Man Ray: Women~ISBN 88-89431-32-6 U.S. $49.00 / Hardcover, 8.5 x 11 in. / 152 pgs / 130 b&w. ~Item / March / Photography

Man Ray, surrealist master and exponent of the Dada movement, managed to reinvent not only the photographic language, but also the representation of the body and face, as well as the genres of the nude and the portrait themselves.0This book brings together around 200 photographs produced from the 1920s right up to his death in 1976, all featuring female subjects. Through rayographs, solarisations and double exposures, the female body undergoes a continual metamorphosis of forms and meanings, becoming an abstract form, an object of seduction, classical memory or realistic portrait, in endless playful and refined variations. Among the protagonists of his shots are Lee Miller, Berenice Abbott, Dora Maar and Juliet, a lifelong companion, to whom is dedicated the amazing The Fifty Faces of Juliet portfolio (1943-1944). But these women were, in turn, great artists: as evidence is presented here a corpus of works dating back to the time - between the 1930s and '40s - of their most direct association with Man Ray and with the environment of the Dada avant-garde and Parisian surrealism.0This volume offers a wide survey of one of the most exuberant periods of the 20th century, with authentic masterpieces of photographic art such as the Electricite portfolios (1931) and the very rare Les mannequins. Resurrection des mannequins (1938).00Exhibition: CAMERA, Turin, Italy (17.10.2019 - 19.01.2020).

A biography of the elusive but celebrated Dada and Surrealist artist and photographer connecting his Jewish background to his life and art Man Ray (1890–1976), a founding father of Dada and a key player in French Surrealism, is one of the central artists of the twentieth century. He is also one of the most elusive. In this new biography, journalist and critic Arthur Lubow uses Man Ray’s Jewish background as one filter to understand his life and art. Man Ray began life as Emmanuel Radnitsky, the eldest of four children born in Philadelphia to a mother from Minsk and a father from Kiev. When he was seven the family moved to the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, where both parents worked as tailors. Defying his parents’ expectations that he earn a university degree, Man Ray instead pursued his vocation as an artist, embracing the modernist creed of photographer and avant-garde gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz. When at the age of thirty Man Ray relocated to Paris, he, unlike Stieglitz, made a clean break with his past.

A dazzling portrait of Paris’s forgotten artist and cabaret star, whose incandescent life asks us to see the history of modern art in new ways. In freewheeling 1920s Paris, Kiki de Montparnasse captivated as a nightclub performer, sold out gallery showings of her paintings, starred in Surrealist films, and shared drinks and ideas with the likes of Jean Cocteau and Marcel Duchamp. Her best-selling memoir—featuring an introduction by Ernest Hemingway—made front-page news in France and was immediately banned in America. All before she turned thirty. Kiki was once the symbol of bohemian Paris. But if she is remembered today, it is only for posing for several now-celebrated male artists, including Amedeo Modigliani and Alexander Calder, and especially photographer Man Ray. Why has Man Ray’s legacy endured while Kiki has become a footnote? Kiki and Man Ray met in 1921 during a chance encounter at a café. What followed was an explosive decade-long connection, both professional and romantic, during which the couple grew and experimented as artists, competed for fame, and created many of the shocking images that cemented Man Ray’s reputation as one of the great artists of the modern era. The works they made together, including the Surrealist icons Le Violon d’Ingres and Noire et blanche, now set records at auction. Charting their volatile relationship, award-winning historian Mark Braude illuminates for the first time Kiki’s seminal influence not only on Man Ray’s art, but on the culture of 1920s Paris and beyond. As provocative and magnetically irresistible as Kiki herself, Kiki Man Ray is the story of an exceptional life that will challenge ideas about artists and muses—and the lines separating the two.

A wildly entertaining and surprisingly educational dive into art history as you've never seen it before, from the host of the beloved ArtCurious podcast We're all familiar with the works of Claude Monet, thanks in no small part to the ubiquitous reproductions of his water lilies on umbrellas, handbags, scarves, and dorm-room posters. But did you also know that Monet and his cohort were trailblazing rebels whose works were originally deemed unbelievably ugly and vulgar? And while you probably know the tale of Vincent van Gogh's suicide, you may not be aware that there's pretty compelling evidence that the artist didn't die by his own hand but was accidentally killed--or even murdered. Or how about the fact that one of Andy Warhol's most enduring legacies involves Caroline Kennedy's moldy birthday cake and a collection of toenail clippings? ArtCurious is a colorful look at the world of art history, revealing some of the strangest, funniest, and most fascinating stories behind the world's great artists and masterpieces. Through these and other incredible, weird, and wonderful tales, ArtCurious presents an engaging look at why art history is, and continues to be, a riveting and relevant world to explore.

Published to accompany an exhibition held Feb. 7-May 27, 2013, at the National Portrait Gallery, London; June 22-Sept. 8, 2013, at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh; Oct. 28, 2013-January 19, 2014, at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.

When American-born Surrealist Man Ray died in 1976, he left behind thousands of photo negatives, mostly portraits taken in his studio after his arrival in Paris in 1921. The Centre Georges Pompidou, which has owned them since the mid-1990s, has duly catalogued the collection of negatives and is now in a position to bring out what is an encyclopedic publication in the best sense of the term. It attests both to Man Ray s ability as a portrait photographer and to the quality of his archive as a monument to cultural history. The catalog features 500 portraits, each of which is explained in a short commentary. Since Man Ray's clientele was made up of members of Dadaist and Surrealist circles, of artists and painters, of writers and US emigrants of the Lost Generation, of aristocrats, and paragons of the worlds of fashion and theater, the book is at the same time a marvelous Who's Who and an indispensable reference work for a broad range of different historians and scholars of the 20th century.