Kicking Conference — Art Information Australia

In 2004, an Art Gallery of New South Wales exhibition of Man Ray’s works drew a file 52,000 guests. One of them was Lesley Harding.

“It was beautifully curated,” says Harding, now creative director at Melbourne’s Heide Museum of Modern Art. “It really stuck with me.”

That present proved to be the seed of an concept that matured over a era: Man Ray and Max Dupain, now on show at Heide. The exhibition brings collectively greater than 200 images—some by no means publicly proven—from Australian collections and personal loans from Paris, staging a dialogue between two modernist visionaries, a world aside but linked by surrealist experimentation.

Man Ray was a worldwide icon of surrealist pictures and Dadaism, redefining pictures as an artwork type. His trajectory might be put right down to a number of elements – his expertise and tenacity, for sure. But he additionally occurred to be in the proper place on the proper time. In 1921, he relocated from the U.S. to Paris. Though Man Ray’s works now command excessive costs, it wasn’t all the time so. At first, he struggled to maintain himself, shifting between portrait commissions, trend pictures and avant-garde experimentation. His portraiture, on show at Heide, reveals the corporate he saved as he grew to become entrenched in Paris’s elite artwork milieu: artists like Salvador Dalí and Pablo Picasso, and writers like Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein.

“We could have done a solo show of Man Ray,” Harding says, “but it was important to look at what was happening in Australia at the time.”

Enter Max Dupain, who flirted with surrealism however, as Harding factors out, “refused to be defined by it”.

In Nineteen Twenties and ’30s Australia, pictures was mushy and ornamental, echoing the British pictorialist custom. Dupain grew to become a formidable power within the shift in direction of new pictures, elevating the {photograph} to an paintings somewhat than only a painterly imitation. He got here of age as post-colonial Australia was nonetheless defining itself. As Surrealism challenged creative norms overseas, European writers and artists have been reimagining what artwork may very well be. Dupain—although geographically distant—needed to be a part of that zeitgeist. He wasn’t a traveller till later in life, so gleaned what he might about international surrealist traits from overseas magazines and journals.

“The great thing about photography is that the images tell you everything,” says Harding. “He didn’t need to read the German or French in those magazines. He got all he needed from looking at the photographs.”

Ambitiously, Dupain opened his personal Sydney studio in 1934, in his early twenties. His associate, photographer Olive Cotton, grew to become his assistant. He started experimenting with modernist aesthetics—daylight, abstraction, unfavourable area, dynamic composition—a one-way dialog with distant artists like Man Ray.

In staging Man Ray and Max Dupain, Heide additionally contains works by Lee Miller— Man Ray’s collaborator, muse and associate—and by Olive Cotton.

“It’s important these women and their contributions aren’t forgotten,” says Harding. “Man Ray and Lee Miller elevated each other, and the same is true of Olive and Max.”

The exhibition foregrounds Dupain’s work from the Nineteen Thirties, together with his most well-known picture, The Sunbaker (1937), shot whereas tenting with associates on the New South Wales coast. It additionally highlights his experiments with portraiture, methods akin to solarisation and camera-less pictures often called photograms — a course of Man Ray had revived and rechristened ‘rayographs’.

The Second World War shifted Dupain’s output in direction of documentary imagery as he responded to the battle and his postings within the Northern Territory and Papua New Guinea. His later transfer away from Surrealism revealed a maturing artist extra involved with Australian life, architectural type and modernist readability. He went on to construct a profitable profession in business, architectural and documentary pictures—even working for manufacturers like David Jones.

“There aren’t a lot of comparable photographers to Dupain,” Harding says. “Olive Cotton is one, but no one else has gone to the lengths he did in what was essentially a dialogue with international modernist photographers.”

In this daring pairing, Heide reminds us that trendy pictures’s pulse didn’t beat solely in Europe’s capitals. From Sydney’s Bond Street to Montparnasse in Paris, Dupain and Man Ray every broke boundaries, reimagining what the {photograph} may very well be. Perhaps Dupain mentioned it finest: all of it got here right down to kicking conference “right up the arse”.

Man Ray and Max Dupain
Heide Museum of Modern Art
On now till November 9