Art: Grandada

Hemingway took him to the boxing matches; Duchamp beat him at chess. Brancusi entertained him by playing the violin, Cocteau by a drum recital, Gertrude Stein by letting Alice B. Toklas cook him lunch. And this was fit tribute to the wiry young expatriate American who not only made artful photographs of his Paris friends but also created a series of “objects”—tacks fastened to a flatiron, a picture of the human eye to a metronome — that shook the salons of the ’20s with cries of ecstasy and reverence. Yet Man Ray wanted fame as a painter, not as a photographer or constructor, and he spent decades trying to win it. The current exhibition of his paintings at Manhattan’s Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery shows that his very genius—his gifts of invention and humor—barred him from be coming an artist of serious value. Over the years, Ray adopted whatever ism was the going one at the time, adding to each a fast-growing repertory of stock techniques: the placement of the curious (whether an object, texture or color) next to the ordinary, the abrupt disordering of space, an almost mannerist play of light. He jumped like a child at hopscotch from Fauvism to cubism to Dadaism to sur realism, but it was Dada that shaped him most. He was one of the few American members of the original school, and for him it never really died: his determined disrespect for the materials of art and deep attention to the ideas that art can shape lend the current collection its saving measure of excitement. In Optical Hopes and Illusions, bicycle riders ride cross-canvas to turn into eyeglasses. Etcetera seems nothing more than a row of bright blue buildings, ends up spelling out its title. Making the Fur Fly, Ray’s homage to Georges Braque. glues a bird-shaped piece of pelt on a solid background. Signature looks to be a single building, but at the proper distance its doors and windows spell the artist’s name and its eaves the date. Jokes all, they are. and technically indebted to other painters. Ramapo Hills owes flagrant credit to Franz Marc, Le Pont Neuf to Giorgio de Chirico, Kiki to Modigliani, others to Braque. Léger, Picasso and Magritte. Yet they have much beyond mockery that is their own: enough original sensitivity and so abundant a measure of spontaneity that it almost begins not to matter that the method is imprecise or the execution slapdash. There is gimmickry in the world, says Man Ray, and it takes a thousand vital shapes. At 72, he holds to his course, which is to record the puns and anagrams of everyday life.