Paris
In July 1921, Man Ray went to live and work in Paris, settling in the Montparnasse quarter favored by many artists. His accidental rediscovery of the cameraless photogram, which he called "rayographs", resulted in images hailed by Tristan Tzara as "pure Dada creations".
Shortly after arriving in Paris, he met and fell in love with Alice Prin (popularly known as "Kiki de Montparnasse"), an artists' model and celebrated character in Paris bohemian circles. Prin was Man Ray's companion for most of the 1920s, and became the subject of some of his most famous photographic images. She also starred in his experimental films Le Retour à la raison and L'Étoile de mer.
In 1929, he began a love affair with the Surrealist photographer Lee Miller. She was also his photographic assistant and, together, they reinvented the photographic technique of solarization. Miller left him in 1932.
From late 1934 until August 1940, Man Ray was in a relationship with French art model Ady Fidelin, who appeared in many of his photographs. When Ray fled Nazi-occupied France, Adrienne chose to stay behind to care for her family. Unlike the artist's other significant muses, Fidelin had until 2022 largely been written out of his life story.
Man Ray was a pioneering photographer in Paris for two decades between the wars. Many significant members of the art world, including Tzara, Pablo Picasso, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Jean Cocteau, Salvador Dalí, Peggy Guggenheim, Alice Rahon, Bridget Bate Tichenor, Luisa Casati, and Antonin Artaud, posed for his camera. His international fame as a portrait photographer is reflected in a series of photographs of Maharaja of Indore Yashwant Rao Holkar II and his wife Sanyogita Devi from their 1927 visit to Europe. In the winter of 1933, surrealist artist Méret Oppenheim, known for her fur-covered teacup, posed nude for Man Ray in a well-known series of photographs depicting her standing next to a printing press.
His practice of photographing African art in the Paris collections of Paul Guillaume and Charles Ratton and others led to several iconic photographs, including Noire et blanche. As Man Ray scholar Wendy A. Grossman has illustrated, "no one was more influential in translating the vogue for African art into a Modernist photographic aesthetic than Man Ray."
Man Ray was represented in the first Surrealist exhibition with Jean Arp, Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, Georges Malkine, André Masson, Joan Miró, and Pablo Picasso at the Galerie Pierre in Paris in 1925. Important works from this time were a metronome with an eye, originally titled Object to Be Destroyed, and the Violon d'Ingres, a photograph of Kiki de Montparnasse with f-holes superimposed on her back, inspired by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Violon d'Ingres is a popular example of how Man Ray could juxtapose disparate elements in his photography to generate meaning.
Man Ray directed a number of influential avant-garde short films, known as Cinéma Pur. He directed Le Retour à la Raison (2 mins, 1923); Emak-Bakia (16 mins, 1926); L'Étoile de Mer (15 mins, 1928); and Les Mystères du Château de Dé (27 mins, 1929). Man Ray also assisted Marcel Duchamp with the cinematography of his film Anemic Cinema (1926), and Ray personally manned the camera on Fernand Léger's Ballet Mécanique (1924). In René Clair's film Entr'acte (1924), Man Ray appeared in a brief scene playing chess with Duchamp. Duchamp, Man Ray, and Francis Picabia were all friends and collaborators, connected by their experimental, entertaining, and innovative art.
