Man Ray

Man Ray (1890–1976), born Emmanuel Radnitzky in South Philadelphia to Russian Jewish immigrant parents, was a leading American visual artist of the twentieth-century Dada and Surrealist movements. He grew up in Brooklyn, where his family changed its surname to Ray during his youth, and he formally adopted Man Ray as his single working name early in his career.

In New York he met Marcel Duchamp in 1915, and the two became close collaborators in the American wing of Dada. In 1921 he moved to Paris, where he spent most of the next two decades and became a central figure in the Montparnasse circle around André Breton, Paul Éluard, and Tristan Tzara. He worked across painting, sculpture, photography, and film.

His best-known photographic work was made in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s, including the rayograph camera-less prints he produced by exposing objects on photographic paper, the back-of-a-violin nude Le Violon d'Ingres from 1924 of his model and lover Kiki de Montparnasse, and the surrealist portrait Noire et Blanche from 1926. He also directed avant-garde films such as Le Retour à la raison, Emak-Bakia, and L'Étoile de mer.

He fled Paris in 1940 ahead of the German occupation, spent the 1940s in Hollywood, and returned to Paris in 1951, where he lived until his death in 1976. He is buried in Montparnasse Cemetery.

Man Ray is a self-chosen masculine pseudonym; Man functions as a shortened form of Emmanuel and Ray as the family's adopted English surname, and he used masculine forms throughout his life.