A dominant figure of Dada and Surrealism, Man Ray worked prolifically throughout his career in Paris and Hollywood. Of the many media and forms in which he worked, the current exhibition at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery (up from the National Portrait Gallery in London) brings together many of Ray's photographic portraits, illuminating this facet of his art.
The 1930s Parisian portraits are joyfully vivid. The artistic world, where everybody who was anybody was photographed by Ray, is opened up to us – from fellow Dadaist Marcel Duchamp to Gertrude Stein, taking in a heap of writers, composers and filmmakers. This is the Paris for which we yearn. The panoply of celebrity continues throughout the exhibition's chronology, including later portraits of Virginia Woolf, Pablo Picasso and Catherine Deneuve and work for Harper's Bazaar, Vogue and Vanity Fair.
Beyond this voguish set, there are dazzling works depicting Ray's series of muses: Kiki of Montparnasse, Lee Miller and his wife of 37 years, Juliet. There is a hint of a more private world here, as well as some of the exhibition's boldest artistry; it is in these works that the aesthetic capacity of photography is pushed forward. The solarization technique Ray developed with Miller is striking still, also featuring in a wonderful 1955 portrait of Leslie Caron. Meanwhile, the famous, sublime Le Violon d'Ingres from 1924 encapsulates so much of its time and place (the exoticism of the turban, the surreal violin f-holes and the exquisite beauty of Kiki herself) that it shines of its own accord.
In concentrating on photographic portraiture, the exhibition only hints at the breadth of Man Ray's innovation. Through the photographs and magazine spreads, we glimpse other aspects of his prolific and playful work: assemblages, films, a chess set, a preposterous smoking device. The portraits of Stravinsky, James Joyce and Yves Montand are all marvellous to see. But perhaps most interesting of all is how we imagine Man Ray's surrealist conceptions and constructions fitting into his Paris–Hollywood world, as we see it through his portraits.
