Man Ray’s Noire et blanche is a masterpiece of contrasts: the soft, white face of his muse Kiki, her head horizontal, her eyes closed. She is holding an African Baule mask: vertical, dark, hard. Originally shot for a 1926 edition of Paris Vogue, the photograph has certainly become one of the most iconic examples of avant-garde photography, if not modern art, period.
Noire et blanche has always been considered a departure for Man Ray: a rare dance for the modernist with African art.
Not so, it turns out.
In Man Ray, African Art, and the Modernist Lens, opening at Vancouver’s Museum of Anthropology (MOA) on Friday, the celebrated artist’s important relationship with non-Western objects is explored for the first time through Man Ray’s photographs and the original artifacts documented in the photos.
Born Emmanuel Radinsky in Philadelphia in 1890, Man Ray – who spent much of his career in Paris – practised many artistic disciplines, but was best known for his photography. A celebrated modernist and one of the most prominent figures associated with the Dada and Surrealist movements, Man Ray helped support himself with his fashion photography and by cataloguing art collections. He was certainly not, until now, associated in any meaningful way with African art.
Part of the Man Ray exhibit on display at the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver. — The Globe and Mail
It was an intern’s curiosity that led to the groundbreaking discovery and sparked this landmark exhibition, turning Man Ray scholarship on its head in the process. Wendy Grossman was a summer intern working on the photo collection at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, when she was told to track down every place that Man Ray’s 1932 photograph Pablo Picasso had ever appeared.
“This was back in 1995, pre-Google days,” said Grossman, now 55, during a recent interview from Washington, where she lives. “So I went down to the Library of Congress, to the most obscure catalogues in every language in every place, and there were these Italian catalogues with these bizarre headdresses and I had this aha moment: There’s something else going on here. It’s clearly not true that Man Ray had no other interaction with African art.”
Grossman – a passionate, highly intellectual and tenacious independent curator – spent years challenging long-held ideas about Man Ray and investigating and developing theories about this long-ignored body of the modernist’s work.
“My life became consumed,” she says. “I became obsessed with this material, because it just felt so rich. It was completely unexplored territory – a whole chapter of Man Ray’s life and story that was completely missing.”
Grossman unearthed dozens of photographs that revealed an aspect of the iconic artist’s work that was news even to scholars. “The major players in the Man Ray world were very excited,” says Grossman. “People say: Can there be anything new on these artists who have been written about ad infinitum? So to have found a whole new facet of that has been very rewarding to me.”
Grossman was faced with many unanswered questions and blanks to fill in. For example, one of the photographs Man Ray took for the Danish collector Carl Kjersmeier (who commissioned Man Ray in 1933 to catalogue his African art collection) featured an ivory Pende pendant and a black Chokwe whistle, both from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Why, Grossman wondered, would Man Ray photograph these objects together? She was stumped.
One night, her husband out of town, Grossman spread a copy of that photograph and a number of others – including Noire et blanche – on the other side of her double bed and went to sleep, the mystery turning over in her mind.
