A review of Man Ray: When Objects Dream by Stephanie D’Alessandro and Stephen C. Pinson

Reviewed by David Brizer

When Objects Dream
by Stephanie D’Alessandro and Stephen C. Pinson
Metropolitan Museum of Art/ Yale University Press
Dec 2025, 334 pp, Hardcover, ISBN-13: 978-1588398024

“Finish your carrots. Finish your greens.”

Wallace Shawn (Shawn was the coeval in the cult classic My Dinner with Andre, a 110-minute cornucopia of dialogue about everything, everything including the kitchen sink) wasn’t at the table, so dinner conversation wasn’t exactly scintillating. I was fourteen years old, too old to be exhorted to eat vegetables, I had but two things on my mind: sex and surrealism.

Don’t ask why. In that household, I was overfed. Overfed and overread. André Breton’s manifestos, turgid as split pea soup, said and did it all. They were cutting, deliciously irreverent, everything a nascent geek could ever want or need to make a self-statement in that family, at that table, in the burgeoning crazy world without.

Fourteen years old and the rayographs struck me with their utter directness and temerity, their is-ness, the abject hilarity of their being. These non-photos, exposures of everyday objects yanked from their element into monochromatic Dasein, upset me, made me laugh, thrilled me to the core.

Fifty-five years later they still do.

There have been many Man Ray spinoffs. ‘Man Ray‘ has become a handy referent for the whimsical, the found, the absurd; there were restaurants in Manhattan and Paris called Man Ray: no doubt they served up umbrellas and sewing machines on checkered cloth-covered operating tables.

Curators D’Alessandro and Pinsker have pulled off a magisterial feat, collecting and attempting to explicate a body of work that, beginning in the 1920s and shining on through 1976, fueled if not was directly accountable for the Dada, Surrealist and all subsequent proto-surrealist movements.

The images in the book, drawn directly from the current exhibit of the same name at the Metropolitan Museum, are iconic, well-worn, known to art tasters and cognescenti alike: the thumb tack-studded clothes iron, the f-holes added to the nude back of Kiki de Montparnasse, one of Man Ray’s notable partners. Ray’s official appearance in the art world was launched by his edition of Champs Delicieux (1922), a series of 12 rayographs — starkly beautiful images obtained from exposing camera-less photographic paper and objects to light — followed by a lifetime of incredible output inpainting, photography, objects and collage.

By today’s phantom standards, Ray’s output was truly incredible. He was the real thing. Unlike the merchants of entertainment-in-the-guise of art of today, there is not a single note of inauthenticity in his work. None. He didn’t need to throw live chickens from a stage or hurl his half-clad body into the fawning arms of a mosh pit; nor did he need to section livestock seasoned with bluebottle flies or plant 3100 open umbrellas into the ocean to make his point. His feat, namely the transformation of water to wine — the alchemical dance of the ordinary into the miraculous – was accomplished playfully, but authoritatively, over a lifetime of serious work and thought. Man Ray did not hire workers to assembly-line his drawings, photographs, work in oil, collage, found objects, and other media to a benighted public.

The life, the work, in all its protean and paradigm-shifting glory, have been treated over the decades, almost always in the manner they deserved, in books, monographs, dissertations, articles, films. An anchor point in this massive encomium is Man Ray’s infallible wit: he was a grandmaster of the pun, of the knife-edged sobriquet, of the deliciously raised eyebrow in his slaughterhouse of the banal. Man Ray’s deadpan wit was by no means confined to captions accompanying canvas and photo; he wrote (Self Portrait (1963) is his autobiography), directed films, and charmed the world by thumbing his nose at rank and file convention. Man Ray: “To create is divine, to reproduce is human”. (Opera Grafica, 1973); “There is no progress in art, any more than there is progress in making love”. (“To Be Continued, Unnoticed” by Man Ray, 1948); “When I saw I was being attacked on all sides, I knew I was on the right track; and, Lipstick is the red badge of courage”.

 

When Objects Dream, the catalog raisonée, the book, is a work of art in itself. It will turn your coffee table into a living museum. The reproductions are stark, practically bleeding; the organization of the book, skirting Ray’s ever-wavering lines between genre and chronology, is every bit as delicious and sumptuous — practically on a par with — a visit to the exhibit itself. D’Alessandro and Pinson share years of profound review and appreciation of the work. The depth of coverage is encyclopedic, Borgesian, rampantly archival. But the text is often too sumptuous, turgid, freighted with artspeak, with vernacular that veers time and again toward outright jargonese:

While he acknowledged the photographic origins of rayographs, Man Ray did not
think of them as strictly bound by medium. Instead, like sculptural objects, they were
formed and shaped; like paintings or drawings, they resulted from a durational process,
or “experience,” of which they also served as a physical trace. In this way, they were
also performative, even proto-cinematic. (p. 15, Introduction.)

This, of course, is the language of the academy; it lies a great distance outside the smack-your-face temerity of the Surrealist manifestos. Nonetheless, When Objects Dream the book is more than a survey, more than an introduction to the work of this once-in-a-century artist: it is a necessary and suitable homage, in resplendent plates and narrative, to a champion of our time.

About the reviewer: David Brizer is a NY-based novelist and book critic whose Secret Doctrine of V.H. Rand was published by Fomite in 2024. His work appears in AGNI, Word Riot, Exquisite Corpse, TYPO, Compulsive Reader, Calliope, Exacting Clam, Rain Taxi, Compulsive Reader.