PARMA.- Man Ray spent his life resisting the idea that an artist should belong to a single medium. He photographed what he did not want to paint, painted what could not be photographed, turned ordinary objects into unsettling sculptures, made experimental films and continually revisited his own inventions. That restless approach to art is at the heart of Man Ray: Everything, opening September 12 at the Villa dei Capolavori, home of the Fondazione Magnani-Rocca near Parma.
Bringing together more than 300 photographs, paintings, sculptures, objects, graphic works, books and films, the exhibition is described as the most comprehensive retrospective ever devoted to Man Ray in Italy. It coincides with the fiftieth anniversary of the artist’s death in Paris on November 18, 1976.
Rather than treating Man Ray primarily as a photographer — the medium with which he is most often associated — the exhibition places photography, painting, sculpture, design, graphic art, publishing and cinema on equal footing. The result is a portrait of an artist who spent some sixty years moving freely between disciplines and questioning conventional ideas about what an artwork could be.
Among the best-known works is Le Violon d’Ingres of 1924, Man Ray’s celebrated photograph of Kiki de Montparnasse seen from behind, her bare back transformed into the body of a violin through the addition of two f-holes. Other photographic landmarks include Tears, Prayer, Anatomy and Noire et Blanche, alongside portraits of women who played important roles in his life and work, including Lee Miller and Nusch luard.
The exhibition begins with Man Ray’s early years in the United States. Born in Philadelphia in 1890, he became associated with Dada and discovered photography as a medium that would remain central throughout his career. His early experiments also extended into sculpture and objects. By Itself, created in 1918 and represented in the exhibition by a 1966 bronze version, dates from this period, as does Obstruction of 1920, an installation made from 63 wooden coat hangers suspended from the ceiling and multiplied into an unexpectedly complex structure.
His move to Paris in 1921 transformed both his career and his life. Marcel Duchamp welcomed him into the city’s avant-garde circles, beginning a friendship that would last for decades. Man Ray soon became one of the most important photographers of the Paris art world, portraying many of the writers, artists, performers and personalities who shaped the cultural life of the period.
Commercial assignments, particularly in fashion, developed alongside increasingly radical personal experiments. His camera-less “rayographs” and his explorations of solarization became some of the defining images of Dada and Surrealism. The exhibition also includes lectricit, the 1931 portfolio of ten photogravures produced with Lee Miller, who began as his assistant before becoming his muse and partner and ultimately establishing an independent photographic career of her own.
Photography, however, never displaced painting. Man Ray continued to work on canvas throughout his life, and several paintings included in the exhibition reflect his close involvement with Surrealism during the 1930s. Among them is l’Heure de l’Observatoire, les Amoureux (1932–1934), in which the enormous crimson lips of Lee Miller float in the sky above the Paris Observatory. Born from the emotional aftermath of their separation, the image turns private anguish into something strange, theatrical and cosmic.
That willingness to remake personal experience into images, objects and symbols also appears in some of Man Ray’s most famous sculptures and ready-mades. Cadeau (Gift), an iron fitted with a row of nails, was first made on December 3, 1921, for the opening of his first Paris solo exhibition at Philippe Soupault’s Librairie Six. The original disappeared that same day, but Man Ray later recreated it repeatedly, challenging the idea that an artwork’s significance depended on the survival of a unique original.
A similar history surrounds Indestructible Object, originally created in 1931 from a metronome fitted with a photograph of Lee Miller’s eye. Following the end of their relationship, the work evolved into Object to Be Destroyed. Man Ray repeatedly altered, reproduced and reconsidered such objects, treating replication not as a loss of authenticity but as another stage in their lives.
That attitude gives the exhibition an unexpectedly contemporary edge. Long before digital images made copying nearly effortless, Man Ray was already questioning ideas of originality, authorship and mechanical reproduction. His rayographs were photographs made without cameras; his sculptural objects could disappear and return in later versions; and works conceived decades earlier could be produced again without, in his view, losing their identity.
Design also entered naturally into this fluid practice. Palettable, conceived in 1941 and later produced in 1971, transforms an artist’s palette into a functional table, while the Monument to the Unknown Painter of 1955 similarly blurs the separation between sculpture, object and artistic joke.
The exhibition also looks at Man Ray’s place within the wider history of Surrealism. Rsurrection des Mannequins documents the legendary 1938 International Surrealist Exhibition at the Galerie Beaux-Arts in Paris, where artists including Salvador Dal, Max Ernst, Joan Mir, Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray transformed female mannequins into works of art as part of one of the movement’s most memorable installations.
Film provides another important strand. Man Ray’s relatively small but influential body of experimental cinema is presented not as a side activity but as part of the same larger vision that drove his photography, painting and sculpture. For him, artistic practice was less a collection of separate disciplines than a single experience capable of moving freely among images, objects, movement and ideas.
The retrospective also devotes particular attention to Man Ray’s relationship with Italy during the 1960s and 1970s, while tracing connections between his work and subsequent generations. Andy Warhol, who knew Man Ray toward the end of the older artist’s life, is presented as an important inheritor of some of his ideas about repetition, celebrity, reproduction and the shifting status of the art object.
Curated by Walter Guadagnini, Mauro Carrera and Stefano Roffi, Man Ray: Everything brings together loans from museums, galleries and private collections in Italy and abroad. The exhibition also builds on a series of shows at the Villa dei Capolavori devoted to artists and movements connected with the twentieth-century avant-garde, among them Mir, de Chirico, Cocteau, Warhol, Surrealism and Bruno Munari.
Visitors will also encounter the permanent collection assembled by Luigi Magnani, which includes works by Titian, Drer, Van Dyck, Goya, Canova, Monet, de Chirico and Morandi. Recently rediscovered works by Renoir, Czanne and Matisse have returned to the collection and are again on view in its Gallery of the French Masters.
A catalogue published by Dario Cimorelli Editore reproduces the works in the exhibition and includes essays by the curators as well as contributions by Paolo Albani, Silvana Annicchiarico, Andrea Bellavita, Eva Brioschi, Alice Ensabella, Flaminio Gualdoni, Marco Meneguzzo, Alessandro Nigro and Giangavino Pazzola.
Taken together, the exhibition makes a case for Man Ray not simply as one of the great photographers of the twentieth century, but as an artist for whom photography was only one possibility among many. Painting, objects, film, typography, fashion and experimentation all belonged to the same project: finding a form for things that did not yet have one.
