Jewish Identity: "Concealing And Revealing"
Mason Klein stood before The Rope Dancer Accompanies Herself with Her Shadows, an early Man Ray painting. Completed in 1916, five years before the notoriously elusive artist set off for Paris to become the most renowned American working among the European avant-garde, Man Ray made this colossal work. It is barely comprehensible: an abstract crystalline structure is etched against a gray background, with six ropes hanging from it. Each rope is attached to a large geometric mass painted in red, green, yellow, blue or black.
"For me, I think this painting's a narrative for the whole show," said Klein, the curator for The Jewish Museum's new exhibition, Alias Man Ray: The Art of Reinvention. Klein explained that much like the artist himself — born Emmanuel Radnitzky, in 1890, to Russian Jewish immigrants living in Williamsburg — the barely visible crystalline shape, meant to represent the dancer, seems secondary to the dominating colored shadows.
Those shadows, Klein explained, represent Man Ray's various artistic personae — painter, photographer, Surrealist, Cubist, Dadaist. But what the artist was born as — a Jewish child to a tailor and seamstress in Brooklyn — has largely been obscured. "It's not as if I wanted to out him," said Klein. "It's just that his need to repress his Russian Jewish immigrant past has not been addressed thoroughly through his art."
Indeed, the Alias Man Ray exhibit, which opens on Sunday, Nov. 15, is nothing short of art-historical revisionism. The show argues that far from having little relation to his creative process, Man Ray's Jewish identity — and his relentless desire to escape it — manifests itself throughout his career. It is in his refusal to stick to any one medium, be it photography, film or painting. It’s in his close association with the Dadaists, who mocked any type of categorization. And it’s in all those shadows, a recurring motif found in much of Ray's work.
That biographers have overlooked his Jewish identity is perhaps no fault of their own; the artist was notoriously vague about his past. Even in his autobiography, published in 1963, when he was 73, Ray does not mention a word about his Jewishness. "It's been elided completely," Klein said. "He only tells us about his artistic creations as if it was the only thing he wanted you to know about him."
But the exhibit makes a strong case that there was more to Ray than he said. In the exhibition catalogue, Klein writes that his reading of Ray"s work is psychological, meaning that the Jewish references must be understood to have arisen subconsciously. When, for instance, abstract forms faintly resemble a flatiron or stitching, they could be unintended allusions to his parents' professions. When a later painting, Le Rebus (1938), made just before Ray fled Paris for Hollywood, contains creased lines that resemble body crevices, it might be a sign of physical weakness.
"He felt impotent to change," Klein said, noting that the works Ray made while he was in Hollywood, from 1940 until 1951, were his most Jewish ones yet. Only when he was forced to flee Paris — which he refused to do until just days before the Nazis invaded — did his Jewish identity re-emerge as something worth considering. "He thought he'd never have to deal with it again," said Klein. And yet when the war ended, Ray left for Paris once more, living there until his death in 1976.
Ray began his career as a painter, creating most of his early canvas work in the 1910s. Alfred Stieglitz introduced him to New York's art crowd, but it was the Armory Show in 1913 that captured Ray"s imagination. Europe"s great modern painters — Picasso, Matisse, Braque — displayed their work there, convincing the young painter that his real future lay in Europe.
The exhibit contains several paintings from this early American period that bear an uncanny resemblance to the Cubists; Ray"s Promenade (1916), for instance, seems to prefigure Picasso's Three Musicians (1921), with its vertical figures painted in muted blue, rusts and browns.
Ray gained a considerable reputation in this period, changing his name at this time too, but Klein argues the artworks themselves reflect his identity transformation. Ray's evasions about his past are legion, with the exhibit even opening with his well-known quote: "You see, I try to walk the tightrope of accomplishment between the chasms of notoriety and oblivion."
Because of this lack of biographical detail, Klein said you have to use the art as your guide. "Look at how he conceals and reveals," Klein said. "You have to see how he reveals himself in his work." In his paintings, human figures seem to dissolve into the background, which, Klein suggests, symbolize the artist's effort to lose his identity.
To this day, however, Ray is best known for his photographs. And the exhibit has dozens of them, including the iconic Le Violon d'Ingres (1924), in which a violin's F-holes are inlaid over a woman's back. Ray created most these works in Paris where he was eagerly embraced as the American Dadaist, after he founded the movement's New York branch.
Ray collaborated most often with Marcel Duchamp, and the exhibit highlights one photographic collage they made together. Titled Portrait of Rrose Sélavy (1921) it shows Duchamp dressed in drag, Both artists were mocking the supposedly fixed idea of identity — in this case sexual — but the story behind the photograph indicates that they actually considered dressing Duchamp up as a Jew first. The idea was dropped for reasons not known, but the picture nonetheless reflects the show's underlying thesis: identity transformations can be found throughout Ray's oeuvre.
These Dadaist works weren't how the general public knew Man Ray at the time, however. In America at least, glossy magazines made him famous. There is a telling quote on a wall text by Sylvia Beach, the founder of the original Shakespeare & Company bookstore in Paris, which quotes her as having said: "To be done by Man Ray means that you were rated as somebody."
Portraits in the exhibit of James Joyce, Jean Cocteau, Gertrude Stein and Marcel Proust on his deathbed are proof enough. In fact, while Ray is known today for his hybrid photographic collages and rayographs - objects placed on light-sensitive paper, which left their image behind like an X-ray — those fairly unimpressive portraits, published by the likes of Vanity Fair and Vogue, made Ray the Annie Leibovitz of his day.
The catalogue contains an authoritative essay about Ray's ever-shifting critical reputation. Written by Merry A. Foresta, curator of an important Man Ray exhibit in the 1980s at the Smithsonian, it describes how Ray's constant artistic transformation contributed to his askance posture within the modern art canon. "Like Baudelaire's flâneur, the observer who strolls through the crowd but is really not a part of it, Man Ray navigated through the art movements of the twentieth century." But he is an artist, she continues, "who ultimately got lost in translation."
Because he crossed so many boundaries — demolishing some, creating others — critics have found it difficult to place him within any one movement. His reputation was revived in the late 1970s and '80s, she writes, in large part because postmodernists found his taste for irony and categorical deconstruction suddenly fresh. And he remains relevant today for still another reason: because his transatlantic career, and indeed his hybrid identity, mirrors the careers of so many young artists today.
Klein suggests that Ray may have even been the first Jewish avant-garde artist, though it is a tenuous claim given both the movement and Ray's disavowal of ethnic identity. Indeed when Klein began working on this exhibit, he said several art world cognoscenti were puzzled by his theme. "Why are you reducing him to an ethnic category?" some wondered. Klein said others were even more blunt: "What? A Man Ray exhibit at The Jewish Museum? He'd roll over in his grave." But Klein was not deterred. "My answer is that I think he'd appreciate the irony of being looked at another way."
by Eric Herschthal - Staff Writer
The Jewish Week
Man Ray Mondays at the Jewish Museum
Until March 14, 2010
In conjunction with its new exhibition, "Alias May Ray: The Art of Reinvention," The Jewish Museum is presenting Man Ray Mondays. On Mondays during the run of the Alias Man Ray show (through March 14, 2010), the Museum will offer free docent tours or staff gallery talks every Monday at 12:15 pm (through December 28) or 1:00 pm (January 4 through March 8). Upcoming gallery talks by Jewish Museum staff members include: December 14, Nelly Silagy Benedek, Director of Education, "A Closer Look – The Rope Dancer;" December 21, Jennifer Mock, Manager of Public Programs, "A Closer Look – L'Homme (Man);" and December 28, Amanda Thompson, Assistant Registrar, "Exhibition Installation."
Museum visitors on Mondays receive 50% off the audio guide price of $5.00, and also have the option to purchase the Alias Man Ray exhibition catalogue for 10% off the regular price of $50.00. Artists and photographers who present a resume or business card will receive a discounted $5 admission.
Further information and updated offers and schedules re Man Ray Mondays can be found at http://www.thejewishmuseum.org/manraymondays.
NYBlueprint
From Miro to Warhol: The Berardo Collection in Paris at Musée du Luxembourg
PARIS.- José Berardo, born in 1944 on the island of Madeira, is one of the biggest Portuguese entrepreneurs. Barely aged 19, he emigrated to South Africa where he made a fortune working in various fields (goldmining, wine, banking, telecommunications). He came back to Portugal in 1986 and started gathering one of the most interesting collections of modern and contemporary art in Europe, which he continues augmenting.
An eclectic and ambitious collector, José Berardo was eager to share his collection with a wide audience. Two years ago, he signed a partnership with the Portuguese state, just like the one that was established in Madrid for the Thyssen collection: 862 works are on deposit for ten years in a museum bearing his name, in the Belém Cultural Centre, in Lisbon. After those ten years, the state will benefit from an exclusive purchasing option.
Since it opened some twelve months ago, the Berardo Collection Museum has attracted more than 400,000 visitors. It boasts a very dynamic policy of acquisitions and temporary exhibitions.
Examples of such private generosity toward the public are few and far between. Gathering more than 500 artists who all contributed to the evolution of modern art from 1900 to the present day, this collection allows visitors to "experience the twentieth century", in the collector's own words. Those works came to fill in the gaps in the collections of Portuguese museums (their acquisition policy had been restricted by the dictatorship which lasted until 1974).
When the new museum opened to the public in June 2007, Prime Minister José Sócrates hailed the international dimension of this exceptional initiative: "The European path of modern art used to go no further than Madrid. From now on, it starts from here".
The seventy-four works on display in the Musée du Luxembourg correspond to five major artistic movements in the twentieth century: Surrealism (Miró, Dali, Ernst, Breton...), one of the strong points of the pre-1945 collection; abstraction from 1910 to the immediate post-war period (Mondrian, Tanguy, Arp...); Europe vs. America in the 1960s, with Nouveau Réalisme and Pop Art (Warhol, Klein, Soulages, Mitchell...) ; post-1945 plastic explorations (Riopelle, Schnabel, Stella...).
The first section brings together eclectic works, to capture the spirit of the collection and José Berardo's passion for art: Pablo Picasso's Head of a Woman (circa 1909) is shown next to Jackson Pollock's Head (1938-41) and Karel Appel's Jump Into Space (1953). Francis Gruber's Sitting Nude with Green Chair (1944) meets Eugène Leroy's Standing Nude (1958) and Germaine Richier's Big Manta (1946-51). A 1914 landscape by Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso, the greatest Portuguese painter of the early twentieth century, confronts a 1953 landscape by Nicolas de Staël. Portrait painting is represented with Balthus' Portrait of a Woman in a Blue Dress (1935).
The second sequence is devoted to Surrealism, one of the collection's fortes, with an evocation of the Dada movement and the origins of Surrealism. The selected works survey the trend's main representatives and their sources of inspiration: Man with Candle (1925) by Joan Miró, Black Landscape (1923) and Shell-Flowers (1929) by Max Ernst, Le Gouffre argenté by René Magritte (1926), The Invincible Cohort (1928) by Giorgio de Chirico, Woman Attacked by Birds (1943) by André Masson , The Ice Knight (1938) by Victor Brauner, The Spinning Top (1956) by Hans Bellmer, The Encounter (1936) by Jacques Hérold, The Couple (1937) by Óscar Dominguez, Man Ray Café (1948) by Man Ray, Lunguanda Yembe (1950) by Wifredo Lam, and The Café de la Marine (circa 1930) by Pierre Roy.
Next, visitors will find a 'curiosity cabinet' gathering a Salvador Dali artefact (Aphrodisiac White Telephone, 1936), a folding screen painted by Yves Tanguy (The Firmament, 1932), a "box" by Joseph Cornell (Hôtel de l'Etoile, 1956), drawings by Victor Brauner, Joan Miró, Julio González and Roberto Matta, and a 1933 Cadavre Exquis associating André Breton, Valentine Hugo, Tristan Tzara and Greta Knutson. This ensemble is indicative of the manifold Surrealism's plastic manifestations. A transition toward the next section is managed with two paintings by Jean [Hans] Arp (Untitled, circa 1926, and Feuilles placées selon les lois du hasard, 1937) and a drawing by Arshile Gorky (a study for Bull in the Sun, 1942).
The third section shows the various trends in European geometric abstraction between the wars. Drawings by Georges Vantongerloo (Studies II, 1918) and by Liubov Sergeievna Popova (Composition, 1917) illustrate the birth of the movement, De Stijl for the Dutch artist and Suprematism for the Russian painter. A second work by the Portuguese Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso, Pelas Janelas (Desdobramento - Intersacção), 1914, is indicative of his radical evolution toward abstraction. The display is centred on Piet Mondrian's Composition with Yellow, Black, Blue, Red and Grey (1923), hanging next to Composition #28 (1930), a painting by Jean Gorin, whom Mondrian considered "France's only neo-plastician". Around those two works, paintings and drawings illustrate various trends, from Giacomo Balla's Futurism (Untitled, 1929) to Max Bill's experiment with "concrete art" (Progression in Six Steps, 1942-43). Several movements are shown in sequence: the "Circle and Square" association, the "Concrete Art" group or the "Abstraction-Creation" association are represented by Victor Servranckx (Composition, 1923), Marcelle Cahn (Abstract Composition, 1925), Amédée Ozenfant (Composition with Decanter, 1926-30), Ben Nicholson (Painting, Cadmium Red, Lemon and Cerulean, 1936), Robert Delaunay (Reliefs; Rhythms, 1932), Carl Buchheister (Diagonalkomposition 332r Fahne, 1932), Jean Hélion (Equilibrium, 1934) and Làszlo Moholy-Nagy (CH XIV, 1939). An ebony sculpture by Georges Vantongerloo (S X R, 1936) proves that most of these painters were also interested in applied arts and architecture.
American Pop Art and French "Nouveau Réalisme" are on view in the next section. The 1960s Europe vs. America confrontation has particularly interested the collector. Nouveau Réalisme is represented with works by Yves Klein (IKB 103, 1956) and Lucio Fontana (Concetto spaziale, 1960); torn posters by Jacques Villeglé (Libération, 1964) are displayed next to Mimmo Rotella's Lava Bene (1963).
Pop Art is present through works by Robert Indiana (Black Diamond American Dream #2, 1962), Andy Warhol (Campbell's Soup Can, 1965 and Ten-Foot Flowers, 1967), Tom Wesselmann (Great American Nude #52, 1963), Allan D'Arcangelo (Self-Portrait, Smoke Dream, 1963) and Roy Lichstentein (Mirror #1, 1971), beside a Jean Tinguely sculpture (Indian Chief, 1961) and one of Louise Nevelson's golden "furniture- sculptures" (Royal Tide – Dawn, 1960).
The last section surveys though partially significant post-war experiments. Geometric abstraction is embodied by Portuguese painter Maria Helena Vieira da Silva (Composition, 1948), then by Victor Vasarely (Bellatrix II, 1957), until the more and more "minimal" forms by Ad Reinhardt (Abstract Painting, 1962) and Joseph Albers (study for Homage to the Square: Blond Autumn, 1964). Lyrical abstraction and gestural painting are shown in parallel, with Jean-Paul Riopelle's Orange Abstraction (1952), Pierre Soulages' Painting, 10 November 1963 (1963) and Joan Mitchell's Lucky Seven (1962).
The exhibition ends with a big geometric Frank Stella, Hagamatana II (1967), which is more than 4,50 m. long. On the last wall of the room, the human figure reappears: to an uncanny portrait by Portuguese painter Lourdes Castro (Sombra projectada, 1964) answers Julian Schnabel's vehement Portrait of Jacqueline (1984), the only work deliberately chosen to go the 1960s limit retained for this project. This latter work shows that painters never stop experimenting, while, at the same time, bearing witness to the richness of José Berardo's collection, which also includes a large section of contemporary art.
Finally, a monumental bronze sculpture by César, Homage to Léon (1964), stands on the museum's patio.
Artdaily.org
Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage
