Once I remember considering a trip and I was talking to my mother on the phone and I mentioned it, I can't recall what city now but it was somewhere sort of chic, in my mind, like, but not exactly, Sao Paolo or Trieste, and my mother said, Why would you want to go there? There aren't any good museums. And then I knew where I get it from. One of the few times I was ever angry, and angriest by far, at the man I dated through most of my twenties, was when we were in a little French village near the Swiss border visiting his extended family and he refused to alter our plans so that we could take a day trip to Lausanne and I could visit the Art Brut Museum founded by Jean Dubuffet, an artist whose textured, cartoon-ish work captivated me as a child. My companion, to his credit, had traveled the world many times before, including with his father on an archeological expedition that allowed him to pass through London at the age of ten or so, and later, when we were breaking up, to come back from deep within the jungles of Mexico laden with gifts, and was content to visit a nearby village noted for its quaint charm with our free day. I had never been anywhere then, as far as I was concerned, and was sure that I'd never have the chance to go to Lausanne, so close at present, again and if you could do something in this moment, why wouldn't you? It didn't make any sense to me, and I didn't make any sense to him. I have been thinking about that lots lately, the subjective realities we bring to our interactions with each other, the wildly divergent perspectives, the sameness of people that still doesn't explain how we can each inhabit our own entirely contained universe.
Alias Man Ray, an exhibition currently at the Jewish Museum, attempts to explore that universe of the self, and the intriguing identity that this germinal artist, who dictated the mode only to later fall out of it, crafted on an ongoing basis throughout his life. As an art student at the Ferrer Center, a "hotbed of anarchy," his paintings are kind of Cubist, and sort of suprising in the way that early Jackson Pollocks are. Does elegance always come later in life? What does it replace? He soon hooks up with Duchamp and his peers such as Hugo Ball, who describes Dada as "a revolt against 'the senilities of grown-ups.'" The movement, always more European than American, draws Ray from New York, as he notes in a letter, "Dada cannot live in New York. All New York is dada, and will not tolerate a rival." His work begins to interest me when he arrives in Paris in 1921 and discovers photography, his true metier, wherein he crafts an assemblage of earlier experimentation in form and medium into a stark new aesthetic with exciting enthusiasm. My favorite pieces were a portrait and a photograph he made of his lover, Kiki de Montparnasse. The painting, circa 1923, has exquisite tones of black and white and deep grey and cream that give it the cool glamour of a film still. A topless photograph of Kiki, circa 1924, with one breast concealed (or is it one exposed? the viewer decides) similarly caught my eye. Lee Miller, Marquise de Casati, Elsa Schiaperelli, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Andre Breton and other luminaries of the Lost Generation also appear. Later, Ray flees Europe and the war for Hollywood, where "he began to introduce the sensationalism of popular billboard advertising into his work," most successfully in a large painting from 1959 called "Image a deux faces," an extreme close-up of two lovers, either parting or coming together, a precise snapshot of the duality of love. The Jewish Museum is free on Saturdays.
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