Pairing Man Ray and Max Dupain at Heide

For many Australians, the name Max Dupain will evoke a single image: a male figure lying on the beach, the crown of his head and his bronze muscular shoulders creating a silhouette against the bleached sand and sky. This image, Sunbaker (1937), has become an icon of Australian modernist photography and is also emblematic of a certain idea of Australian culture – the model, a friend of Dupain’s, had just emerged from the surf before plopping down for a spot of tanning.

Since its creation – almost a century ago – Sunbaker has been endlessly reproduced. This repetition slowly but surely reduced the image from a modernist masterpiece to something more like advertising material. Likewise, the breadth of Dupain’s talent has been reduced to a single image.

This makes Man Ray and Max Dupain at Heide Museum of Modern Art a welcome salve. Curated by Heide’s artistic director Lesley Harding and French curator and Man Ray expert Emmanuelle de l’Ecotais, the double bill exhibition offers viewers a broad cross-section of works by the American-born Paris-based modernist daddy of photography Man Ray, while also presenting an array of lesser-known Dupain works.

I admit I was sceptical: double bill exhibitions have become something of a trendy curatorial methodology in recent years. We might think of Keith Haring | Jean-Michel Basquiat: Crossing Lines at the NGV (2019), which presented the works of two artists who did know each other but which was criticised for omitting Haring’s pieces dealing with sexually explicit themes and homosexuality. There are wins – in 2024, commercial Melbourne gallery Neon Parc paired etchings by German surrealist Hans Bellmer with creations by contemporary Castlemaine-based sculptor Noriko Nakamura. It was a seemingly weird coupling – given the artists’ different historical and geographical backdrops – that nonetheless worked.

For Man Ray and Max Dupain, the curators did not try too hard to create links between the two artists. Straight off the bat, we are told they never met. It is unclear whether Man Ray even knew of Dupain’s existence. Dupain was two decades younger than Man Ray and spent most of his life in Sydney making a living as a commercial photographer – some choice examples of his fashion photography are hung in the show.

Man Ray was born in Philadelphia but moved to Paris in his early 30s and became quickly entrenched with dadaists and surrealists, counting artists such as Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp as friends. This exhibition features some incredible portraits of his milieu, including Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró. Portrait of André Breton (in Front of Giorgio Chirico’s Painting The Enigma of Day), thought to have been taken shortly after Man Ray’s relocation to Paris, is a who’s who of Paris surrealism. The viewer is shown two pioneering modernist artists who experimented and influenced generations after them.

Dupain admired Man Ray, whom he encountered through reproductions in magazines. Homage to Man Ray (1937) depicts a woman’s chest covered by her hands and employs the technique of solarisation that Man Ray made famous, which involves briefly exposing the negative or print to light to produce a halo-like effect.

This work is hung subtly with other Dupain and Man Ray solarisations, including a tiny, quietly arresting image of the artist Hera Roberts framed by a bunch of trumpet lilies (Hera Roberts, 1935). It would have been too easy to reinforce the direct pipeline from European modernism to Australian modernism, which so often compounds the provincialism that is the bane of Australian art. To mitigate this, the exhibition is hung according to various themes – fashion photography, nudes, portraits and so on – with the works of each artist combined in salons.

The curators did not try too hard to create links between the two artists. Straight off the bat, we are told they never met.

I overheard a pair of women trying to guess which work belonged to which photographer, before checking against the wall didactic and being surprised to learn they were incorrect. I did a lot of this too. Each photographer seemed to have a very keen focus on the interplay between shadow, light and rounded lines. Although, given the bulk of Man Ray and Dupain works are images of nude women, this might just be happenstance.

The differences between the photographers, combined as their works are at Heide, emerge with time. Take the photographers’ respective light sources. A beach-themed line-up of three images shows two featuring Man Ray’s fellow surrealist Meret Oppenheim – famous for her fur teacup – in a beach bonnet (Meret Oppenheim, 1932), and by Dupain a third of a woman in a bathing suit held up by a second figure and shot from below with the sky as backdrop (Beach Play, 1937).

While Man Ray clearly shot these photographs in a studio, Dupain shot on a beach using natural lighting. The sun is a critical player in Dupain’s oeuvre and naturally lit photographs come up time and again. Images such as Beach Play, as well as some of his still lifes – such as one that shows a domestic kitchen vessel covered in the shadow of light filtered through a blind (Still Life, 1935) – represent the vernacular of his works. In a small gallery dedicated to the women in Man Ray and Dupain’s lives – Lee Miller and Olive Cotton, respectively – we are presented with a photograph by Cotton of Dupain after he has emerged from the surf (Max after surfing, 1939).

In her catalogue essay, Helen Ennis points out that Man Ray’s use of light reflects his involvement with dada and surrealism: “Man Ray’s concentration on light’s ‘fugitive aspects’, on the oscillations between light and shadow, enabled him to create a poetic vision of reality – of surreality.” These surrealist experimentations can be seen not only through light play in the studio and through techniques such as solarisation but also in subject matter.

The phallus, the beloved subject matter of psychoanalysts and therefore surrealists, makes frequent appearances. Anatomies (1929), one of Man Ray’s most recognisable works, shows a woman rearing her head back so that her neck and chin resemble a penis. The lesser-known Érotique Voilée (1933), another photograph of Meret Oppenheim, stands her behind the wheel of a printing press with the handle functioning as a phallus.

Although Dupain published several surrealist photographs over the years, he did not subscribe to Man Ray’s strongly surrealist bent, working instead with something more like spiritualism. Move over penis envy and the subconscious, hello auras and fairies. The Birth of Venus (1939), a double exposure of a heavily pregnant woman flanked by identical Venus statues, has a cultish vibe. Another portrait of a nymph-like Hera Roberts (Hera Roberts, 1936) shows the artist gazing into a round mirror, her forehead and face reflected back in symmetry, as if she is summoning some higher being. Again, the curators’ light touch means they don’t try to force a surrealist framework on to Dupain’s work.

The works in Man Ray and Max Dupain are strong and have been arranged with great care, which is why I was perplexed by the inclusion of a soundtrack commissioned especially for the exhibition by composer Peter Corrigan. It feels like a gimmick and is a disservice to the composer.

Even more spectacle-driven are the mirrors positioned around the gallery in V formations, each pane bearing a work from one of the artists in a sort of compare and contrast – a thinly veiled attempt at appealing to a social media generation. It’s hard not to think this is part of an inevitable “experience-making” of the contemporary art scene, where viewers expect to be able to centre themselves.

But it was the images that stayed with me long after seeing Man Ray and Max Dupain – in particular, a seemingly abstract photograph by Dupain of white curved lines interspersed with black planes. A masterwork of light and shadow, the subject of this work slowly revealed itself to be a folded woollen blanket (Blanket Rhythm, circa 1934). The mood of this form and sensuality of the wool as it becomes known to the viewer could not be further from the slickness of Sunbaker.

Man Ray and Max Dupain is showing at Heide Museum of Modern Art, Bulleen, Victoria, until November 9.

ARTS DIARY

THEATRE Whitefella Yella Tree

Wharf 1 Theatre, Gadigal Country/Sydney, until October 18

VISUAL ART New Asian Art

National Gallery of Australia, Ngambri/Canberra, until April 18

BALLET Prism

Regent Theatre, Naarm/Melbourne, September 25–October 4

CULTURE Nature Festival 2025

Venues throughout South Australia, September 26–October 12

PHOTOGRAPHY Julien Scheffer: Architecture

Studio Gallery, nipaluna/Hobart, until September 26

LAST CHANCE

THEATRE Shore

Home of the Arts, Yugambeh Country/Gold Coast, until September 20

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on
September 20, 2025 as “Sun and shadow”.

For almost a decade, The Saturday Paper has published Australia’s leading writers and thinkers.
We have pursued stories that are ignored elsewhere, covering them with sensitivity and depth.
We have done this on refugee policy, on government integrity, on robo-debt, on aged care,
on climate change, on the pandemic.

All our journalism is fiercely independent. It relies on the support of readers.
By subscribing to The Saturday Paper, you are ensuring that we can continue to produce essential,
issue-defining coverage, to dig out stories that take time, to doggedly hold to account
politicians and the political class.

There are very few titles that have the freedom and the space to produce journalism like this.
In a country with a concentration of media ownership unlike anything else in the world,
it is vitally important. Your subscription helps make it possible.

You’ve shared all of your credits for this month. They will refresh on October 1. If you would like to share more, you can buy a gift subscription for a friend.

SHARE WITH A FRIEND
? CREDITS REMAIN

SHARE WITH A SUBSCRIBER
UNLIMITED

Loading…

RELATED READING