page_title: Man Ray
section_title: Background and early life
hierarchical_section_title: Man Ray / Biography / Background and early life
context_page_description: Man Ray was an American visual artist who spent most of his career in Paris. He was a significant contributor to the Dada and Surrealist movements, although his ties to each were informal. He produced major works in a variety of media but considered himself a painter above all. He was best known for his photography, and he was a renowned fashion and portrait photographer. Man Ray is also noted for his work with photograms, which he called "rayographs" in reference to himself.
context_section_description: During his career as an artist, Man Ray allowed few details of his early life or family background to be known to the public. He even refused to acknowledge that he ever had a name other than Man Ray.
  Man Ray's birth name was Emmanuel Radnitzky. He was born in South Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on August 27, 1890. He was the eldest child of Russian Jewish immigrants Max, a tailor, and Minnie Radnitzky. He had a brother, Sam, and two sisters, Dora and Essie, the youngest born in 1897 shortly after they settled in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. In early 1912, the Radnitzky family changed their surname to Ray. Man Ray's brother chose the surname in reaction to the ethnic discrimination and antisemitism prevalent at the time. Emmanuel, who was called "Manny" as a nickname, changed his first name to Man and gradually began to use Man Ray as his name.
  Man Ray's father worked in a garment factory and ran a small tailoring business out of the family home. He enlisted his children to assist him from an early age. Man Ray's mother enjoyed designing the family's clothes and inventing patchwork items from scraps of fabric. Man Ray wished to disassociate himself from his family background, but their tailoring left an enduring mark on his art. Mannequins, flat irons, sewing machines, needles, pins, threads, swatches of fabric, and other items related to tailoring appear in almost every medium of his work. Art historians have noted similarities between Ray's collage and painting techniques and styles used for tailoring.
  Mason Klein, curator of a Man Ray exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York, Alias Man Ray: The Art of Reinvention, suggests that the artist may have been "the first Jewish avant-garde artist."
  Man Ray was the uncle of the photographer Naomi Savage, who learned some of his techniques and incorporated them into her own work.
caption: Man Ray, 1913, Landscape (Paysage Fauve),  watercolor on paper, 35.2 x 24.6 cm, Smithsonian American Art Museum
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