(855) 4-ESSAYS

Type a new keyword(s) and press Enter to search

Man Ray


The trip was made even more tolerable by the fact that Robert Henri was the art teacher. It was four years since the Macbeth Gallery exhibition where Emmanuel had first seen the vibrant, pulsating portraits by this founding member of the Ashcan School. .
             It is a reflection of Man Ray's open sensibility at this early point in his career that he was inspired by both Stieglitz and Robert Henri, who each encouraged young artists to break from the Academy, but who had, indeed, feuded with each other in the past. Stieglitz was the proponent of high modernist art. Henri celebrated democratic vistas and gritty, impoverished urban landscapes in the spirit of his hero, Walt Whitman. He was a partisan of paint applied with gusto and energy. Both men satisfied Man Ray's thirst for theory, his intellectual affinity for ideology, and his need to pursue pleasure in the act of making art. .
             Robert Henri was a tall, thin, quietly intense man, who donated his services to the Ferrer School. An anarchist since his student days in Paris, he had followed Emma Goldman's philosophy closely in her magazine, Mother Earth, and after attending one of her lectures, he described her in his diary as "a woman of remarkable address and convincing presence. This is a very great woman." Emma Goldman invited Henri to join the Ferrer School faculty in late 1911 "by then he had painted her portrait and shared his admiration of Walt Whitman with her "and he stayed on for seven years. .
             Robert Henri believed in devoting attention to real subjects in real settings. Glamorizing and prettifying were of no interest to him. His love for Whitman was a strong point of convergence with Man Ray, who had been finding solace in his well-worn copy of Leaves of Grass for some time. Its endorsement of essential independence, no matter how fearful, taught Man Ray that courage was the artist's credo. Like Henri, who once chided his colleague John Sloan for working too laboriously at his painting, Man Ray had become a devotee of speed in composition.


Essays Related to Man Ray


Got a writing question? Ask our professional writer!
Submit My Question