Man Ray

Emanuel Rudnitzky was born in Philadelphia in 1890. From 1909 to 1912 he attended the National Academy of Design in New York. The artist’s family changed its last name to Ray. In 1915 he met Marcel Duchamp. Ray was fascinated by the European avant-garde, and his early paintings were influenced by Cubism. Together with Duchamp and Francis Picabia, Ray founded the New York Dada movement in 1917, and in 1920, with Katherine Sophie Dreier and Duchamp, he founded the Dadaist association Société Anonyme. In 1921 Ray followed Duchamp and Picabia to Paris. He developed the rayogram, a photographic technique that did without a camera and in which objects on photo paper were lighted from different angles. He also began to work with film and created object montages. He was represented at the first Surrealist exhibition in 1926 and took an active part in that movement. In 1940 Ray returned to the United States and settled in Hollywood. In 1961 he returned to Paris, where he died in 1976.