Emmanuel Radnitzky, a wavering student of architecture, engineering and painting, was born in Philadelphia in 1890. Man Ray, a leading painter, sculptor, photographer and filmmaker, came 19 years later.
How the one metamorphosed into the other is the subject of “Conversion to Modernism: The Early Work of Man Ray,” the revelatory traveling exhibition that recently opened at the Terra Museum of American Art.
In the mid-1970s, the Museum of Contemporary Art mounted a large survey of photographs, films and ephemera that began where the present show leaves off. It included all the photographic portraits and solarizations that became classics, representing the artist’s most fully developed body of work.
But Man Ray — because Radnitzky made the name up, it was always Man Ray, or simply Man — often said he took photographs only as a means of earning a living and was a painter. And “Conversion to Modernism” shows him becoming one of the leaders of the avant-garde exclusively through painting and drawing.
We begin in 1907, with headings for a high school newspaper or yearbook and an orthodox pen-and-ink still life.
But already in 1909, a year after graduation, a change is under way in a drawing of the Brooklyn Museum. The piece represents the artist’s interest in architecture and perhaps something more, as it has traces of non-naturalistic color that accord well with the new name he has taken and signed with the initials “M.R.”
Radnitzky, after all, had seen exhibitions of contemporary European art at Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery and in his own work would soon adopt full-blown Fauvist color as well as motifs by Henri Matisse.
A wall label in the exhibition suggests this coincides with the artist adopting the name Man Ray in 1912, yet re-christening already has taken place three years earlier, in the first drawing that departs, however slightly, from architectural transcription.
Man Ray’s best-known work from the 1920s and 1930s inhabits a pure realm of the imagination, which nonetheless was conjured in a city — Paris. The formative paintings on view here also show French influence, particularly of Paul Cezanne and Cubism. But Man Ray worked out the influences in the American countryside, at a small artist’s colony in Grantwood, New Jersey.
There he lived from 1913 to 1915, driving toward a degree of simplification and abstraction in the natural landscape.
It would be nice to say these were great paintings. They were, however, merely necessary. A lot of Cezanne, Kandinsky, Munter and even John Marin had to be moved through before Man Ray literally moved to Manhattan and the environment changed his painting again.
There, in such works as the 1916 “Promenade” and “Symphony Orchestra,” he appears to hit his stride, though now the influences are from Marcel Duchamp and Jean Crotti.
In any event, the elegant graphic play of “Admiration of the Orchestrelle for the Cinematograph” is a great distance from where the young Radnitzky began, as he emerges there, unmistakably, as the father of American Dada.
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Organized by the Montclair Art Museum, N.J., “Conversion to Modernism: The Early Work of Man Ray,” will continue at the Terra Museum of American Art, 666 N. Michigan Ave., through April 4. 312-664-3939.
