Title: Man Ray
Author: Jan Ceuleers
Publisher: Harry N. Abrams, 1994
Edited by Jan Ceuleers, texts by Man Ray and André Breton; 350 pages, 300 black and white illustrations
Published in conjunction with a substantial exhibition at the Ronny Van de Velde Gallery in Antwerp, this impressive volume presents an unprecedented range of Man Ray’s paintings, photographs, collages, drawings, objects, graphic work, and writing. Retrospectively, Man Ray has been theorized, valorized, and revered for his experimental solarized photographs, inventions, and films. His writing, photography, painting, and collage were important vehicles for Surrealist philosophy, avant-garde ideals, and paradoxically, high fashion photographs. Man Ray contains the innovative portraits of his creative contemporaries, including Breton, Yves Tanguy, Jean Coctaeu, and Gertrude Stein, as well as his Vanity Fair and Vogue spreads, the iconic Le Violon d’Ingres and Noire et Blanche photographs, and the stunning “rayographs.” This largely visual book celebrates Ray’s prescience in a spectacular display of nearly 300 works from his massive oeuvre, as well as a selected chronology, and list of plates complete with provenance. The resulting publication is a valuable overview of his artistic output in all of its eccentric and pioneering glory.
