The Exhibition: Paris in the ‘20s Meets L.A. in ‘40s

There are few decades that hover more glamorously on the modern imagination than the myth of Paris in the ‘20s. Hemingway and the Lost Generation, Picasso and Gertrude Stein, James Joyce and Sylvia Beach, French zazou flappers with beaded dresses and little-boy haircuts. It’s all so glimmeringly seductive and maddeningly unattainable. Not only were we not there, we were not here. Most of us weren’t born yet.

Paris in the ‘20s was that wonderful thing that happened just before we got to the party. The epoch has no rival, but a subtler second was certainly Los Angeles in the ‘40s when it was still cloaked in the aura of Raymond Chandler’s tender toughness and the perfume of night-blooming jasmine on fake Spanish patios. It lingered even after the war started and Rosie the Riveter did the boogie-woogie with G.I. Joe. Ah, a moonlit night on the lagoon in Westlake Park in a boat named Donald Duck. Rattle home on the Red Car.

An exhibition has just opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art presenting the art of a man who laced those two improbable times together and played no small role in creating their glamour. It is a retrospective of the work of Man Ray. He wasn’t very happy exiled in Los Angeles, but he made a happy marriage to Juliet Browner. His presence added to our myth and reminds us there was art hereabouts before the boom of the ‘60s.

Man Ray. Sounds like a Buck Rogers half-alien, and in a way, as an expatriate, he was one. His name is unforgettable but after that it’s difficult to know what to call him. Photographer? Painter? Film maker? Dadaist bricoleur ?

He fished earnestly in all those ponds and made unforgettable catches. Once seen, it is impossible to forget his photograph of a girl’s beautiful eyes crying glass beads. Was she Midas’ daughter whose tears turned to jewels or a tart weeping fakes for effect?

We would probably remember his flat-iron bottomed with its ripping row of nails without reading the label, but calling it “Cadeau” clinches it, adding insight to injury. He had a knack for witty titles. Once he took a photo of a girl’s eye, attached it to a metronome and called it “Object to Be Destroyed.” Somebody obliged by pulverizing it, but by that time it was so famous he shrugged, put it back together and called it “Indestructible Object.”

Everybody remembers his best painting. It’s one of the most erotic images ever concocted. It shows a pair of Gargantuan ruby lips floating in a cloudy night sky above the silhouette of an observatory. It was painted in Paris but it looks like Griffith Park to us, especially since it seems like an ancestor of Ed Ruscha’s Pop Surrealism. But it’s not in the show. Man Ray’s best painting is not in his retrospective. When you try to put the guy together he darts away in a flash like a coy koi.

He was born in Philadelphia in 1890 and died in 1976. In the beginning his name wasn’t Man Ray, it was Emmanuel something, probably Radensky. The catalogue offers an equivocal account of the family name and how it was changed. There may have been a time when such name-changing shenanigans were provocative, but by now we’ve had so many artistic pseudonyms that they are either quaint or irritating. Can you really trust a guy who won’t tell you his name?

Anyway, Man Ray was a pioneer, sort of. He led in the art of forging one’s own mythic public image, a precursor of Andy Warhol but more aristocratic in the fashion of the day. He was a rare American to be celebrated by the School of Paris avant-garde. Art-photo people said he invented the Rayograph while other people grumble that the technique of making images on photo paper by exposing it directly to light was really old stuff. Besides, the results look a lot like mechanical Cubism.

By 1913, he was confirmed in his artistic ambitions, just married to his first wife, Adon Lacroix, and living in New Jersey. This impediment did not prevent him from becoming fascinated with Rimbaud’s poetry, the writings of the weird proto-surrealist Lautremont and the legendary Armory Exhibition, which introduced radical European art to America. Soon Man Ray was paying court to Marcel Duchamp. They both played chess. Man Ray painted his second-best picture, “The Rope Dancer Accompanies Herself With Her Shadows.” It’s a rather embarrassing knock-off of Duchamp’s “Large Glass,” but at least it is in the exhibition.

By 1921--discouraged at New York’s indifference to Dada--Man Ray moved to Paris, where he was embraced by the avant-garde. He still wanted to be a painter, but he was less a bohemian than a dandy who regarded a pretty mistress, a good studio and a flashy car as life’s basic necessities. In a self-portrait he showed himself short and dapper with the face of an elfin weasel.

He decided to become a fashionable portrait photographer to make money and advance his own artistic fortunes through contact with the rich and famous. He was so successful that it was soon regarded as a status symbol to pose for Man Ray. The pictures are wonderful in themselves, chic, detached and witty and a wonderful sociological record of the era. He photographed everyone from the dead Marcel Proust to a solemnly tipsy Sinclair Lewis and every artist, poet and slick young thing in town. And everybody was in town.

The required mistress was found in a teen-age model named Alice Prin, called Kiki. He photographed her ivory face, bee-stung lips and powdery body ceaselessly until he traded her in on a new model, Lee Miller, an aspiring American photographer with a figure like a Greek statue. Clearly a certain amount of inbreeding was going on because some of Man Ray’s mistresses and models--including Dora Maar--also turn up in accounts of Picasso’s mistresses and models.

Man Ray held the mirror up to a glamorous and richly creative era. That is enough in itself to make the exhibition a popular attraction until it closes here May 28. But when we have had enough of being flattered, kidded and entertained by Man Ray’s sardonic impishness, how does this body of work hold up to art’s harder questions?

I previewed the show at its point of origin--the National Museum of American Art in Washington. It comes on like a rare and definitive event, and it is, but there have been others. In 1966, Jules Langsner presented a survey at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. It may be significant to note that both shows came at times when stylishness threatened to gobble up art.

The MOCA installation makes the art appear more substantial. Paintings look less raw, but the ensemble appears darker and more paranoid. The exhibition meanders around like a gigolo at a cocktail party. Man Ray displayed all the symptoms of butterfly dilettantism--flitting prettily from flower to flower--looking brilliantly clever as he paused briefly on each one but never resting anywhere for long. The show looks mainly like the work of four or five gifted amateurs who dabbled for a time and moved on to collecting exotic automobiles. His movies are full of witty bits, but their heartlessness eventually causes your rear end to inform you you are sitting through another self-indulgent art movie. Scrutinized for common threads, the work reveals a commonplace artistic sensibility--it is coldly mechanical at bottom, a kind of updated Neo-Classicism. (He drew with a prissy thin line.) The closest it comes to feeling is its delight in polite erotic fetishism. Man Ray admired the Marquis de Sade and painted his third-best painting in his honor. He is also said to have bragged about occasionally batting around a recalcitrant mistress. Some later photographs are subtly sadomasochistic.

Art has to be free to express kinky desires, so that’s not the point. Artists’ personal habits are even less relevant to our judgment of their artistic qualifications than are those of candidates for presidential secretaries, so that’s not the point either.

The point has to do with the fact that egomania and narcissism are natural occupational diseases of all artists. The only way to stave them off is by being more interested in art than in oneself, one’s career, one’s image.

An artist who is more interested in art than himself may seem as self-involved as one who is not. The difference shows in the work. A truly self-involved artist’s oeuvre is usually less than the sum of its parts. Man Ray’s work shows that what he created was not an artist but an artistic personality--a kind of visual Oscar Levant.