New York Dadaist, Parisien surrealist, international portraitist & fashion photographer, this work considers how the career of Man Ray was shaped by his turn-of-the-century Jewish immigrant experience & his lifelong evasion of his past.

Man Ray (1890 –1976) was a pioneer of the Dada movement in the United States and France and a central protagonist of Surrealism. Today he is one of the best-known American artists of the twentieth century, celebrated above all for his innovative and often seductively glamorous photography. Surprisingly, given Man Ray’s key role in the history of early-twentieth-century Modernism, a comprehensive collection of his writings on art has not been published in English until now. Man Ray: Writings on Art fills a conspicuous gap in scholarship on the artist and his period. It brings together his most significant writings, many of them published here for the first time. These occasionally quixotic texts, which include artist books, essays, interviews, letters, and visual poems, reveal the incredible scale of the artist’s output and the remarkable continuity of his aesthetic and political beliefs. This volume offers a long overdue vision of Man Ray as someone who used words both as a creative medium and as a means of articulating ideas about the nature and value of art. With richly reproduced illustrations, it provides powerful insight not only to scholars of art history and academics, but also to working artists and those who count themselves as Man Ray fans.

Replication and originality are central concepts in the artistic oeuvres of Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray. Remaking the Readymade reveals the underlying and previously unexplored processes and rationales for the collaboration between Duchamp, Man Ray, and Arturo Schwarz on the replication of readymades and objects. The 1964 editioned replicas of the readymades sent shock waves through the art world. Even though the replicas undermined ideas of authorship and problematized the notion of identity and the artist, they paradoxically shared in the aura of the originals, becoming stand-ins for the readymades. Scholar-poet-dealer Arturo Schwarz played a crucial role, opening the door to joint or alternate authorship—an outstanding relationship between artist and dealer. By unearthing previously unpublished correspondence and documentary materials and combining this material with newly conducted exclusive interviews with key participants, Remaking the Readymade details heretofore unrevealed aspects of the technical processes involved in the (re)creation of iconic, long-lost Dada objects. Launched on the heels of the centenary of Duchamp’s Fountain, this new analysis intensifies and complicates our understanding of Duchamp and Man Ray’ initial conceptions, and raises questions about replication and authorship that will stimulate significant debate about the legacy of the artists, the continuing significance of their works, and the meaning of terms such as creativity, originality, and value in the formation of art.

A dazzling portrait of Paris’s forgotten artist and cabaret star, whose incandescent life asks us to see the history of modern art in new ways. In freewheeling 1920s Paris, Kiki de Montparnasse captivated as a nightclub performer, sold out gallery showings of her paintings, starred in Surrealist films, and shared drinks and ideas with the likes of Jean Cocteau and Marcel Duchamp. Her best-selling memoir—featuring an introduction by Ernest Hemingway—made front-page news in France and was immediately banned in America. All before she turned thirty. Kiki was once the symbol of bohemian Paris. But if she is remembered today, it is only for posing for several now-celebrated male artists, including Amedeo Modigliani and Alexander Calder, and especially photographer Man Ray. Why has Man Ray’s legacy endured while Kiki has become a footnote? Kiki and Man Ray met in 1921 during a chance encounter at a café. What followed was an explosive decade-long connection, both professional and romantic, during which the couple grew and experimented as artists, competed for fame, and created many of the shocking images that cemented Man Ray’s reputation as one of the great artists of the modern era. The works they made together, including the Surrealist icons Le Violon d’Ingres and Noire et blanche, now set records at auction. Charting their volatile relationship, award-winning historian Mark Braude illuminates for the first time Kiki’s seminal influence not only on Man Ray’s art, but on the culture of 1920s Paris and beyond. As provocative and magnetically irresistible as Kiki herself, Kiki Man Ray is the story of an exceptional life that will challenge ideas about artists and muses—and the lines separating the two.

From the pencil to the puppet to the drone—the humanities and the social sciences continue to ride a wave of interest in material culture and the world of things. How should we understand the force and figure of that wave as it shapes different disciplines? Other Things explores this question by considering a wide assortment of objects—from beach glass to cell phones, sneakers to skyscrapers—that have fascinated a range of writers and artists, including Virginia Woolf, Man Ray, Spike Lee, and Don DeLillo. The book ranges across the literary, visual, and plastic arts to depict the curious lives of things. Beginning with Achilles’s Shield, then tracking the object/thing distinction as it appears in the work of Martin Heidegger and Jacques Lacan, Bill Brown ultimately focuses on the thingness disclosed by specific literary and artistic works. Combining history and literature, criticism and theory, Other Things provides a new way of understanding the inanimate object world and the place of the human within it, encouraging us to think anew about what we mean by materiality itself.

In this remarkable autobiography, Man Ray - painter, photographer, sculptor, film maker and writer - relates the story of his life, from his childhood determination to be an artist and his technical drawing classes in a Brooklyn high school, to the glamorous and heady days of Paris in the 1940s, when any trip to the city 'was not complete until they had been "done" by Man Ray's camera'. Friend to everyone who was anyone, Ray tells everything he knows of artists, socialites and writers such as Matisse, Hemingway, Picasso and Joyce, not to mention Lee Miller, Nancy Cunard, Alberto Giacometti, Gertrude Stein, Dali, Max Ernst and many more, in this decadent, sensational account of the early twentieth-century cultural world.

Playing with Earth and Sky reveals the significance astronomy, geography, and aviation had for Marcel Duchamp - widely regarded as the most influential artist of the past fifty years. Duchamp transformed modern art by abandoning unique art objects in favor of experiences that could be both embodied and cerebral. This illuminating study offers new interpretations of Duchamp's momentous works, from readymades to the early performance art of shaving a comet in his hair. It demonstrates how the immersive spaces and narrative environments of popular science, from museums to the modern planetarium, prepared paths for Duchamp's nonretinal art. By situating Duchamp's career within the transatlantic cultural contexts of Dadaism and Surrealism, this book enriches contemporary debates about the historical relationship between art and science. This truly original study will appeal to a broad readership in art history and cultural studies.

A tale inspired by the 1976 attempted assassination of Bob Marley spans decades and continents to explore the experiences of journalists, drug dealers, killers, and ghosts against a backdrop of social and political turmoil.

Including previously undisclosed information on one of the most significant and mysterious events in modern American history, this account debunks the myth that James Earl Ray was a racist and documents his actual location on one of the critical days leading up to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The memoir also reveals photographs of James Earl Ray when he was ill in prison and gives the key to a code used by the brothers in planning a prison break. Presenting a mesmerizing perspective on the manipulation of the media in reporting on race relations, the working middle class, and the U.S. criminal justice system, this account broadcasts an urgent call to action to correct some of the many injustices that surround these events, such as the U.S. government's refusal to rigorously test the alleged murder weapon, and encourages support for new federal legislation.

One of the Best Books of the Year: Parade, Glamour, Real Simple, Refinery29, Yahoo! Lifestyle. "A startlingly modern love story and a mesmerizing portrait of a woman's self-transformation from muse to artist." --Celeste Ng, author of Little Fires Everywhere "I'd rather take a photograph than be one," Lee Miller declares after she arrives in Paris in 1929, where she soon catches the eye of the famous Surrealist Man Ray. Though he wants to use her only as a model, Lee convinces him to take her on as his assistant and teach her everything he knows. As they work together in the darkroom, their personal and professional lives become intimately entwined, changing the course of Lee's life forever. Lee's journey of self-discovery takes took her from the cabarets of bohemian Paris to the battlefields of war-torn Europe during WWII, from inventing radical new photography techniques to documenting the liberation of the concentration camps as one of the first female war correspondents. Through it all, Lee must grapple with the question of whether it's possible to stay true to herself while also fulfilling her artistic ambition--and what she will have to sacrifice to do so.