It was Man Ray's genius to aim his cold eye and ironic sense of humor at the ordinary.Thus, he transformed a flatiron into a work of art by gluing a row of carpet tacks to its bottom and giving it the enigmatic title Gift. In Violon d'Ingres, an icon of Westem art--the female nudeitook on a new playfulness when Man Ray irreverently placed the curved f-shaped apertures of a violin on a photograph of Kiki's back.

Man Ray began his fifty-year career as a painter and designer and soon expanded to coIlage,printmaking, photography, object-making,sculpture, and film, never attempting to establish a hierarchy for his various activities.More than seventy reproductions in this book highlight masterworks in aIi of Man Ray's principal mediums and from aI1 the major periods of his career. To complete the volume,his richly eventful personal life is chronicled in a biographical outline and several documentary photographs.