Man Ray

Vanity Fair Portraits

5 Jun 2008

We didn’t need Princess Diana to die to know we live in a celebrity-obsessed age. The love/hate relationship between the people and the famous is now more fraught than ever. Fame has never been so easy to come by, but we seem to take even greater joy in…

Simon Baker - Close-Up

16 Oct 2008

‘I think you can probably see this exhibition on two levels,’ says Simon Baker, co-curator of Close-Up, a new show exploring the history of close-up photography. ‘There’s the obvious and rather marvellous aspect suggested by the scenes before us, which…

Screening Surrealism film programme

Films by Luis Buñuel, Jean Cocteau, Salvador Dali, Man Ray, Maya Deren and Hans Richter

24 Aug 2010

This terrific season of big and small films by inspirational lights of experimental cinema – Luis Buñuel, Jean Cocteau, Salvador Dali, Man Ray, Maya Deren, and Hans Richter among many others – is showing in conjunction with the National Galleries of…

Edinburgh Art Festival surrealist exhibition Another World leaves potential unfulfilled

Impressive, if surprisingly straightforward, collection of surrealist works

27 Jul 2010

For a source so rich in departures for radical flights of enquiry, this presentation of surrealist paintings, objects, journals and sculptures is alarmingly straightforward. By marrying a host of mesmerising works by the likes of Dali and Magritte to a…

Paul & Nusch Eluard & Surrealism Exhibition

23 Jul 2009

PHOTOGRAPHY, ILLUSTRATION & MEMORABILIA All the boys loved Nusch, the hypnotist’s assistant whose skinny frame and fiery demeanour mesmerised every art star in town. It was poet and painter Paul Eluard, though, who made Maria Benz – muse to the…

Affair of the art

25 Jun 2009

Every movement needs its muse. So it was with the surrealists’ boys club, whereby Picasso, Man Ray, Max Ernst and co turned the art world upside down while leading equally tempestuous private lives. Take poet and painter Paul Eluard, for instance, whose…

Close Up

27 Nov 2008

PHOTOGRAPHY/FILM ‘Why has not man a microscopic eye? For the plain reason man is not a fly.’ The early 18th century poet Alexander Pope’s wrote that, perhaps in a moment of peevishness. Between Pope’s witticism and writer and critic William Hazlitt’s…

Vanity Fair Portraits: Photographs 1913-2008

3 Jul 2008

PHOTOGRAHY National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh, until Sun 21 Sep Any exhibition that begins with an Ashkenazi Jewish songwriter (Irving Berlin) and ends with a sloaney celebrity culture muse (Diana, Princess of Wales) is worth a peek. Following New…