Man Ray, African Art, and the Modernist Lens

“The core of this show is the presence of these real-life, so to speak, African sculptures, artifacts, masks, and other items, which recreate the buzz and shock that must have occurred when they were first exhibited in Europe and New York."

– Gary Tischler, The Washington Diplomat

“The exhibition not only explores how the work of Man Ray and his contemporaries changed Western ideas of African art, it also critically looks at what photographic representation itself means.”

– Kevin Griffin, The Vancouver Sun

This groundbreaking exhibition featured the photographs of American artist Man Ray (1890-1976), whose work translated the vogue for African art into a modernist aesthetic and disseminated this idea to a popular audience. The exhibition highlighted a little-examined chapter in the development of modernist artistic practice; namely, the significant role photography played in the process by which African objects—formerly considered ethnographic curiosities—came to be seen as the stuff of modern art in the first decades of the 20th century. Images such as Noire et blanche (Ray’s iconic juxtaposition of alabaster-skinned model Alice Prin with an African mask of darkest ebony) united primitivism and surrealism in a seductive embrace that found its way into fashion magazines as well as avant-garde journals and ethnographic guides.

The exhibition juxtaposed both seminal and recently discovered photographs with a number of the actual African masks and figures they depict, illustrating the complex nature of photographic representation. By use of dramatic lighting, cropping, and camera angles, these masterpieces of ceremonial sculpture were repurposed into highly stylized, two-dimensional works of modern art that sometimes appear markedly different from the objects themselves. The exhibition included photographs by contemporaries such as Charles Sheeler, Walker Evans, Clara Sipprell, Cecil Beaton, and Raoul Ubac.

Man Ray, African Art, and the Modernist Lens was organized by International Arts & Artists, Washington, DC, and curated by Wendy A. Grossman. The exhibition was made possible by grants from the Terra Foundation for American Art, the National Endowment for the Arts as a part of “American Masterpieces: Three Centuries of Artistic Genius,” and the Dedalus Foundation, Inc. Research for this project was supported by the Trust for Mutual Understanding.

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