Exhibition Dates: September 14, 2025–February 1, 2026
Location: The Met Fifth Avenue, Floor 1, Gallery 199
Man Ray: When Objects Dream at The Metropolitan Museum of Art is the first major exhibition to examine the media-crossing, radical experimentation of American artist Man Ray (1890–1976) through one of his most significant bodies of work, the rayograph. Man Ray coined the term rayograph to name his version of the 19th-century technique of making photographs without a camera. He created them by placing objects on or near a sheet of light-sensitive paper, which he then exposed to light and developed. These photograms—as they are also called—appear as reversed silhouettes, or negative versions, of their subjects. They often feature recognizable items that become wonderfully mysterious in the artist's hands. Their transformative nature led the Dada poet Tristan Tzara to describe rayographs as capturing the moments “when objects dream.” While Man Ray acknowledged the photographic origins of his new works, he did not think of them as strictly bound by medium. Taking Man Ray’s lead, this presentation will be the first—more than a century since he introduced the rayograph—to situate this signature accomplishment in relation to his larger artistic output. The exhibition will be on view September 14, 2025, through February 1, 2026.
The exhibition is made possible by the Barrie A. and Deedee Wigmore Foundation.
Major funding is provided by Linda Macklowe, the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, and Andrea Krantz and Harvey Sawikin.
Additional support is provided by the Vanguard Council.
Drawing from the collections of The Met and more than 50 U.S. and international lenders, the presentation will include more than 60 rayographs, many of which were featured in important publications and exhibitions at the time of their making, and 100 paintings, objects, prints, drawings, films, and photographs to highlight the central role of the rayograph in Man Ray’s boundary-breaking practice. The exhibition marks a collaboration with the Lens Media Lab, Yale University, under the direction of Paul Messier, and with photography conservators and curators at various lending institutions, to study more than fifty rayographs.
“As one of the most fascinating and multi-faceted artists in the avant-garde movements of the early 20th century, Man Ray challenged traditional narratives of modernism through his daring experimentation with diverse artistic mediums,” said Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer. “Anchored by Man Ray’s innovative and mesmerizing rayographs along with new research and discoveries, this exhibition invites visitors to explore his ground-breaking manipulation of objects, light, and media, which profoundly reframed his artistic practice and impacted countless other artists.”
In the winter of 1921, while working late in his Paris darkroom, Man Ray inadvertently produced a photogram by placing some of his glass equipment on top of an unexposed sheet of photographic paper he found among the prints in his developing tray. As he wrote in his 1963 autobiography, “Before my eyes an image began to form, not quite a simple silhouette of the objects as in a straight photograph, but distorted and refracted … In the morning I examined the results, pinning a couple of the Rayographs—as I decided to call them—on the wall. They looked startlingly new and mysterious.” This supposed accident, now the stuff of legend, has obscured the fact that rayographs might be seen as the culmination of Man Ray’s work up to 1921 as well as the frame through which he would redefine his work thereafter. They harnessed his interests in working between dimensions, media, and artistic traditions, fittingly at the moment between Dada and Surrealism, which writer Louis Aragon once called the mouvement flou (flou means “hazy, blurry, or out of focus” in French).
Unfolding in a series of spaces that intersect with a central, dramatic presentation of more than 60 rayographs, the exhibition will illuminate their connections with Man Ray’s work in other media, including assemblages, rarely seen paintings, and films. Thematic sections will highlight such concepts as dreams, the body, and games. Other groupings will focus on specific media, unexpected techniques, the artist’s studio, and watershed moments, such as the years 1923 and 1929, in the artist’s production.
On view will be iconic objects like Man Ray’s iron studded with tacks, known as Gift (1921), and his metronome, Object to be Destroyed (1923), that keeps time with the swinging eye of his companion, the photographer Lee Miller. Celebrated photographs, including his landmark Violon d’Ingres (1924), in which the torso of Kiki de Montparnasse (Alice Prin) is depicted as a musical instrument, will also be featured. The exhibition will also bring together some of his boldest but most refined experimental works—compositions like ANPOR (1919), a painting made with an airbrush and pigment sprayed through and around objects in his studio. A section of the exhibition will feature several little-known paintings made at a moment when Man Ray had publicly sworn off the “sticky medium of paint” but had returned to the canvas armed with the lessons of making rayographs. Works such as Swedish Landscape (1926) show the artist applying pigment without a brush, working it in an almost sculptural way, building up and scraping down the surface. Three of Man Ray's films (all of which have been newly restored) will be screened in the exhibition.
Credits and Related Content
Man Ray: When Objects Dream is curated by Stephanie D’Alessandro, Leonard A. Lauder Curator of Modern Art and Senior Research Coordinator in Modern and Contemporary Art at The Met, and Stephen C. Pinson, Curator in the Department of Photographs at The Met, with the assistance of Micayla Bransfield, Research Associate.
The Met will host a variety of exhibition-related programs, to be announced at a later date.
A fully illustrated catalogue will accompany the exhibition and be available for purchase from The Met Store.
The catalogue is made possible by the Mellon Foundation.
Additional support is provided by James Park, the Carol Shuster-Polakoff Family Foundation, and Sharon Wee and Tracy Fu.
The exhibition is featured on The Met website, as well as on social media using the hashtags #WhenObjectsDream and #MetManRay.
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May 1, 2025
Image: Man Ray (American, 1890–1976). Rayograph, 1922. Gelatin silver print. 9 1/2 × 7 in. (24.1 × 17.8 cm). Private collection. Photo by Ben Blackwell. © Man Ray 2015 Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY / ADAGP, Paris 2025