After the Musée Cantini in Marseille in 2019 and the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris in 2020, it's now the turn of Antwerp's Fashion Museum to show Man Ray's fashion photographs, confronted this time with creations by contemporary designers and photographers influenced by the surrealist's work, such as Martin Margiela, Helena Lumelsky, Olivier Theyskens, Dries Van Noten and Dirk Van Saene.
Arriving in Paris in 1921 on the advice of Marcel Duchamp, whom he had met in New York after the scandal caused by his Nude Descending the Staircase at the Armory Show in 1913, Emmanuel Radnitzky, alias Man Ray, was introduced by the pope of Dadaism and "anti-art" to the avant-garde milieu and Tout-Paris of the Roaring Twenties. Initially a society portraitist, he was sought after by the greatest couturiers: Paul Poiret, Madeleine Vionnet, Coco Chanel, Augusta Bernard and, above all, Elsa Schiaparelli...
The sophistication and strangeness of his stagings, his play on light and shadow and his cropping, the dreamlike atmosphere created by his solarizations, colorizations, overprints and other technical experiments, led fashion photography, then still purely illustrative and utilitarian, into more artistic and poetic territory. As a good surrealist, Man Ray drew on the source of dreams and desires to create his iconic photograph Les Larmes for a mascara brand in 1932. No less enchanting is his 1927 Hair cascading from the head of a sleeping beauty, here set against a hair-embroidered jacket by Olivier Theyskens (Spring-Summer 1999 collection).
Right: Helena Lumelsky, Autumn-Winter 2009-10 © MoMu, photo: Stany Dederen
Tilted perspectives, plunging or low-angle shots... As part of the advent of a new, derealizing vision of the world, Man Ray seems intent on turning our gaze upside down, and capturing the hidden strangeness of reality. "To open our eyes to the invisible, that is the goal", he wrote in the surrealist magazine Minotaure in 1933. It's a quest perceptible in the sublime oddities of many of his fashion photographs.
" MAN RAY AND FASHION" - MOMU
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UNTIL AUGUST 13, 2023
MOMU.BE
