*Déshabillé en Contre-Jour* (Undressed with Backlight), by Man Ray, 1935.

*Top,* Alice Prin, known as Kiki de Montparnasse, 1925; above, *Larmes* (Tears), 1932.

*Objet Indestructible* (Indestructible Object), a 1965 work by Ray.

A sleeping woman, photographed by Ray in 1931.

A still of Man Ray from his 1926 short film, “Emak-Bakia.”

De Montparnasse in *Le Violon d’Ingres* (Ingres’s Violin), 1924.

Marchesa Luisa Casati in *Le Portrait de Mon Âme* (The Portrait of My Soul), 1922.

Photograms by Ray, circa 1921–22. He refined and personalized the technique so much that the prints were eventually called “rayographs.”

*Male Torso,* created in 1930 with the solarization technique.

A 1921 letter from Ray to the Romanian poet and essayist Tristan Tzara.

Man Ray’s Halo Effect

A new book surveys the life and work of the prolific 20th-century artist who revolutionized photography and pioneered the Surrealist movement

In 1970, the year Man Ray turned 80, a journalist from New York magazine delivered a scathing critique, telling the artist he would “probably end up going down in history as a clever, slightly scandalous artist who never really found himself.”

Ray was undeniably prolific. He worked variously as a draftsman, photographer, filmmaker, assembler, and sculptor, and created nearly 40,000 pieces during his lifetime. Yet there was a strong, steady vision that cohered his work and belied the criticism. Indeed, his photographs came to represent the je ne sais quoi of Paris during the Jazz Age.