Description
"Man Ray is one of the central artists of the twentieth century. By his own design, he is also one of the most mysterious. He was a founding father of Dada and played a key role in French Surrealism. His earliest and perhaps his greatest invention was the persona of Man Ray. He began life as Emmanuel Radnitsky, the eldest of four children born in Philadelphia to a mother from Minsk and a father from Kiev. His father changed the family name to "Ray," and Emanuel, whose nickname was "Manny," adopted the name "Man Ray." When he was seven the family moved to the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, where both parents worked as tailors and the children helped out at home. In New York in the early twentieth century, this was a typical Jewish upbringing. Defying his parents' expectations of earning a university degree, he turned down an architecture scholarship to New York University with the intention of becoming a painter. Frequenting "291," the avantgarde art gallery of Alfred Stieglitz, he was mentored by the older man, the son of German-Jewish parents, who were of a previous generation and much more elevated social class than Man Ray's. When at the age of thirty Man Ray relocated to Paris, he like Stieglitz, discovered his calling. More than Stieglitz, he made a clean break with his past. He shunned organized religion, and except for the war years, when his background required him to return temporarily to America, he paid no mind to a Jewish identity. Still, it can be argued that by giving precedence to thinking and ideas above all practical matters, and in embracing the absurdity of the human predicament, he fits squarely in the Jewish tradition. By employing his Jewish background as one filter to understand his life and art, Arthur Lubow illuminated aspects of Man Ray that previous biographies have not explored"--
