Figures in a Landscape is a hugely important and rare example of Man Ray’s earliest artistic innovations. Dating from 1914, it marks a pivotal moment in the career of an artist whose varied practice is characterised by a restless and pioneering creativity.

There were two experiences in his first years working as an artist that would have a profound impact on the young Man Ray. In 1911, he began to frequent 291, the gallery at the eponymous address on Fifth Avenue founded and run by photographer Alfred Steiglitz. In this space Steiglitz brought the controversial modernists of Europe—Picasso, Cézanne (fig. 1), Matisse, Picabia—and the new generation of revolutionary American artists including Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley and John Marin to the public.

Then in 1913 Man Ray visited the now-legendary Armory show of 1913. For many it was the first t.mes they had seen works by the European avant-garde and the exhibition was an immediate sensation with crowds gathering to protest their outrage in the face of this radical art. For Man Ray it was a revelation: ‘[My] mind [is] in turmoil, the turmoil of a seed that had been planted in fertile ground, ready to break through’ (quoted in N. Baldwin, Man Ray, American Artist, New York, 1988, p. 30). It would take six months for him to begin painting again: ‘I did nothing for sixth months’, he said, ‘It took me t.mes to digest what I had seen’ (quoted in Perpetual Motif: The Art of Man Ray (exhibition catalogue), National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian, Washington, D.C., 1988-89, p. 55).

The results when he picked up his paint brush again reveal a radical shift into a new pictorial style and constitute his first major works, with many now in international museum collects ions (figs. 3, 4 & 6). As Francis Naumann notes: ‘It was the severe, geometric qualities of cubism – the “cubified” look that gave the movement its name – that attracted Man Ray and led to his discovery of a new figurative style. During the winter of 1913-14, the artist pursued this style in a series of large canvases, several of which present figures in such a reduced and blocklike fashion that they appear to have been inspired more by examples of cubist sculpture than by any paintings he might have seen at the Armory Show or in New York galleries’ (ibid., pp. 57-59).

In a separate publication Naumann continued this analogy with sculpture, describings the present work, ‘these figures are so dramatically enlarged that they barely fit within the confines of the canvas […] these larger painted effigies are decidedly more monumental, rendered as if to represent monoliths carved in stone. The reduction and simplification of form that characterises the figures in this landscape represents an intermediate step in the development of a more abstract vision, a direction in which Man Ray’s art would soon evolve (quoted in Conversion to Modernism, The Early Work of Man Ray (exhibition catalogue), op. cit., pp. 89-90).

Figures in a Landscape was probably among the works Man Ray showed in a one-man exhibition at the Daniel Gallery in 1915. Reviews were not entirely complimentary, with American Art News running a column entitled ‘Man Ray’s Paint Problems’. Luckily, some collects ors were more visionary in their understanding. The work was acquired that year from the gallery by one of the earliest American collects ors of Modern Art, Arthur Jerome Eddy (1859-1920), who bought four works by the artist including Five Figures (fig. 6; now in the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York). Eddy had been an influential supporter of the Armory show and was author of the first American publications about Cubism and Post-Impressionism. A large portion of his collects ion was donated to the Art Insitute of Chicago after his death, although the present work passed to his son and was sold in 1937.

An indication of its importance, Figures in a Landscape was subsequently acquired by man who belonged to the next generation of great American art collects ors. Joseph Randall Shapiro (1904-1996) was the founding president of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and a trustee at the Art Institute of Chicago. He began building his collects ion in the 1940s and amassed a highly significant collects ion of art, including one of the pre-eminent groups of Surrealist art in private hands. Joseph and his wife, Jory were known for welcoming people to their home to view their personal collects ion as well as supporting wider access to art. This was an essential part of his mission to promote artists who were often – at the t.mes he first acquired their works – under-appreciated or considered too radical for mainstream taste. In 1985 the Art Institute of Chicago honoured his contribution to Modern Art in America with a major exhibition of his colletion, in which this work was included. As Shapiro wrote in the introduction to the catalogue, ‘Today it is rare that someone will approach me, as did a young Vassar graduate many years ago, with the query, “Tell me, Mr. Shapiro, is all modern art so ugly, or is this just your taste?” After all, the war for modern art has been won’ (quoted in The Mr. & Mrs. Joseph Randall Shapiro collects ion (exhibition catalogue), op. cit., p. 10).