After the Musée Cantini in Marseille in 2019 and the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris in 2020, it is now the turn of the Antwerp Fashion Museum to show the fashion photographs of Man Ray, confronted, this time, with creations by current stylists and photographers influenced by the work of the surrealist, 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 a Staircase at the Armory Show in 1913, Emmanuel Radnitzky, alias Man Ray, was introduced by the pope of Dadaism and "anti-art" into the avant-garde circles and the Parisian elite 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 compositions, as well as his interplay of light and shadow and his reframing, the dreamlike atmosphere created by his solarizations, colorizations, superimpositions, and other technical experiments, indeed led fashion photography, then still purely illustrative and utilitarian, into more artistic and poetic territory. Drawing, like a true Surrealist, from the wellspring of dreams and desires, Man Ray created his iconic photograph, Les Larmes (Tears), for a mascara brand in 1932. No less enchanting is his 1927 photograph, Chevelure tomber en cascade de la tête d'une belle endormie (Cascading Hair from the Head of a Sleeping Beauty), shown here alongside a jacket embroidered with hair by Olivier Theyskens (Spring/Summer 1999 collection).

Tilted perspectives, shots from above or below… In keeping with the advent of a new, surreal vision of the world, Man Ray seems to want to overturn our gaze and capture 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. A quest perceptible in the sublime oddities of many of his fashion photographs.

“MAN RAY AND FASHION” – MOMU
NATIONALESTRAAT 28, ANTWERP (BELGIUM)
UNTIL AUGUST 13, 2023
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