Man Ray Portraits

In this exquisite volume, published in association with London’s National Portrait Gallery and featuring an introduction by Marina Warner, the 200-plus portraits by Man Ray (1890–1976) share a virtuosic and dramatic quality. Ray’s most famous images remain arresting and fresh, such as his 1926 Noire et Blanche studies of a pale black-haired woman holding a black mask, and his iconic 1924 Le Violon d’Ingres, showing the lower back of a nude decorated with the f-shaped sound holes of a violin or cello. Ray remained at the forefront of photography and art throughout his years in Paris, where he shot dynamic images of his artistic friends and his girlfriend, collaborator, and muse Lee Miller (with whom he developed his famous solarization technique). The book chronicles Ray’s portraits as he traveled from New York to Paris to Hollywood and back to Paris. The collection is a veritable who’s who of artists, writers, and famous faces from the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s, including Picasso, Jean Cocteau, Ava Gardner, and Catherine Deneuve. Pepper supplements the collection with little-known images from Ray’s career in Hollywood as a magazine photographer and his foray into early color film. Together with his Surrealist and Dadaist ready-mades, collages, and experimental films, which are mentioned in Pepper’s chronology, these photographs reveal Ray’s true artistic genius. 200 color and b&w illus. (Mar.)