A very practical enfant terrible
John McEwen
MAN RAY by Neil Baldwin
Hamish Hamilton, £20, pp. 446
Man Ray (1890-1976) is well served by books, not least by his autobiography, notorious for containing only one date; this latest offering is the most pedantic and the least flattering. It is very much of the constipated American school, having taken five years to write, carrying nine pages of acknowledgements and painstakingly identifying the source of all its many quotations. It also contains a warning. Many people were found who knew Man Ray, but 'relatively few actually knew him well enough to talk at length about him.'
Not an uncommon problem, as most of us will know from personal experience, but to mitigate its effect Baldwin resorts to unquotable quotes — "Life is au fond so limited, so diabolique . . . " she told Djuna Barnes' — and a fair lump of padding in the baneful form of faction — . . . the wordly (sic) European traveller was instantly attracted to Dora, who duti- fully helped set the table, her eyes demure- ly downcast . . .' etc.; which shows that the author is also not the sprightliest of prose stylists. But there is no denying he has done his homework and no denying either that the enigmatic Man Ray has a special fascination, as a 17-page bibliography further testifies.
Indeed it is a tribute to the artist's lifelong pursuit of idiosyncracy that he continues to defy art-historical description. He is probably thought of as a photo- grapher above all else, but he himself wanted to be recognised as a painter and some of his most memorable visual con- ceits — the spiked flat-iron, the metrono- mic eye — come within the compass of 'sculpture', involving as they do the altera- tion of everyday objects.
This artistic volatility — An artist should avoid alcohol and permanent attachments' — was not to the advantage of his career, but is easy to understand in the context of his immigrant background and claustrophobic upbringing. When he changed his name and went to Paris he made as clean a break with his past as his father had done before him; only in the son's case it was for emotional and intellec- tual reasons, rather than political and economical ones. Hard work was instilled in him from the start, when as a child he helped with his parents' home-based vest- making business; but until the end he refused to be drawn on what he dismissed as 'family, religion, or sentimental topics'.
Man Ray's early life might have served a thousand Jewish American novels. His mother, Manya Louria, was born in Minsk, his father, Melach Radnitsky, in Kiev. A sentimental train of events, too long to tell, brought them to Philadelphia. Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitsky) was their first child.
The family lived in Philadelphia and then, in 1897, moved to Brooklyn, New York. Emmanuel soon began to shine at school and his parents inevitably enter- tained the highest hopes for him, so it was a blow when he turned down the archi- tectural scholarship he had been offered by New York University, preferring to make his own way in the arts as a painter. His parents supported him nonetheless, one room in the already cramped apartment being set aside as his studio. 'I thought of myself as Thoreau,' he wrote later, 'break- ing free of all duties and ties to society.' The anarchic Walt Whitman was another hero.
A change of persona followed — 'Man' short for 'Manny', 'Ray' an abbreviation of his surname, the 'Ray' part of it im- mediately adopted by the rest of his family. It was a clever idea, the first of his inspired adaptations, and made all the more objec- tive by his insistence that it should be a surname throughout, not Ray but Man Ray. This breakthrough was in 1911, the year of his majority.
Visits to the photographer Alfred Stieg- litz's 291 Gallery and evening classes at the Ferrer Modern School had by now brought him into direct contact with the American avant-garde, although for most of his twenties he held down a conventional job as a map designer and was even married for a time.
At the Ferrer School his art teacher was the realist painter, Robert Henri — a self-proclaimed anarchist for whom the idea always took artistic precedence: 'Art is art whether on a canvas, on stone, on a book cover, on advertisement, or a piece of furniture.' Later Man Ray found the most exquisite embodiment of Henri's attitudes in the life and person of Marcel Duchamp. Perhaps because he and Duchamp were opposites the two became lifelong friends — Duchamp the subtlest, most ascetic and felinely subversive of dandies; Man Ray dogged, sensual, businesslike. The irony was complete when Duchamp chose to make his home in thrusting New York and Man Ray in sophisticated old Paris.
With Man Ray's arrival in Paris the narrative leaves the winding and specific roads of his upbringing to join the great motorway of 20th-century art history. Poiret speeds past in the outside lane, Kiki de Montparnasse is overtaken, Heming- way is glimpsed at a service station. As always, the ghost of the parodying Beach- comber and his memories of artistic life in the rue des odeurs incroyables is never far away — 'Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes would be reading from his text, Mouchez- vous (Blow Your Nose) . . . .' But there are interesting facts — Man Ray's mistress and assistant Lee Miller (later Lady Pen- rose) discovered his photographic trademark of `solarisation' by switching on the light in his dark-room by mistake and there are some arresting quotations: 'While some are satisfied with the effort to please, there are others who wish to surprise'; `Today's tricks are tomorrow's truths'.
It is perhaps the greatest strength of the book that it is diligent enough to give the impression that Man Ray was not entirely the carefree enfant terrible, disdainful of progress in art and practicalities in life; but shows on the contrary that he drank sparingly, avoided parties, evaded his family, was politically naive (though, to his credit considering how fashionable it was, never a communist) and tight with money, rather against the grain of people who do not have much. It also shows that his career was quite conventional in its momentum, old age a matter of cashing in and retrospective exhibitions (but not to his lasting regret, in his hometowns of Philadelphia or New York). However, it neglects to point out that his art too had a progress, Man Ray always reflecting fashion (particularly in his painting) and, more regrettably, it utterly fails to con- vince us of his charm: the wit that endeared him to Duchamp and the sensuality — so apparent from his photographs — that he successfully brought to bear on some ex- ceptionally enticing women. For that we must look to the art, which is as it should be.
`Thank goodness our holiday cottage hasn't been ransacked.'
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