Man Ray’s Orange Period

“There are all sorts of pleasures and ironies that go into any kind of project,” UC Irvine art history professor Dickran Tashjian remarked last week at the Newport Beach Central Library, where he discussed the enchanted yet frustrating 11 years that Dada artist and photographer Man Ray spent in Hollywood in the 1940s and early ‘50s.

As the author of a recent book on Surrealism and American art, Tashjian was twitted by a reviewer for not discussing Man Ray’s California period. As if to force him into doing the job, the reviewer recommended him as a catalog essayist for “Man Ray: Paris >> L.A.,” an exhibition opening in September in Santa Monica.

Tashjian, wearing a tie dotted with smiling moons, accompanied his talk here with slides of the carefree personal photographs, astringent paintings and luminous portraits of actresses that Man Ray made during his years in Hollywood.

Born Emmanuel Rudnitzky in 1890 to an immigrant family (he changed his name at age 21), Man Ray was a young painter when he began hobnobbing with luminaries of the New York art world. By 1915, Tashjian said, he had taken up photography as a way to document works of his artist friends and earn money on the side.

Through his friendship with French emigre Marcel Duchamp, whose Cubist painting “Nude Descending a Staircase” had created an uproar in the 1913 Armory Show in New York, Man Ray became convinced that the true artist’s life lay in Paris. Together, they embarked for France in 1921.

In Paris, Man Ray received a warm welcome from the Dada artists. His love life also got a boost from a young American woman, Lee Miller, who--like his French lover Kiki Prin--became the subject of memorable photographs.

Worried about his cash flow, he put his camera skills to use as a freelancer for Harper’s Bazaar. This body of work includes an elegant shot of ballerina Tamara Toumanova emerging swan-like from the sculpted lines of an evening dress, and a striking image of a hand with a huge purple ring poised on a globe covered with constellations.

His earnings allowed him to live a prosperous life in Paris and still send money home to his sister Elsie, an accountant in Jersey City, N.J., who promptly deposited it in the bank. This frugality proved fortuitous when Paris fell to the Nazis in June 1940 and Man Ray, a Jew, had to find a way to leave the country.

After a stymied attempt to flee with his lover of the time, he departed without her, reaching the U.S. in mid-August. Holed up in Jersey City, he was utterly depressed, so much so that he couldn’t even muster the energy to visit Manhattan.

He had left a group of devoted friends in Paris--among them, poet Paul Eluard, whose wife was to die of malnutrition during the war--and nearly all his belongings. He was convinced (erroneously, as it turned out) that the Nazis would destroy everything he’d left behind.

As luck would have it, however, a traveling necktie salesman--a friend of the family--happened to be driving out West that autumn. Man Ray, still feeling numb, figured he might use California as a takeoff point for a Gauguin-style life in Tahiti.

And serendipity struck again: Another family friend suggested he look up a young dancer, Juliet Browner, who’d come to California from New York on a lark. They fell in love (eventually marrying, in 1946) and set up housekeeping at the St. George, a residential hotel at 245 Vine St. in Hollywood. A photograph by Man Ray shows Browner in the courtyard, looking a bit weary amid piles of household belongings.

Once again the woman in his life figured in numerous Man Ray images: smilingly bare-breasted at the beach with a semi-nude female friend in a photograph; absorbed in a book in a Matisse-like sketch.

“California was a strange place for Man Ray,” Tashjian said. “He was very ambivalent about it, calling it ‘a beautiful prison.’ He felt isolated, unappreciated and out of the action. But he liked to boast of his good 10-year vacation out here.”

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Tooling around in his “Hollywood Supercharger” sedan, Man Ray lived the good life in a sunny paradise. Many of his photographs--of the epicurean essayist M.K.F. Fisher holding a drink and a sandwich, of Juliet munching on corn-on-the-cob--are of social life in the great outdoors.

“Yet at the same time, Man Ray was hard at work,” Tashjian said, showing a photograph of the artist in his home darkroom.

Although commercial photography was pretty low on his list, he did have some brushes with the “other” Hollywood. Paulette Goddard, Charlie Chaplin’s gamin pal in the just-released “Modern Times,” poses in a sumptuous fur coat in a 1936 photograph. Dolores del Rio appears amply girded with ethnic jewelry. A lesser-known brunet actress, Ruth Ford, becomes in instant blond in a solarized photograph (one of Man Ray’s favorite darkroom tricks).

Movie director Albert Lewin commissioned Man Ray to paint the image of a beautiful young girl for the 1951 movie “Pandora and the Flying Dutchman,” starring James Mason as a man who can’t find peace until he finds a woman who will give him eternal love, and Ava Gardner as the woman whose portrait he farsightedly paints before ever meeting her. But while filming in Spain, Lewin informed Man Ray that he couldn’t use the painting after all because the girl didn’t look sufficiently innocent.

Man Ray’s other moneymaking ventures included chess sets with abstract pieces of anodized aluminum that he produced in limited editions and sold for about $100 apiece, Tashjian said, to such notables as bandleader Artie Shaw.

Still, Man Ray continued to experience “a deep rupture in his life,” Tashjian said. Yearning for some tangible link with his past, he asked Elsie to send the abstract wall hanging “Tapestry” he had made out of tailors’ samples in 1911 and the now well-known 1926 portrait of Kiki resting her head on a table next to an African sculpture (“Blanche et Noir”).

He even embarked on the curious project of attempting to re-create the paintings he had left behind in Paris, turning out “well over 20 within a two-year period,” Tashjian said. “This was a way for him to assert his defiance” of war, exile and the passage of time.

One of these paintings was the ironically titled “Le Beau Temps” (“Good Weather”) from 1939, in which semi-mechanical figures loom over modernist architecture, and two creatures are locked in a deadly embrace. As luck would have it, a friend of Duchamp’s saved the original painting, along with Man Ray’s famous “Observatory Time: The Lovers,” with its giant lips floating in the sky above a Parisian observatory.

Paintings from the Hollywood years also include “La Fortune” (an image of a billiard table outdoors beneath clouds composed of colored billiard balls) and “The Shakespeare Equations,” a series based on photographs of three-dimensional models for mathematical equations.

Man Ray had a major exhibition in 1944 at what was then the Pasadena Art Institute, and he showed his work at several galleries in Los Angeles. (One of his exhibitions at the Copley Gallery took the form of a mock “Cafe Man Ray” with Vera Stravinsky, wife of the composer, serving drinks at the opening.)

But critical recognition lagged in California. Los Angeles Times critic Arthur Millier either ignored his work entirely or made “snide comments,” Tashjian said.

A witty, popular lecturer, Man Ray pursued his Dada-style fascination with games of chance by distributing numbers to the audience and promising a prize for the winner. Once, Tashjian said, the artist tossed snipped pieces of an inner tube to someone he proclaimed the grand-prize winner.

The California sojourn finally came to a close when postwar Europe’s siren call became too strong to ignore. In March 1951, Man Ray left for Paris. He wouldn’t return until 1966, 10 years before his death, when the Los Angeles County Museum of Art belatedly gave him a retrospective.

* “Man Ray: Paris >> L.A.” opens Sept. 21 at Track 16 and Robert Berman galleries, 2525 Michigan Ave. (Bergamot Station, Building C), Santa Monica. 11 a.m.-6 p.m., Tuesdays through Saturdays through Dec. 27. (310) 264-4678.