The city of Nuoro is preparing to host 300 works by Man Ray (Philadelphia 1890-Paris 1976), one of the most prominent figures of avant-garde art, that apparently will give the event a new imprint. Focusing also on the exhibition of unseen and rare masterpieces by the artist, for the first time examined in such a thorough way in Italy, the exhibition entitled “Unconcerned but not indifferent” – which draws on the sentence engraved on Man Ray’s tombstone by wish of his life partner Juliet, buried with him – is an invitation to consider his figure as an artist and man, in a fusion of art and life perceived in an “unconcerned but not indifferent” way. The three-hundred pieces that from 24th October 2008 to 6th January 2009 will animate the rooms of the Man museum in Nuoro have been accurately selected by the curators Noriko Fuku (independent Japanese curator, who lives and works between the Unites States and Japan) and John Jacob (independent curator and director of the Inge Morath Foundation in New York) from the 2000 pieces of the Man Ray Trust collection of Long Island in New York, foundation established by his wife Juliet after the artist’s death as a tribute to sixty years of creative talent. Paintings, sculptures, photographs but also personal documents and objects, will rebuild the famous artist’s life, retracing his career marked by travels between America and Europe and by relationships established with other renown figures of the art world of the early twentieth century. Indeed, there will also be two significant proofs of such bonds: an unpublished document about Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass and a composition of frottages executed with Max Ernst.
Man Ray, whose real name was Emmanuel Radnitzky, was born from Russian parents emigrated to the New World in the 1880s. While he was in New York he discovered a strong inclination for art which induced him, once he had completed his studies in 1908, to become a regular attender of Alfred Stieglitz’s Gallery 291, where he approached art in its various expressive forms, and naturally photography. In 1913 he moved to New Jersey into a community of artists, where he increasingly often used the camera to document his oeuvre and where he met Marcel Duchamp, with whom he founded the American branch of the Dada movement of European origin. This friendship soon induced him to look for more success in Paris, at the time lively propulsive art centre, where he relocated in 1921. 
Together with Jean Arp, Max Ernst, André Masson, Joan Miró and Pablo Picasso, he gained a place in the first surrealist exhibition at the Pierre gallery in Paris in 1925. In the Ville Lumière, Montparnasse, he worked hard as a professional photographer collaborating with some famous magazines, such as “Harper’s Bazar”, “Vogue”, “Vu” and “Vanity Fair”, but he also felt the impulse to experiment: he was the first to use techniques like solarization and the famous rayograms. In the Thirties, the perception of an alarming political climate made him lay photography aside to go back to painting, as an efficient language that expressed a widespread discomfort. After the armistice and the fall of the French government, Man Ray tried to safeguard his works and went to the United States where, in the grip of depression and solitude, he decided  to begin a journey across the States which  took him to California, Los Angeles.
There he settled with his partner,  then wife, Juliet who, in those years of professional frustrations and lacking recognitions for his work, became his inspiring muse, portrayed with intensity and involvement, and sometimes with a vein of irony. Driven by his dissatisfaction and failure in America, in 1951 Man Ray decided to return to Europe with Juliet and settle in Paris, by then his welcoming adoptive homeland, were he started working again with renewed enthusiasm and experimenting with colours and photography. He died in Montparnasse in November 1976.
Therefore, this is a very significant initiative, organized by the Man Museum of Nuoro - which curiously shares a partial homonymy with the artist proposed – exhibition pole born in 1999 with the intent to make room also for the local artistic reality. Now Man museum is aiming at Man artist exhibiting pieces of absolute interest by the polyhedral exponent of Surrealism: photographic plates, instruments of his rayograms from the Twenties, photos for Les main libres from the Thirties, polaroids from the Sixties, his bowler, his stick, his letters, the initial manuscript of his autobiography, a magnetic chessboard and evidence of his experimentation in the photographic ambit for the invention of a new chemical product. In Italy the visionary and fantastic world of Man Ray has never been so close.

http://museoman.it/

(translated by Giorgina Arcuri)