Man Ray & Sherrie Levine

de Man Ray

In 1918, Man Ray scandalized the art world when he created his first readymade sculptures: an egg beater and an assemblage of metal light reflectors and clothes pins, which he presented as photographs entitled Man and Woman. In 2005 Sherrie Levine re-photographed Man Ray's Man and Woman photos, called them her own art works, and re-scandalized the art world of a new millennium. At the beginning of the 20th century, as a vocabulary of abstraction was being developed, Man Ray produced a new order of images using the new medium of photography, and challenged the world to accept them as art. Forty years later, when minimal abstract art dominated the art world, Sherrie Levine began to use photography as a way of introducing representational imagery back into art. Man Ray's career was drawing to a close just as Levine's career was beginning, but a lively dialogue between this Man (Ray) and Woman (Levine) exists through the sensibilities they share in their relationships with objects, images, and ideas.