The scene is delirious and delicious. Midnight in Paris, by Woody Allen. Dalí, Buñuel, May Ray and Gil Pender (Owen Wilson), a writer who lives by day in 2009 and by night in the 1920s sitting in a tavern and at a table. La bouteille de vin rouge is on the way.
Pender, obsessed by the company, caught between two eras and two loves, confesses to them: “They will think that I am drunk, but I have to tell them that I am someone from another time, from the future. And Man Ray, without ruffling his hair, replies: "Exactly correct, he inhabits two worlds at the same time, I don't see anything strange about it." “Yes –he insists- but you are surreal, I am normal”.
A century has passed since that fictitious scene (Ray arrived in Paris in 1921) and the emergence of Dada and Surrealism and the validity of the American Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitzky, 1890–1976) passes all the controls of time, of subtle humor , poetry and beauty and if all of it is applied to dressing, then walking the red carpet.
The palpable, visible and admirable proof is in the muslins, tulles and poplins displayed by the MOMU in Antwerp, one of the most advanced and shameless fashion museums in the world and in a country where surrealism is the flagship for many reasons, but above all all because of its artists: René Magritte and Paul Delvaux, of course, but also the lesser-known but equally admirable Rachel Baes and Jane Graverol.
Just as Picasso, Miró, Braque, Derain, Goncharova, Gris, Laurencin or Matisse worked for Diaghilev's ballets. The Belgian museum enthusiastically showcases not only the collaborations that Man Ray established with some of the names of the golden age of Parisian haute couture dressmakers, but also how he has inspired local (and at the same time universal) contemporary designers.
If Belgium is an ode to surrealism, Antwerp, without being a state capital, is one of the cities that has most shaped the world of fashion in the last 35 years. Man Ray worked with Chanel, the maison de Jean Lanvin, Madeleine Vionnet, Yves Saint Laurent and inspired the biggest names on the Antwerp scene, including Martin Margiela, Olivier Theyskens and Dries Van Noten, these photos prove it. And that's without forgetting the Brussels brand Norine, active until 1952 and often forgotten, but very influential, and which perhaps deserves a separate chapter another day.
It is never easy to show dresses and accessories in a museum for reasons of movement, light, and the delicacy of the fabrics. Here, at the Antwerp museum, they have sought that balance between the art of seamstresses (les petites mains, almost always edged in all these glamor stories) and Ray's surreal and magical vision.
“The hope we had when we organized the show was that it would help to understand this cross-pollination between art and fashion as an incessant and enriching process,” says Kaat Debo, the director of MOMU.
It is curious that the world of fashion prostrates itself before Man Ray and is inspired by him and his games of light when, upon his arrival in Paris, he tried to introduce himself to fashion photography, without much success. “Her exhibition of him at Librairie Six was a flop, so Picabia and Breton encouraged her to photograph the work of his surrealist friends. One day he met the couturier Paul Poiret, but they did not understand each other, Ray was not prepared for fashion. Not yet”, explains veteran essayist Alain Sayag.
But Ray's emergence would not be long in coming with a unique style in which the play of light combined with the delicacy of the fabrics, and the mystery of the models' gaze would take his work to levels never seen before. In 1924 he portrayed Peggy Guggenheim in a Poiret dress.
In 1937, he immortalized Sonia Colmer in a spectacular Vionnet dress uploaded to a carriage by the Spanish artist Óscar Domínguez, another surrealist who is sometimes not given the deserved credit. But that's life. More models, one decked out in an Elsa Schiaparelli pompom-shouldered dress, of course a shot of surrealist artist Meret Oppenheim in a bare-breasted white bathing cap. 1933 icon.
Ray is a kind of James Bond who meets people in high places but also in the underworld. He is the same as the prefect, Benoît Maginel, in the hallucinogenic film Pacifiction, by Albert Serra. Ray photographs Kiki de Montparnasse and Countess Étienne de Beaumont, also Dada poet Tristan Tzara (“the bells ring senselessly and so do we”), piece of verse, master.
His photography is like the Paris of the twenties: free, experimental, without fear, very fast, sleepless. She turns the negatives of the photos into objects of adoration and drifts towards a photography that drinks from the growing abstraction that will flood everything everywhere.
The jobs for magazines arrive, especially Vogue and Harper's Bazaar with clothes from Chanel and company. Many of these dresses that can still be seen in Antwerp for a few weeks (until August 13), are jealously guarded (the clothes are like vampires, they hate light) in the reserve of the Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris.
In all the photos, risk and daring go hand in hand: long evening dresses on a black background, shadows, optical games like those developed by Lazlo Moholy-Nagy and finally images of objects related to sewing, influenced by the vision of Marcel Duchamp: dressed, decorated, embellished sewing machines, work objects by day, decked out like prêt-à-porter jewels by night.
A drink with the Fitzgeralds, a fight with Hemingway, a conversation with TS Eliot. Gil Pender is lucky in the movie. He lives in two (and even three) parallel worlds. He meets Marion Cotillard, buys her some earrings. At the MOMU in Antwerp it is not so difficult to navigate between two eras and, instead of being anguished, the natural feeling is to admire Man Ray's work and applaud or close your eyes and dream of a better future.
