Context

Man Ray's art was accomplished through combining many different mediums; the original physical object or sculpture, a photograph of it, and his painted rendition or replica. Ray saw these three mediums equally important, with no hierarchy, yet it is his painting that draw the most attention. He used these models to confuse the viewer between animate and inanimate objects, and was said to "humanize inanimate objects and objectify the human body" which is best seen in his painting in which a collection of three-dimensional cones are placed together the make up an image of a woman sitting while holding her legs. His photograph Le Violon d'Ingres does the opposite. Here, Ray takes a woman's bare back and dehumanizes it by placing the violin decoration marks, making the image no longer of the woman, but in a sense of an abstraction of a violin.

 Man Ray spent time in both Paris and Hollywood making art. While in Paris, Ray appealed to Surrealists, such as poet André Breton, and had his work displayed in the Surrealist Paris Copley Galleries. After his move to Hollywood, his work which was once seen as very avant-garde was now appealing to celebrities, artists, composers, writers and filmmakers throughout the 1930s.  Aside from sculpture, camera photography and painting, Man Ray found interest in one other medium in which he self-titled the "Rayograph"also known as Photograms, in which he would place objects onto light sensitive paper to create a "camera-less photo".

What makes Man Ray's work so clever is the ambiguous titles. All of the pieces in Man Ray’s Human Equation series are visually non objective to Shakespeare’s plays, yet they are related to them aside from just the title. Ray’s Shakespearean Equation, King Lear  is a paradox that combines representations from the play, such as pigment dripping to represent tears, geometry and playful artistic vision that Ray and Shakespeare share.

Throughout the Sophomore Seminar course, we've studied mostly more contemporary artists, beside a few including our week ten study questions on Man Ray. He fits in with our discussions because he incorporates many different mediums, which appeals to people in the class on different tracks.