Man Ray and Fashion: the work of this great figure of modernity is presented here from a little known angle, from September 23, 2020 to January 17, 2021. Protagonist of Parisian artistic life between the wars and surrealism in In particular, Man Ray was the subject of a major retrospective at the Grand Palais in 1998, and an exhibition at the Pinacothèque de Paris in 2008. But his work had never been explored from the perspective of fashion.

Exhibition "Man Ray and fashion" at the Luxembourg Museum

© TPlassais / Swing-Female
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Man Ray arrived in Paris in 1921 on the advice of Marcel Duchamp, who introduced him to the avant-garde world and to the whole of Paris of the Roaring Twenties. For food reasons, Man Ray will first successfully indulge in social portraiture and gradually slip from social life to fashion. His first contact in the fashion world will be Paul Poiret, but very quickly most of the great couturiers will call on him: Madeleine Vionnet, Coco Chanel, Augusta Bernard, Louise Boulanger, and above all, Elsa Schiaparelli.

Born with the twentieth century, fashion photography is in its infancy: at the beginning of the 1920s, it is utilitarian, documentary and subservient to the codes of fashion illustration. Quickly, magazines, the main vectors of fashion distribution, will devote more and more space to it. So Man Ray began to publish his portraits in the social columns of Vogue, Vanity Fair, and Vu, but it was Harper's Bazaar, during the 1930s, that made him a famous fashion photographer. His strange compositions, his reframing, play of shadows and light, his solarizations, colorizations and other technical experiments will contribute to the creation of dreamlike and striking images, which will be part of particularly innovative layouts. This is how the artist offers fashion a new vision of desire and dreams and fashion photography its letters of nobility.

A avant-garde figure, Man Ray is thus involved in the mass culture that emerges through fashion and advertising. The exhibition highlights this permanent enrichment between "art for the sake of art" and productions subject to commission. So with the iconic photograph, Les Larmes, which is first and foremost, it should be remembered, an advertisement for a mascara brand! In the exhibition, a large selection of photographs - original prints, but also large-format contemporary prints - dialogues with a few haute couture models and cinematographic documents evoking the fashion of the 1920s and 1930s, a fashion that now dominates beautiful in hair and makeup. These short audiovisual extracts shed another light on fashion by showing that the way of filming is also emancipated. As for fashion magazines, they occupy a large place, in order to underline the major role they played in the ever wider dissemination of a new aesthetic.

Man Ray did everything to conceal what he considered to be a minor activity, his "job" as a professional photographer, preferring to favor the posture of an inventive and free artist painter. When he practiced fashion photography he shot sparingly, limiting himself to contacts and then only to images selected for publication. At that time, journals owned not only the prints but also the negatives. The dispersal and rarity of these images, now assembled in the exhibition, give them an exceptional character.

Using modern prints to show some of them allows us to appreciate the differences between prints which, however, were all taken from the original negatives, for the photograph is an object, and not just an image.

The exhibition route takes place through the following sections: From 1920s Portrait to Fashion Photography, The Rise of Fashion and Advertising and The Rise of a Fashion Photographer, the Bazaar Years.

  • Commissioner General: Xavier Rey, director of the Marseille museums
  • scientific curators: Alain Sayag, honorary curator at the National Museum of Modern Art and Catherine Örmen, curator, fashion historian
  • scenography: NC agency, Nathalie Crinière assisted by Lucile Louveau
  • graphics: Anamorphic / Pauline Sarrus
  • light design: Studio 10-30
"Man Ray and fashion" at the Luxembourg Museum

Man Ray, Pavilion of Elegance, International Exhibition of Decorative and Industrial Arts (detail), 1925, platinum proof, exhibition print made from the negative on a glass plate, 23,5 x 17,5 cm, Paris, Center Pompidou, Musée national d'Art moderne / Center de création industrielle, purchase by order , print Jean-Luc Piété © Man Ray 2015 Trust / Adagp, Paris 2020

Useful information :

"Man Ray and Fashion" exhibition

From September 23, 2020 to January 17, 2021 at the Musée du Luxembourg.

Opening time:

  • every day from 10:30 a.m. to 19 p.m.
  • night until 22 p.m. on Monday
  • Exceptional closings at 18 p.m. on December 24 and 31

Prices

  • € 13; TR 9 €,
  • special Young 16-25 years old: € 9 for 2 people from Monday to Friday after 16 p.m.
  • free for children under 16, beneficiaries of social minima

access:

  • M ° St Sulpice or Mabillon
  • Luxembourg Rer B
  • Bus: 58; 84; 89; Luxembourg Museum / Senate stop

Information and reservations: museeduluxembourg.fr