Man Ray and America: The New York and Ridgefield years: 1907-1921. (Volumes I and II).
Item
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Title
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Man Ray and America: The New York and Ridgefield years: 1907-1921. (Volumes I and II).
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Identifier
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AAI9136799
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identifier
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9136799
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Creator
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Naumann, Francis M.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Robert Pincus-Witten
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Date
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1988
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Art History | Biography
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Abstract
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Man Ray (1890-1976) has long been considered one of the most versatile and innovative artists of the Twentieth Century. As a painter, writer, sculptor, photographer and film maker, he is best known for his intimate association with the French Surrealist group in Paris during the 1920s and 30s, particularly for his highly inventive and unconventional photographic images. These remarkable accomplishments, however, have tended to overshadow the importance of his earlier work--significant not only for an understanding of Man Ray's future artistic development, but also extremely important in any effort to gain a thorough understanding of the visual arts in America, during one of the most important and crucial phases of the modernist evolution.;Man Ray and America is intended to fill this lacuna. It is only through a comprehensive examination of the artist's work produced during his early years in New York and Ridgefield (before his departure for Paris in 1921), that Man Ray's preeminent position in the history of American modernism can be securely established. This study traces the development of the artist's work from the time when he first seriously contemplated the prospect of becoming an artist--in 1907-08, while still enrolled in art classes in high school--to the well known Dada productions of 1920-21. An effort has been made to gather literally all of the works produced in this period (included in an accompanying catalogue raisonne), so that, not only could they be examined for their individual merits, but for the first time, these works could also be understood within the general chronological framework of the artist's entire production in these years, while at the same time, evaluated in terms of the artistic accomplishments of his contemporaries. It is only through such a detailed analysis that we can systematically follow the artist's work as it progressed--in a gradual, step-by-step fashion--first, in the direction of pure abstraction, and then, in the years just before his departure for Paris, towards a more conceptually-oriented approach to the art making process.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy Restricted.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.