Man Ray: Self Portrait (1963)

In this remarkable autobiography, Man Ray – painter, photographer, sculptor, film maker and writer – relates the story of his life, from his childhood determination to be an artist and his technical drawing classes in a Brooklyn high school, to the glamorous and heady days of Paris in the 1940s, when any trip to the city ‘was not complete until they had been “done” by Man Ray’s camera’.

Friend to everyone who was anyone, Ray tells everything he knows of artists, socialites and writers such as Matisse, Hemingway, Picasso and Joyce, not to mention Lee Miller, Nancy Cunard, Alberto Giacometti, Gertrude Stein, Dali, Max Ernst and many more, in this decadent account of the early twentieth-century cultural world.

Publisher Little, Brown and Company, Boston and Toronto, 1963
402 pages

PDF (58 MB, no OCR)

Georges Bataille: Manet: Biographical and Critical Study (1955)

Bataille’s introduction to Manet.

The essay also appeared as Manet. Études biographique et critique, Skira, Genève, 1955
Translated by Austryn Wainhouse and James Emmons
Publisher Skira, 1955
135 pages
via leninbert

Commentary: Anne McConnell (Equinoxes, 2004).

PDF

See also Michel Foucault: Manet and the Object of Painting (1971, FR, EN)

Alice Goldfarb Marquis: Marcel Duchamp: The Bachelor Stripped Bare (2002)

“One of the most influential artists of the 20th century, Duchamp, the son of a successful notary, was also a shrewd manager of his image and interests — so much so that many of those who have written about him have been dazzled by his self-created persona when trying to assess his elusive legacy and equally elusive character. Marcel Duchamp: The Bachelor Stripped Bare is not the first full-length biography of Duchamp, but it is the first to present him in all his human contradictions and to take a refreshingly objective look at his real contribution to modern art. The well-known facts are beautifully explored here: Duchamp’s myriad personal relations (with family, lovers, collectors, and artists ranging from Man Ray, Picabia, and Breton to the Stettheimer sisters and the Arensbergs); the creation of major works such as the readymades and the Large Glass; his passion for chess and presumed abandonment of painting. But beyond this, author Alice Goldfarb Marquis looks past the diffident, humorous mask that Duchamp wore with friend and acquaintance alike, to explore the passions and insecurities that motivated many of his artistic and personal evolutions. She separates the artist from the con artist, to determine just how profound an influence Duchamp has really been. The books is based on numerous unpublished sources and first-hand interviews.”

Publisher MFA Publications, Boston, 2002
ISBN 0878466444, 9780878466443
368 pages
via agitprop

Publisher

PDF (65 MB, updated on 2016-6-6)