Man Ray - Neil Baldwin

Of all the figures of the Dadaist and Surrealist movements, Man Ray was the most enigmatic. He knew them all, he took their pictures, he contributed to their shows. Yet he maintained a distance from the antics, even the outrages, of people like Tristan Tzara and Salvador Dali.;Arriving in Paris at the age of 30 in 1921 from New York, Man Ray quickly became enmeshed in the life of Europe's first city of the arts. By the Thirties, he was a highly sought-after fashion photographer. He attached nails to an iron and called it "Gift"; he invented "rayographs". He came to know and photograph virtually every important figure in the arts on both sides of the Atlantic: James Joyce, Pablo Picasso, Coco Chanel, Jean Cocteau, Max Ernst. And then there were his turbulent affairs with celebrated "femmes fatales" of the day: Kiki of Montparnasse and the beautiful American photographer Lee Miller.;He died in 1976, one of the last to go of that extraordinary Modernist generation. His wife, Juliet Man Ray, has given Neil Baldwin unprecedented access to letters, manuscript and archives that has enabled him to write the first full biography of this most elusive of artists.;Neil Baldwin is a poet, critic and journalist. He is the author of "To all Gentleness", a biography of William Carlos Williams.