A stunning exhibition of photographs, which provides a dazzling record of some of the most highly charged and exciting periods in twentieth-century art and fashion will feature in Man Ray Portraits, the Scottish National Portrait Gallery’s major summer show for 2013.

Man Ray Portraits features some of the most celebrated images in the history of photography and allows visitors to glimpse the world of creativity and glamour that Man Ray, a leader of the Surrealist movement, inhabited.

Man Ray is widely considered to be one of the most innovative and influential artists of the last century, renowned for his remarkable creativity and experimentation across a range of media, including photography, film, printmaking, painting and sculpture. This is the first major museum retrospective in the UK to focus on his use of photography to make defining portraits of his contemporaries, in the period between 1916 and 1968.

Baillie Gifford Senior Partner, Sarah Whitley, commented: ‘Baillie Gifford is the proud sponsor of Man Ray Portraits, a major retrospective of the artist’s work and one of the highlights of the 2013 Edinburgh Art Festival. The Scottish National Portrait Gallery has a long tradition of bringing iconic artworks to the city and this exhibition is eagerly anticipated.”

Showcasing over 100 works, drawn from major international museums and private collections across the world, the exhibition charts Man Ray’s career from early photographs, taken before he left New York for France in 1921, to those made in his final post-war years in Paris.

The significance of magazines and periodicals in establishing Man Ray’s name and reputation is demonstrated by the inclusion of a number of the vintage titles in which his work was first reproduced. The insight these provide is especially valuable, as some portraits which would otherwise have been lost in the chaos of World War II now appear only as reproductions in periodicals.

Man Ray’s most prolific period was spent at the centre of the avant-garde and literary circles of 1920s and 1930s Paris. Working for
high-style magazines such as Vanity Fair, Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, and more specialised art journals such as Minotaure and Littérature, he created memorable portraits of the era’s major figures, as well as personal and often intimate portraits of friends, lovers and his social circle. The exhibition includes striking images of Marcel Duchamp, André Breton, Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso, James Joyce, Erik Satie, Henri Matisse, Igor Stravinsky, Salvador Dalí, Virginia Woolf and Aldous Huxley.