Man Ray, African Art, and the Modernist Lens

Abstract

Wendy Grossman and Letty Bonnell The exhibition “Man Ray, African Art, and the Modernist Lens” explores a little-examined facet in the development of Modernist artistic practice; namely, the instrumental role photographs played in the process by which African objects— formerly considered ethnographic curiosities—came to be perceived as the stuff of Modern art in the first decades of the twentieth century. At the center of this project are both well-known and recently discovered photographs by the American artist Man Ray (1890–1976), whose body of images translating the vogue for African art into a Modernist photographic aesthetic made a significant impact on shaping perceptions of such objects at a critical moment in their reception. Man Ray was first introduced to the art of Africa in a seminal exhibition of African sculpture at Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 Gallery in 1914. While his 1926 photograph Noire et blanche (Fig. 1) would later become an icon of Modernist photography, a large body of his lesser-known work provides new insight into how his photographs both captured and promoted the spirit of his age. From that initial discovery of the African aesthetic in New York to the innovative photographs he later made in Paris in the 1920s and ‘30s, Man Ray’s images illustrate the way that African art acquired new meanings in conjunction with photography becoming legitimized as a Modernist art form. As arguably the period’s most prolific producer of photographs inspired by non-European objects, Man Ray provides a rich body of work that raises critical issues about the role of African art in twentieth-century Modernism and offers new perspectives on that dynamic. For example, his work points to the crucial function photographs served in the collection and reception of African art, while at the same time demonstrating the symbiotic relationship forged between African objects and photographic images within the frame of Modernism. Examining Man Ray’s photographs of African art alongside an array of related photobased work by his American and European contemporaries— including luminaries such as Alfred Stieglitz, Andre Kertesz, and Joseph Sudek, as well as lesser-known practitioners like James Latimer Allen and Clara Sipprell—the exhibition places these images within larger transatlantic dialogues concerning colonialism, race, representation, gender, and modernity. While the concerns of Modernist photographic representation of African art define the terms of this investigation, the display— Man Ray, afRican aRt, and the ModeRnist Lens