ABSTRACT
Man Ray's career has indeed been amazing, and it is of a kind that many other artists must have yearned for and yet scarcely dared to realize—a career given over almost entirely to avant-garde ideas and bohemian pleasures. For Man Ray—and for many later exponents of this anti-art position—the problem lay in how one could effect an artistic production while remaining loyal to a philosophy that seemed to preclude the whole idea of producing art. Like many avowedly "frank" autobiographies, Man Ray Self Portrait remains oddly reticent behind its gay display of history, gossip, and self-revelation. Though his heart belongs to Dada, his Self Portrait belongs to the conventional genre of self-important memoirs by celebrities who have "made it" historically. As a document, it is not without interest, but as with many of Man Ray's works, the interest is only historical—a symptom of the times they summarize rather than a genuine expression of them.
