Man Ray had good connections. He moved as easily from one social group to another as from one country to another. He seemed to be always on familiar ground. When this short, determined American arrived in Paris in 1921 at the age of thirty, he brought with him an old theatrical trunk full of works of art. He also had with him a few hundred borrowed dollars, no knowledge of the language, and hopes that a French friend he had known for five years in New York would meet the boat train.
The friend, Marcel Duchamp, was waiting on the platform at the Gare Saint-Lazare and took him that afternoon to the café Certa in a dusky glassed-in galerie near L'Opera. The Dada group of moonlighting medical students and writers met there every afternoon dressed like Man Ray himself: suit, tie, and fedora. At the Certa, Andre Breton, Louis Aragon, Philippe Soupault, Paul and Gala Elurad, Jacques Rigaut, and Theodore Fraenkel welcomed Duchamp's friend more with gestures than with words. The Dadaists were eager to add to their number an experienced American who had found his way in New York to an artistic dissidence and extremism close to their own. Always independent, more protected than hindered by being an outsider, Man Ray stayed with the French group through the next twenty years of unruliness and adventure.
By the autumn that followed Man Ray's arrival, the raucous yet fragile Dada movement had fallen apart into three clusters around Breton, Tristan Tzara, and Francis Picabia. Breton was himself virtually put on trial for proposing a plan as serious as a huge international congress to consider the state of European culture. It took three years to construct out of the ruins of Dada a new enterprise that would be called Surrealism.
During the interval, which was both slack and tense for the Dadaist-Surrealist group, Man Ray simply followed the connections he found within his reach. Before he had unpacked the works in his trunk, his new friends proposed that he provide the first exhibit at the Soupaults' Librairie Six gallery. Through Picabia's first wife, Man Ray met the fashion designer Paul Poiret and began taking commercial photographs for him. By the time of his December opening, Man Ray had started the portrait photography that brought him growing celebrity and a stream of famous sitters--French, American, English, and Irish. He had also begun learning French from Kiki, the popular artists' model and Montparnasse figure who became his mistress for nine years.
In the catalog of the Librairie Six show, the Dadaists rivaled one another in their fabulous descriptions of Man Ray as a chewing-gum millionaire turned artist come to Paris to bring a new poetic springtime. Among the densely packed balloons at the opening, Man Ray met the 55-year-old composer Erik Satie. They went out to warm up with a grog in a café. Coming back, Satie helped Man Ray buy a flatiron and tacks for the self-defeating Cadeau he constructed on the spot and added to the items on exhibit.
Also at that time, Tzara became enthusiastic about Man Ray's cameraless rayographs. The Romanian contributed the influential preface to the album in which the first rayographs were published, Les Champs delicieux (1992). (Two years earlier, Breton and Soupault had called their automatic writings Les Champs magnetiques.) When Breton gave a talk in November 1922 at the Atheneum in Barcelona on the state of the arts in France, he devoted as much time to Man
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