp, Max Ernst, André Masson, Joan Miro and Pablo Picasso, Man Ray presented his works at the first surrealist exhibition at the "Galerie Pierre" in Paris. In 1929 he met Lee Miller who would be his assistant and mistress until 1932. Together, he discovered, once again by chance, the technique of Solarization. In 1931, he tried the carbro process to take color photos but abandoned it because it did not give him the desired shades.
In 1936 Man Ray bought a house in Saint-Germain-en-Laye and began an affair that would last until 1940 with Adrienne Fidelin, known as Ady. In 1940 after the German occupation, Man Ray left Paris for New York. He then left for Los Angeles where he met Juliet Browner in Hollywood. In 1946 in a joint ceremony in Beverly Hills, Man Ray married Juliet Browner and Marx Ernst married Dorothea Tanning. In 1947 the photographer returned to France to recover his belongings, then in 1951 moved with Juliet to Paris.
Man Ray wrote an ironic article on photography in 1943: “Photography is not art”. He had indeed started as a painter and did not devote himself to this practice until 1915, with the sole concern of obtaining images of his paintings. From then on, he produced simultaneously or in turn documentary, professional and art photographs, especially after settling in Paris in 1921.
In 1958 he was commissioned by the firm Polaroid to work with his black and white films. The commission will result in the “Unconcerned Photographs” series. He began experimenting with color photography.
In 1961, Man Ray received the medal of the Venice Biennale of Photography. In 1962 a retrospective was organized for him at the National Library in Paris. In 1967 he was rewarded by the Philadelphia arts jury for his work and the influence of his hometown.
“Creating is divine, reproducing is human. » Man Ray
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