Does that mean you should not be going to a museum, if you do not have your thinking cap on? Not always, since in the ideal case you could go into a museum feeling sleepy and braindead, yet leave completely inspired by what you have seen. Similarly, you can have completely inaccurate presumptions of how an exhibit is going to affect you, either by under- or overestimating its quality and value.

The point of my rant really, is that (as with most things in life) you just can never tell. You might walk into an exhibit and realize you have no desire to be there. Or – perhaps this is the worst – an exhibit could completely bore you. But maybe you did not have any particular expectations, and an exhibit expanded your view by emphasizing themes you had never thought about, or by displaying overlooked or little known works. That last one is probably the one most curators aim for.

Such was the case with the Man Ray retrospective on view currently at the Jewish Museum. It may be the case that you only know of Man Ray’s black and white photographs, mostly taken in the 1920s in Paris. You will get to see all of the famous ones, and many others too, but for me the show was most successful in that I learned a great deal about Man Ray’s other works – the early and the late ones, which are less well known. Yet the show never felt drudgy or overly educational. My personal favorites of his remain the photographs, but they are all the more interesting seen in context of his entire body of work. That may seem like a simple conclusion, but at least the show has succeeded in that respect. To make things better – outside elements were working in my favor: it was a beautiful winter day to take a stroll near Central Park.

Organized chronologically, the show explains his heritage and education and displays early works – mostly canvases but also illustration and graphic design – many done while he was living in an artist colony in Ridgefield, NJ in the 1910s. It was really when Man Ray [real name: Emmanuel Radnitzky] moved to Paris in the 1920s that he began photography, apparently because he could not make enough money with paintings. He became known for his portraits of artists and writers, but one of his most famous images is of Kiki de Montparnasse, “Le Violon d’Ingres” (1924).

I enjoyed seeing the works from his Paris period the most, and in particular learning about his rayographs and the process of making them. Throughout the exhibit, several self-portraits are shown, of which the ink on paper from 1914 – in which he has dark smoky eyes and expressive eyebrows – was the most striking to me. And (who knew?) there is a whole room at the end devoted to works he made in Hollywood in the 1930s, in a style that struck me as worlds away from his earlier photographs and paintings.

Biographical information on May Ray can be found at Wikipedia, PBS/American Masters, and New York Times.
The exhibit is on display until March 14 – plan your visit here.

Happy travels!