{"id":129960,"date":"2025-11-09T06:06:26","date_gmt":"2025-11-09T06:06:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/129960\/"},"modified":"2025-11-09T06:06:26","modified_gmt":"2025-11-09T06:06:26","slug":"man-ray-and-max-dupain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/129960\/","title":{"rendered":"Man Ray and Max Dupain"},"content":{"rendered":"

What could possibly connect Man Ray and Max Dupain? One was a leading avant-garde artist of the twentieth century, the other a photographer whose work helped define a distinctly Australian modernist vision. They have more in common than one might think. Coming to photography at very different moments in their lives, they nonetheless share a commitment to experimentation and form. Both were active in a pivotal time when the language of modernism was being rewritten through the camera, and their experiments reveal unexpected points of contact across both geographical and cultural distance.<\/p>\n

The lead-up makes sense and feels long overdue. It has been more than two decades since Man Ray had a substantive exhibition in Australia: in 2004, a touring exhibition titled Man Ray at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, curated by Judy Annear and Emmanuelle de l\u2019Ecotais. While Dupain is consistently shown at the State Library of New South Wales, which holds his archive of negatives related to his commercial work, his last major solo exhibition was Max Dupain: Modernist in 2007. It would be remiss not to mention Heide\u2019s popular 2023 survey of works by Lee Miller, the American photographer who both modelled for and worked closely with Man Ray in Paris. Along with Miller, photographer Olive Cotton\u2014Dupain\u2019s collaborator, contemporary, and first wife\u2014features in this exhibition as a marginal figure, a reminder of the partnerships and artistic exchanges that supported both men\u2019s practices.<\/p>\n

\"<p>Installation<\/p>\n

Installation view of Man Ray and Max Dupain, Heide Museum of Modern Art, 2025. Photo: Ruby Taylor<\/p>\n

The exhibition, simply titled Man Ray and Max Dupain, brings together over two hundred prints, archival material, and artist\u2019s books, mainly from the 1920s and 1930s, a period when Surrealism reached its height in Paris and modernist photography was taking shape in Australia. Split between Paris and Australia, this isn\u2019t a story of centre meets periphery (thank God), and co-curator Lesley Harding knows this perfectly well. In her catalogue essay, she cites Rex Butler and A.D.S. Donaldson\u2019s UnAustralian Art project, noting that \u201cAustralian art is part of, and belongs to, the rest of the world.\u201d In this way, Harding and co-curator Emmanuelle de l\u2019Ecotais appear confident enough to present the two photographers as equals. Here, in 2025, Max Dupain and Man Ray appear to stand on equal footing. So, how do they compare?<\/p>\n

While it\u2019s not made overtly explicit, an early connection can be found in the first main room of the exhibition, where pages from a comb-bound copy of the artist\u2019s book Man Ray Photographs 1920\u20131934 are concertinaed across a long showcase. Its unbound pages include examples of the woman-as-muse, a self-portrait, and a textual readymade by Marcel Duchamp\u2019s female alter ego, Rrose S\u00e9lavy, titled Men Before the Mirror. As Rrose S\u00e9lavy writes, \u201cMany a time the mirror imprisons them and holds them firmly,\u201d suggesting that the mirror, and by extension the photograph, does not simply reflect but gazes back. The following year, in 1935, Dupain was asked to review the volume for The Home, a popular lifestyle magazine, for its October issue. He begins by declaring: \u201cThe importance of Man Ray in photography is analogous to that of C\u00e9zanne in painting, and it does not seem imprudent to prophesy his enjoyment of an equivalent greatness.\u201d Examples of the magazine appear in a separate room dedicated to both artists\u2019 fashion and advertising work. It is a publication in which Dupain played a significant part in shifting its relationship to modernism; many of the photographs he made for and published in The Home helped steer the visual style of the publication toward a more modernist approach. In his review of Man Ray\u2019s volume, he concludes by writing, \u201cHe is alone. A pioneer of the twentieth century who has crystallised a new experience in light and chemistry.\u201d The review leaves little doubt about Dupain\u2019s admiration for Man Ray, whose artistic innovations the exhibition positions as a criterion for Dupain\u2019s own modernist ambitions. Photography\u2019s position within this exchange is especially telling: of all systems of representation, it carried a particular privilege in twentieth-century culture, its authority drawn from its technological and scientific origins (\u201clight and chemistry\u201d). This dialogue between influence and adaptation continues just across the room.<\/p>\n

\"<p>Man<\/p>\n

Man Ray, Eye and Tears, 1932, printed 1972, gelatin silver photograph, 20.6 x 24.7\u00a0cm (image), 20.6 x 25.5\u00a0cm (sheet). National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, purchased 1973<\/p>\n

Opposite the artist\u2019s book hang Man Ray\u2019s Glass Tears (1932) and Eye and Tears (1932)\u2014the close-up, mascaraed eyes of a fashion model with glass beads dotted below them\u2014exemplary works of the Surrealist movement that introduce the shared thematics of both artists. Even here, an Australian connection can be made. Eye and Tears was reproduced in a February 1934 issue of The Home, paired with an article on salads, accompanied by the image caption: \u201cAn Unusual Study from Photographie.\u201d The Home\u2019s editor, Sydney Ure Smith, was an advocate for modern design and photography in interwar Australia, and his interest in sourcing avant-garde material from abroad reflects a broader ambition to align Australian culture with European modernism. Photographie was an avant-garde French photo magazine, and its citation signals that the mode of transmission\u2014the circulation of avant-garde imagery through popular media\u2014was perhaps as significant to Ure Smith as the images themselves.<\/p>\n

\"<p><em>Man<\/p>\n

Man Ray, No title c.1930, printed 1982, gelatin silver photograph, 29.8 x 23\u00a0cm (image), 30.5 x 23.8\u00a0cm (sheet). Private Collection, Paris<\/p>\n

In a small grouping that follows, a series of prints demonstrate the process of solarisation\u2014a technique Man Ray and Lee Miller collaborated on in 1929, achieved by briefly switching on the darkroom light during exposure. The method introduces chance directly into the photographic process, the result hinging on the smallest variations: the amount of light exposure, and at what angle it strikes the paper. The artist cannot control these conditions precisely; instead, the accidental is, in Surrealist terms, both analogous to and a trigger for the unconscious. Four of the six prints in this section are by Dupain, who it seems first attempted the method around 1935, using shells, lilies, daffodils, and even an egg as subject matter. A vintage print of Hera Roberts (1935), which is solarised, and Homage to Man Ray (1937) make that debt explicit, revealing how emboldened Dupain was by Man Ray\u2019s technical experiments. The exhibition includes Dupain\u2019s Nude (1934), a reverse-printed nude, first published in The Home in April 1934, demonstrating that he was already testing modernist photographic effects independently. What Man Ray offered was not a model to mimic, but a kind of licence to push further. As the wall label tells us, Dupain \u201cwas less interested in the psychological and unconscious aspects of Surrealism than in Man Ray\u2019s testing of photography\u2019s limits,\u201d and it was within those limits that he found his own clarity.<\/p>\n

\"<p>Installation<\/p>\n

Installation view of Man Ray and Max Dupain, Heide Museum of Modern Art, 2025. Photo: Ruby Taylor<\/p>\n

With any two-person juxtaposition, certain visual comparisons are inevitable. The V-shaped mirrored exhibition design layout almost insists on it, reflecting one artist against the other at staged intervals. What\u2019s more interesting is how Dupain\u2019s and Man Ray\u2019s works are often intermingled rather than segregated. The curators resist the urge to compare them in an annulled, oppositional way. Because many of the photographs are hung in grids or loose clusters, there aren\u2019t individual wall labels for each work. Instead, a single caption sits to the side, covering the group as a whole. This forces the viewer to dart back and forth to check who made what. Moving through the exhibition, a kind of confusion sets in; any sense of linear logic or chronology falls away, and I find myself mistaking certain nudes and even fashion photographs made by one for the other. A trio of studies of hands keeps me busy for longer than I expect. The hang keeps you looking, and it feels right.<\/p>\n

In a room flanked by heavy velvet curtains, we find a space devoted to photograms, also known as \u201ccamera-less\u201d photographs, made by placing objects directly on light-sensitive paper so that light itself becomes the subject. It is a technique that captivated Man Ray, who even coined the term \u201crayograph\u201d for his own experiments. Just outside, a copy of his album Champs d\u00e9licieux (1922) sits in a vitrine. Made during a year when Man Ray produced as many as one hundred rayographs, the album marks the culmination of a pursuit of this technique begun in December 1921. Examples from it hang in the adjoining room, rewarding close looking: the brightest forms are those shielded from exposure, while objects shift and overlap across multiple impressions. Identifiable everyday objects include matchsticks, a print roller, a razor, an egg grater, metal coils, springs, and a pipe. Other shapes appear more translucent and harder to place. In one by Dupain, a puddle of water catches the light, casting shadows that seem to hover on the surface of the print. In one of the largest rayographs by Man Ray, two eggs, an ashtray, a pair of paintbrushes, and what we assume to be the artist\u2019s own hands are arranged in luminous play. You can even make out his fingernails and, mirroring your own, notice his wide palms and stocky fingers.<\/p>\n

\"<p>Installation<\/p>\n

Installation view of Man Ray and Max Dupain, Heide Museum of Modern Art, 2025. Photo: Ruby Taylor<\/p>\n

In this room, it quickly becomes apparent who truly mastered the technique. Man Ray\u2019s works whirr with assurance; Dupain\u2019s, by comparison, who trialled the technique, feel tentative, as if still figuring it out. But that ease of comparison is part of what makes this mode of display so effective: it allows you to see the unevenness, the process of trying, of finding form. Elsewhere in the exhibition, Dupain appears more sure-footed, his compositions sharper, and his sense of purpose more defined. The back of Olive Cotton in Little Nude (1938) and the paired back composition of No Title (Nude on the Beach) (1937) are exceptional examples.<\/p>\n

\"<p>Installation<\/p>\n

Installation view of Man Ray and Max Dupain, Heide Museum of Modern Art, 2025. Photo: Ruby Taylor<\/p>\n

With a show billed as a two-person exhibition between two men, it is hard not to be reminded of the perennial problem: what to do with the women. In a deep-rose-red-coloured side room titled Collaborators, our focus is redirected to Olive Cotton and Lee Miller, who are presented as both central and marginal figures, at once practitioners and subjects for Man Ray and Max Dupain. The wall colour itself feels pointedly gendered, as if to frame the women within a softer, separate space. The curators have rightfully acknowledged them, yet their inclusion sits uneasily. Miller\u2019s presence makes sense: her work and career are deeply intertwined with Man Ray\u2019s, both as model and collaborator, and her fashion and commercial photography speak directly back to the room devoted to this style on the opposite side of the exhibition (a highlight is a 1930s Chanel ad). All but one of Miller\u2019s works shown here are modern digital prints from the Lee Miller Archives in Sussex, likely a matter of logistics and funding rather than curatorial choice. Cotton\u2019s inclusion, however, is more of a stretch. While represented by twelve prints, including a single photogram paired with one by Dupain, her presence appears intended less to trace Man Ray\u2019s influence than to widen the frame of Australian modernist experimentation. In truth, she was not influenced by Man Ray at all. Cotton, who disliked disarray and was drawn to order, seems to have found little affinity with the Surrealist experimentation the exhibition otherwise celebrates. While Cotton remains a somewhat elusive presence here, her inclusion still serves as a reminder that Dupain\u2019s modernism was never formed in isolation.<\/p>\n

\"<p>Installation<\/p>\n

Installation view of Man Ray and Max Dupain, Heide Museum of Modern Art, 2025. Photo: Ruby Taylor<\/p>\n

Up close, the presence of vintage material and silver gelatin prints still holds its sway. While some of the exhibition comprises posthumous prints\u2014works reprinted in the 1970s and 1980s\u2014there are more vintage photographs than expected, and they feel all the more precious for it. The exhibition\u2019s loans are remarkable in today\u2019s conditions of digital circulation, from an anonymous collection of Man Ray\u2019s portraits of women from the 1920s, their soft focus and tonal richness, to Max Dupain\u2019s vintage print of Torso in the Sun (1941), a nude of Olive Cotton rendered in luminous contrast. I kept returning to the sparkling surface of a 1933 print of the artist and model Meret Oppenheim, one of six portraits by Man Ray featured in the show, its metallic sheen glinting under the gallery lighting. The silvering-out process, in which the metal migrates to the surface, carries its own quiet sadness\u2014a visible sign of degradation that can appear unexpectedly beautiful in raking light. It now seems to speak to the photograph\u2019s material life, the silver literally coming forward as a reminder of photography\u2019s own physicality. Elsewhere, there are traces of the artist\u2019s hand: Dupain\u2019s scrawled handwriting in green pen on his 1938\u00a0Surrealist Portrait of Miss Margery Nall and the framing marks visible on Man Ray\u2019s Self Portrait (c. 1930). Then there are details that only reveal themselves in person, like the carefully drawn-on eyebrows of Kiki de Montparnasse in Kiki with African Mask (1926), a nuance that never quite translates in online reproduction.<\/p>\n

\"<p>Max<\/p>\n

Max Dupain, Torso in the sun 1941, gelatin silver photograph, 45.4 x 34.0\u00a0cm (image & sheet). Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide. Gift of the artist 1980<\/p>\n

A list of associations rapidly begins to tally up in this exhibition: shared subject matter, close cropping, double exposures, mirrored distortions, photograms, solarisation, and so on. Yet there are also smaller, quieter correspondences. The tiniest work in the show, hung low and only a few centimetres across, is a beautiful portrait by Man Ray of Dora Maar (1936). Her hand curves across her forehead, partly obscuring her face, while a small porcelain hand rests at her throat, clasping itself like an uncanny stand-in. It\u2019s a portrait that stages touch as both artifice and allure: a motif that reappears throughout Dupain\u2019s work, where figurines and sculptural doubles are recurring props. In Discobolus and the Machine (1936), the feet of a broken figurine appear, both fragment and form. Made in the same year, these two photographs are not in conversation across time but in sync: products of a shared visual language emerging in parallel, a convergence of form, style, and iconography that points to similar preoccupations rather than influence. Discobolus and the Machine shares Man Ray\u2019s fascination with reflection and repetition, even if it misses the spontaneity of his work, as seen in his portrait of Andr\u00e9 Breton reclining before a de Chirico painting. Dupain\u2019s version, by contrast, feels more deliberate: a study in restraint rather than chance.<\/p>\n

\"<p>Max<\/p>\n

Max Dupain, Shattered Intimacy 1936, gelatin silver photograph, 36.7 x 45.4\u00a0cm (image), 38.4 x 45.8\u00a0cm (sheet), Art Gallery of New South Wales, purchased 1982<\/p>\n

There\u2019s been a quiet resurgence of interest in both artists that extends beyond Heide\u2019s walls. Currently, the Metropolitan Museum of Art\u2019s Man Ray: When Objects Dream revisits his paintings, sculptures, and rayographs, while earlier this year his 1924 photograph Le Viol d\u2019Ingres fetched an extraordinary 12.4 million USD at auction. In Australia, the National Gallery is preparing a touring exhibition curiously pairing Max Dupain with Ansel Adams; the State Library of New South Wales will soon revisit Dupain in solo; and the NGA\u2019s Olive Cotton and Her Contemporaries brings Cotton into conversation with international modernists such as Dora Maar and Lucia Moholy.<\/p>\n

\"<p>Man<\/p>\n

Man Ray, Le violon d\u2019Ingres 1924, printed 1970, gelatin silver photograph, 38.5 x 30\u00a0cm (image). Private collection, Paris<\/p>\n

It is tempting to read this simply as nostalgia for modernism, with its clean lines, optical games, and the myth of the \u201cmale photographer genius.\u201d But this current wave of reappraisal suggests something more interesting. Dupain is not an Antipodean afterthought, and Man Ray\u2019s singular, resolute photographs are here dispersed. The exhibition\u2019s clusters, wall arrangements, and mirrored correspondences reveal a logic of exchange, even if the two never met. The work of both photographers appears not as baton-passing but as its own kind of dialogue.<\/p>\n

Perhaps what we are seeing, then, is less a revival of modernism\u2019s heroes than a recalibration of its geographies. These renewed pairings\u2014Paris and Sydney, Man Ray and Dupain, Cotton and her international peers\u2014show how the \u201cmodern\u201d did not radiate outward from a single centre but circulated sideways, adapted, and refracted. To borrow again from Rex Butler and A.D.S. Donaldson, Australian art \u201cis part of, and belongs to, the rest of the world.\u201d In that sense, the spirit of a publication like Photographie\u2014the avant-garde made portable, print made global\u2014returns here in 2025. The revival is not just about rediscovering icons; it is about reimagining where and how modernisms emerged, where shared contexts rather than mere reception gave rise to distinct yet resonant articulations.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"What could possibly connect Man Ray and Max Dupain? One was a leading avant-garde artist of the twentieth…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":129961,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[75962,4720,307,304,305,306,986,75964,308,25670,93,4197,28613,61,60,37641,75963,10161,28609,24785,75959,75960,75961,564,3872],"class_list":{"0":"post-129960","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-andre-breton","9":"tag-art-criticism","10":"tag-arts","11":"tag-arts-and-design","12":"tag-artsanddesign","13":"tag-artsdesign","14":"tag-australia","15":"tag-chelsea-hopper","16":"tag-design","17":"tag-dora-maar","18":"tag-entertainment","19":"tag-exhibitions","20":"tag-heide-museum-of-modern-art","21":"tag-ie","22":"tag-ireland","23":"tag-lee-miller","24":"tag-lucia-moholy","25":"tag-man-ray","26":"tag-max-dupain","27":"tag-melbourne","28":"tag-memo-review","29":"tag-naarm","30":"tag-olive-cotton","31":"tag-reviews","32":"tag-sydney"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129960","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=129960"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129960\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/129961"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=129960"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=129960"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=129960"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}