Ray,Mann

Ray, Man 1890 -- 1976 Artist. Born Emmanuel Radnitsky, on August 27, 1890, in Philadelphia, the first of four children of Melach Radnitsky, a tailor, and Manya Louria (or Lourie), both Russian-Jewish immigrants. He assumed the single combined first and last name of Man Ray when his entire family adopted the surname Ray in 1911. The family moved to Brooklyn, New York, in 1897, where Man Ray, with family encouragement, early manifested his enduring fascination with gadgets, objects, and inventions as …

…medium; he incorporated machine-made and artist-crafted objects into hybrids; he rejected craft and technique for concept and idea; he combined words and images in startling and humorous juxtapositions; he was a cheerful surrealist, a nonideological dadaist, a tinker and inventor, an American and a European, a conjurer of dreams but usually not of nightmares. He sought to "amuse, bewilder, annoy, and inspire" rather than to shock--or to confront the full terrors of the twentieth-century w