Also known as Man Ray. A private collection.

We know Man Ray (1890-1976) photographer. Having become famous as a portrait painter of artistic personalities in the interwar period of Paris, he is also a painter, draftsman, creator of objects, graphic designer, draftsman, theorist, poet, filmmaker. While photography makes him famous and allows him to live comfortably, it is not enough for the artist in Man Ray. “Photography is not art”, he does not hesitate to write the title of a book-manifesto that he publishes with André Breton in 1937. Along with his work as a photographer, he develops in counterpoint to the activities he qualifies as "creative", "freer", "more imaginative". They are for him "the essential of life". It is this other Man Ray that the exhibition at the Angladon Museum - Jacques Doucet Collection highlights, under the title Also known as man Ray. A private collection.

Thanks to exceptional loans from a private collection, the Jacques Doucet Literary Library and the Center Pompidou, around a hundred works are to be discovered along a journey that seeks to illuminate this less known and essential side of the artist, namely his invented work: paintings, drawings, but also rayograms revealing the magic of objects simply placed on a sensitive film, lithographs, collages and other experimental pieces, including two films from the surrealist period. For Lauren Laz, director of the Museum and curator of the exhibition, these non-commercial works “are born from another necessity, personal this time: they are guided, in substance, by freedom and pleasure and, in form, by a desire to do things differently, to break with existing aesthetic conventions, a typically modern desire for change. "

The exhibition highlights the many facets of this abundant artist, exploring new horizons of modernity in the company of his plastic artist and poet friends: the Dada temptation which leads him, along with Duchamp, to "fabricate" strange images; the adventure of free books led with Paul Éluard; the "disturbing strangeness" cultivated by the surrealist community, and its flowering of diverted, dreamed and reinvented objects; and finally the Man Ray aesthetic linked to Hollywood cinema.

Among the works on display: the Revolving Doors series (1916-1917) where Man Ray cuts, glues, and stencils colored masses. Rayograms, in which Man Ray lets objects reveal their truth, transposing to the plastic field the idea of ​​automatic writing dear to the surrealists. Notably the very first ones, published in 1922 in the album Champs delightful with a preface by Tristan Tzara, and others including those made in 1931 for the album Électricité.

Let us also quote the originals of the drawings in the book Les Mains Libres, illustrated with poems by Paul Eluard, including an exceptional drawing, an unpublished version of the Broken Bridge, where the long silhouette of a woman - perhaps the muse Nusch Éluard - marries that of Pont d'Avignon. At the Observatory Time - Les Amoureux, lithograph in which two entwined bodies can be guessed in the form of celestial lips. Domesticated Egg, which testifies to his creation of assembled and reinvented objects accompanied by a second degree title. Much ado about nothing, from the Shakespearean Equations series made from mathematical objects photographed at the Poincaré Institute. The Poet, who takes up the face of the Dying Slave sculpted by Michelangelo. And the portrait of Man Ray by Warhol, which closes the course.

This exhibition takes on its full meaning within the Museum, which houses the Jacques Doucet (1853-1929) collection. The inventor of haute couture, a patron very involved with the surrealists, came into contact with Man Ray in 1922 thanks to André Breton. From then on, he took a very close interest in his work, collected his works, and in 1925 entrusted him with the task of making his photographic portrait, a print of which belongs to the Museum's collections.

The exhibition is accompanied by a publication reproducing the entire private collection that is the subject of it. This work renews, with polyphonic contributions, the knowledge and interpretation of a work, in search of another Man Ray.

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