The Triumph of Anti-Art

Interwar Paris was a world-historic cultural incubator, one of the most fertile periods in the history of art, like 11th-century Baghdad or late 15th-century Florence. In his autobiographical Self Portrait, the modernist photographer and painter Man Ray provided an unparalleled picture of the explosion of radical art in the first decades of the 20th century. He described meeting many of the most influential creatives of the modern era: architects, film directors, composers, painters, sculptors, novelists, poets, playwrights, fashion designers, journalists. He claimed to have photographed every one of them. The archives suggest he actually did.