The day looked bright: my colleague at Zabriskie Gallery and I closed the door on a minivan full of Man Rays—a whole exhibition of photographs of famous people by the master of Dada himself. Virginia Zabriskie had won awards for her previous outing with Man Ray, a retrospective of the collaboration between Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp called Conspiratorial Laughter, and Alexis and I had spent the morning sifting the vaults of the Man Ray Trust for what would become Man’s Men, with catalogue essay by Neil Baldwin, author of the still-definitive biography on the artist.1 “Man took the best photographs of men,” Virginia declared, and as I pulled the Ford Aerostar full of the very best of these onto the Long Island Expressway, the puckish glee of the artist filled the vehicle, as if off-gassing from the work itself. The subject matter was a little less sexy than, say, Man Ray’s interpretation of the Venus in bondage,2 but I felt like we had a hit on our hands.
Crunch. I was right sooner than I wanted to be: I rear-ended the driver ahead of me in the bumper-to-bumper Long Island traffic.
II. It’s a Shame About Ray.
Man Ray belongs to the the international avant garde community, but his biography is of a distinctly interstate quality—I-495 in particular. He was born Emmanuel Radnitzky in Philadelphia to Russian Jewish immigrants and lived and worked in Brooklyn in the establishing years of his career—not far, in fact, from the Williamsburg apartment I lived in on the date of my fateful errand. He spent the bulk of his career in Paris, but returned state-side during World War II,3 where he met and wed Juliet Browner, also of outer-borough Jewish stock. “The Surrealists never had kids,” Virginia would occasionally say,4 and it was certainly true of Juliet and Man Ray, so when Juliet died, long since widowed,5 her estate passed to her family out on Long Island.
Which is where I picked up my payload of artworks—the Browner vault in the back room of the family business: an auto-body repair shop. Richly ironic that an autobody repair shop was just the sort of place I needed just now, but the Browner’s was the last place on earth I was going to tow my smashed vehicle. (You can imagine this would have been unwelcome news: “I didn’t make it far, guys, and but I would like to hire you for this other job . . .”).6
Patrick Henry Bruce; Alfred Maurer; John Ferren: the list of American painters that Parisians took seriously is short,7 and Man Ray was not on it. He shed the practice of painter along with his Radnitzky identity, to become something greater: an artist without limits. His paintings are charming and thought-provoking, but he found that sculpture, assemblage, straight and camera-less photography, and experimental film all offered potential to plumb the depths of imagination. What secrets of the modern mind might be revealed in automatic drawing, painting, and poetry? What liberating potential might one discover in a chess set or a lamp shade? How about a strip of film, dressed with olive and vinegar like a salad? Any one of these gestures might seem like a childish provocation, but taken together, Man Ray’s oeuvre suggests an encyclopedic attempt to illuminate the remotest corners of the mind.
While something can be learned from every experiment, not all are successful. You may suspect that some of the more outré attempts may have been flops commercially, but it’s surprising how well he was able to monetize the line. It didn’t hurt that Man Ray enjoyed the support of some forward-thinking patrons and collectors, and, in his early days in Paris, he had a side hustle as a portrait photographer.
From a market perspective, it’s illuminating to observe which have succeeded after his death. Good examples of his paintings, which are mainly from that early period before he gave up the medium, go for millions, but many of his found-object assemblages, often produced in editions, fetch six figures. That kind of makes sense. But it may be surprising that the market has embraced his most iconic photographs at an exaggerated rate. The most expensive painting at auction was 1916’s Promenade, sold in 2013 for just under six million dollars; in 2022, the 1924 photograph, Le Violon d’Ingres, brought over twice that. That made it the most expensive thing by Man Ray in any medium—and the most valuable photograph by anyone, nearly three times the previous record holder.8
As for Man’s Men—well, there’s a lot less urgency way down the market’s curve, and Man’s sideline as a portrait photographer is just a lot less interesting. The subjects are great—Arnold Schoenberg, Pablo Picasso, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, André Derain—and I can’t say that Virginia was wrong: they are some excellent portraits of men. But they are more plentiful and less iconic and mostly weren’t all exhibited as fine artworks in his lifetime, and with that lower status comes some market confusion, lumping these photos in with the many, many question marks that trickle into the market of any prolific creator. Was this picture printed by Man Ray, or one of his assistants, or someone else, and when?9 Is it signed, or stamped, and how? How did the owner come to own it?10 Violon d’Ingres was bought by a prominent collector directly from the artist in 1962 and displayed and exhibited all over, but what about this rather anonymous portrait of Roland Penrose? If you wonder, you probably aren’t about to buy it. We had a few nice write-ups in the press,11 but I can’t recall if we sold a single one of Man’s Men.
My colleague in the passenger seat yelled “Stopping!” but it was too late. My headlights and front side panel met the tail lights of the beige SUV ahead. Everyone was fine—me, my passenger, the other driver, and all the “men” in the back. We waited patiently for the police to show up, exchanged information with the driver, and informed the estate. Everyone involved recovered from the initial shock, and though she never forgave me for taking my eyes off the road, ten years later my passenger did agree to marry me.
And I never went back to the Man Ray Trust again.
Thanks for reading. Next week we indulge in a little Oscar mania before returning to the story of the turning point in the mid-twentieth century that has been our focus so far in 2024. Join us then for “Push/Pull with Hans Hoffmann”!
Jonathan
jonathan@jonathanmillerspies.com
Neil Baldwin, Man Ray: American Artist, 1988.
A 1971 re-creation of the 1936 Venus Restored here.
The artist adopted the glam and anglicizing name Ray before he went to Paris and long before he might have fear Nazi persecution in Vichy France, but you can’t imagine that persona would have been much comfort in occupied Paris.
Roughly true, but I’m not sure how the Dada-Surrealists compare to the rest of their generation of artists. Man Ray and Juliet married in a double-wedding with Dorothea Tanning and Max Ernst, and neither union produced offspring. But Max had one son, the artist Jimmy Ernst, with a previous wife, so there’s at least one counterexample.
He died in 1976, she in 1991—both in France. Which is a long way, by every measure, from Long Island.
The source of the Ford Aerostar, which I did not own, is just as interesting, but will have to wait for another day. And if you don’t believe me about the autobody repair shop, look no further than the Wall Street Journal for corroboration.
See our articles on Bruce here, Maurer here, and Ferren here, for how each of these painters incepted themselves into French sympathie.
One last treasured quote from Virginia: “There’s no such thing as a million-dollar photograph.” She would have enjoyed the spectacle, I’m sure.
Questions of authenticity have been well documented for decades, as mentioned in this 1998 New York Times article.
Notably, the Man Ray Trust questioned the good title of 148 (of 188 total works) sold through Christie’s in 2021. We could spend more than one afternoon trying to untangle that quagmire.
I could have sworn it was mentioned in the New Yorker, but all the Google can tell me is that the Brooklyn Rail enjoyed the show.