Man Ray’s first fashion shoot was a disaster. It was 1922, and the artist had just arrived in Paris from New York with one suitcase, $100 and the singular goal of becoming one of the bright young things of dadaism alongside Duchamp and André Breton.

He had been taking photographs for a few years, but mainly portraits (Jean Cocteau was an early Paris sitter), and not always enthusiastically. He later said “photography is not art,” and that he would only shoot things he couldn’t paint. Still, he had no money, so when he was commissioned by Paul Poiret, the French couturier who took women out of corsets and put them into harem pants, he agreed. Back then, illustrations were the go-to for fashion houses, but Poiret was after something a bit different, which Man Ray was. Except the American turned up at the salon with no idea what he was doing. The lights weren’t right, and the electrics broke on set. Poiret didn’t like the pictures and refused to pay.

These photographs, among the early work once described as “appallingly banal” by the French critic Alain Sayag, never saw the light of day. But they became Man Ray’s Damascene moment. According to Romy Cockx, curator of a new exhibition at Antwerp’s MoMu, which looks at how fashion informed Man Ray’s work and how he, in turn, influenced the industry, “his wish to be accepted as a painter meant he dismissed his work as a fashion photographer and photography as a whole. Yet, he was pleased with these shots, pleased with what he had created”.

Man Ray went on to take portraits of Parisian high society and shoot for fashion magazines and various cosmetic brands, while toying with different photographic methods such as solarisation (exposing a partially developed photograph to light to create a dark outline) and double exposures. There were, it seems, two Man Rays. One, the world-famous surrealist who turned banal objects into works of art, and the other, a prolific fashion photographer who parked his unease about the industry to create a body of work which, in the end, accounted for more than his entire non-fashion work put together. It also bought him a nice house in Hollywood. Without one, it seems, we wouldn’t have the other.

The MoMu show has a short run, largely because you simply can’t have a 110-year-old dress on display for too long. Based on versions held in Marseille and Luxembourg that took place in and around the Covid pandemic, it aims – by and large successfully – to reconstruct Man Ray’s career during the 1920s and 1930s using more than 200 photographs, while contextualising his work within past and contemporary fashion by Chanel, Lanvin, Loewe and Martin Margiela.

The show opens with coat hangers. A single one whose wire has been folded into a pair of breasts from the 90s by the Belgian designer Margiela – and a 1920 assemblage of 63 wooden ones called Obstruction, by Man Ray. Born Emmanuel Radnitzky in Philadelphia in 1890 (he changed his name as a teenager), his parents were Russian immigrants with a background in fashion. His mother was a seamstress and his father a tailor who would bring clients home for fittings. Man Ray never explicitly cited either as having any impact on his career but equally, “if he was the son of a butcher, chances are these would be knives hanging from the ceiling,” says Cockx.

Of the 200 photographs, most are of his lovers, Lee Miller and Kiki de Montparnasse, which the exhibition convincingly links to the dresses beside them. According to Belgian fashion expert and MoMu guide, Katleen Derijcke, Margiela (quite innocently) never made a direct link between his work and that of Man Ray. It’s an intriguing claim, one that recalls Tony Benn reading Marx as a middle-aged man and discovering that the German had “already come to the conclusion I’d come to about capitalism” over a century before him. Margiela’s 1996 spring/summer collection features photographic negatives of articles of clothing; his 2008 body suit is overlaid with a black trompe l’oeil bra. It’s all undeniably Man Ray.

By Morwenna Ferrier