The Surreal Selling of Man Ray


Man Ray, a pioneering photographer and Jazz Age colleague of Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí, died in Paris more than three decades ago, but what's left of his studio can still be found—in a car-repair shop on New York's Long Island.
Beyond this shop's no-frills showroom, which is lined with upholstered seat covers, sits the headquarters of the Man Ray Trust. The trust consists of 16 freezer-size vaults containing about 4,500 works from the artist's estate. These archives include Dadaist and Surrealist photographs of the artist's muse Kiki de Montparnasse, as well as props Man Ray used to make some of his experimental, camera-free images, called Rayographs. (One prop box is labeled "Slinky, Wrench, Razorblade, Bullet, Comb, Can Opener, Many Metal Pieces.")

Now, the collection is being privately shopped to museums, with a price tag of $20 million.

The story of how Man Ray's art wound up in Long Island—and why it's now being offered for sale—is nothing short of surreal. The artist's late wife, Juliet, set up the original trust, but since her death everything has filtered down to her extended family, which owns the car-repair shop. Now, the family, which initially knew little about the art world, is ratcheting up its ambitions for the collection.
As art (`b_code`,`b_cate`,`b_kind`,`b_title`,`b_name`,`b_link`,`b_content`,`b_etc10`,`b_etc11`,`b_datetime`) VALUES soar, many families who can claim relation to iconic artists are realizing their inheritances are worth millions. The Aspen Institute says there are at least 300 artist-endowed foundations in the U.S., double the tally from 16 years ago. Some of these have grown into powerful market players. Few sculptures by Alexander Calder make it to auction without first being vetted by the sculptor's grandson, Sandy Rower. The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, which was set up after the Pop artist's death in 1987, has given away $220 million in arts grants, funded in part by licensing his works for memorabilia.

The stakes are high for the Man Ray Trust, which is overseen by Juliet Man Ray's brother, Eric Browner, who owns the Long Island shop. Mr. Browner, now 86 years old, had only met Man Ray once before he and his brothers stepped in three decades ago to help their bereaved sister sort out the artist's affairs. Today, Mr. Browner manages 15,000 copyrights for the artist and oversees licensing contracts worth roughly $300,000 a year—from Mandarin Hotel headboards embroidered with Man Ray's images to Zara's taupe-colored Man Ray shirts. The trust's proceeds are split among a dozen heirs.
Mr. Browner said he's been feeling family pressure lately to sell the archive before he dies. He has had discussions with the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Smithsonian's American Art Museum in Washington; both museums said they demurred because they couldn't pay his $20 million asking price, the appraised value of the trust's contents as of 2007.

Last month, a few curators from the Getty Research Institute came out to the trust, said Marcia Reed, the institute's curator and head of collection development. Ms. Reed said she is "very interested" in the artist, but her team hasn't yet presented its findings to the Getty board.

The collection could get a boost from the recent market revival for Surrealism. As Impressionist masterworks become scarce in the market, more collectors have begun scouring for fresh gems among the Surrealists—a quirky, cerebral set of artists like Dalí and René Magritte who thrived in 1920s and '30s Europe. Man Ray is best known for his penetrating photographs of Paris's Surrealist elite and for his shadowy, X-ray-like still-lifes made with experimental darkroom techniques. Prices are now also rising for Man Ray's long-overlooked paintings and drawings of eerie dreamscapes.
Two years ago, Sotheby's reset the artist's auction record, getting $2 million for "Fair Weather," one of his 1941 paintings depicting a faceless figure with a lantern for a head. The seller was a private collector. The next test will come May 30, when Sotheby's Paris offers up Man Ray's 1959 proto-Pop close-up of two women's lips nearly kissing, "Two-Faced Image," for at least $2 million. The seller paid Sotheby's $425,500 for the painting a decade ago.

Man Ray's major collectors include San Francisco's John Pritzker, who owns Man Ray's 1933 "Glass Tears," a close-up of a woman's eye surrounded by glass droplets—believed to be the first photograph ever to top $1 million. New York's Roz Jacobs owns Man Ray's masterpiece, "Le Violon d'Ingres," a 1924 large-format print of his mistress Kiki de Montparnasse, her nude back adorned with a pair of black F-holes, as though she were a violin. (The work's title is a French idiom for "hobby;" the artist never said whether it referred to the music or his mistress.) New York dealer Peter MacGill said he could easily resell it for $3 million.
The trust's decision to sell Man Ray's studio contents has already irked some in the art establishment. Timothy Baum, a major Surrealist dealer, dismissed Mr. Browner's target price as "crazy," given that "it's the residue of an archive," whose top works were cherry-picked years ago by auction houses. Other dealers who have looked through the archive peg its value closer to $6 million. The Browners stand by the appraisal.

Merry Foresta, an independent curator who worked on a 1988 Man Ray retrospective at the Smithsonian, said she worries the trust will be tempted to break up the archive and sell off its parts if they can't eventually get their asking price. "The archive's value for researchers hinges on it staying together," she said.

The trust's move also follows years of grousing from dealers and collectors about the Browner family's early reluctance to police Man Ray's market by chasing down, and removing, fakes from the marketplace—an authoritative role that's historically common among artist estates. Lately, though, attitudes about what an estate should, or shouldn't, monitor are changing: The Warhol foundation recently retired its authentication board, in part for fear of litigation.
Confusion persists when it comes to discrepancies in Man Ray's photographic oeuvre. Thousands of photographs are considered original, or vintage, but untold others are still suspected of being copies because a studio assistant printed them shortly after the artist died. Mr. Browner said he has recently tried wielding more influence in this arena by sending out a dozen "threatening letters" to suspected sellers of posthumous prints.

Since the family didn't know much about the art market, they say it took years for them to figure out how to navigate the perks and pitfalls that come with claiming Man Ray. Today, they are still trying to connect with the artist's legacy, even as they seek to cash out. Greg Browner Jr., a nephew of the artist, said, "Man Ray has taken over our lives, basically."

These days, Eric Browner and his wife, Dele, spend much of their year in a modest home in Lake Worth, Fla. The first thing visitors tend to notice is the elaborate coat-hanger mobile that dangles over their coffee table. Mr. Browner pored over sketches of Man Ray's 1920 Dada piece called "Obstruction" three years ago and built a mobile to match.
Nearby shelves show off other faux Man Rays he has built over the years—a blue baguette balanced on a food scale, a pair of metal springs coiled at odd angles. Mr. Browner said he wants to live with art but feels any originals should stay locked up in Long Island. He is tall and nearly bald, still spry in sandals and a Hawaiian shirt. "The thing you've got to learn about the art world is it's full of characters," he said.

Man Ray certainly fit that description. The son of a Russian immigrant tailor, Emmanuel Radnitzky was born in 1890 in Philadelphia and moved with his family as a boy to Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The family later Anglicized its surname to Ray, and eventually Manny Ray truncated his name even further. By the time he signed up to study modern art at Manhattan's Ferrer School in 1912, he insisted on being called by both names at all times.

His quirky sensibilities dovetailed with Dada, a new art movement fostered by Marcel Duchamp and others who reacted to the horrors of World War I by making art that was absurd. The artist moved to Paris in 1921. Short and chatty, he gamely donned a beret and managed to burrow into the center of the city's artistic elite. He began taking photographs of anyone noteworthy who flitted through Paris in the 1920s and '30s—Ernest Hemingway, Georges Braque, Picasso. When World War II began, he uprooted to Los Angeles, where, at a dance, he met Juliet Browner, a pixie-haired dancer and model from the Bronx. They married in 1946 in a double wedding with artists Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning.

The first time Man Ray met most of his wife's family was in 1951, when the couple stopped over in New York on their way back to Paris. The artist broke the ice by telling the Browners how he'd recently taken their sister to a restaurant in Los Angeles that insisted men wear ties—at which point he had unlaced his shoe to create an instant bolo.

Mr. Browner said he and his brothers chuckled, slightly in awe of their sister's choice. Mr. Browner was a high-school dropout who upholstered cars, and the rest of his brothers were workers—accountants, salesmen, New Jersey policemen. Man Ray? "He was a raconteur."

Man Ray and Juliet, who now went by Juliet Man Ray, settled in a former sculptor's studio in Paris. She often sent home letters recounting their adventures—invitations to stay in castles, summers spent vacationing with the Picassos. Mr. Browner says the artist never visited again.

When he died in 1976, Man Ray was "beloved by the French but virtually unknown in America," where subsequent movements like Abstract Expressionism and Pop had passed him by, said Ms. Foresta, the curator. His market perked up slightly three years later, when New York collector Bill Copley sold his giant-lips painting, "Observatory Time—The Lovers," at Sotheby's-Parke-Bernet for a record $750,000 to Greek shipping magnate Stavros Niarchos. When Ms. Foresta asked to borrow the work for her retrospective nearly a decade later, Mr. Niarchos's foundation declined because he had hung the work in his yacht and didn't want to bring it into port.

In 1981, Rick White, the son of Juliet Man Ray's younger sister Selma, visited the artist's widow in Paris for the first time. The widow still spent much of her time at Man Ray's crowded studio, where she liked to receive her ever-swirling social set. But at age 65, she was battling arthritis and poor eyesight, and she felt terrified of being alone. "Some of the people around her seemed like sharks," Mr. White said.

Six years later, one of Juliet's friends called Eric Browner to say that she was worried his sister was being overcharged by lawyers and underpaid by dealers. According to several Man Ray experts, the artist's longtime studio assistant, Lucien Treillard, took Man Ray's studio stamps to authorize photographs that he began reprinting on his own, a move that can confuse collectors who are willing to pay more for originals. (Mr. Treillard has since died).
The Browner brothers quickly stepped in. At the time, Juliet was getting some help from Naomi Savage, Man Ray's niece and closest living blood relation. The Browners didn't question her integrity, but thought they would be best suited to control the estate. Ms. Savage has died; her daughter, Lourie, says she isn't involved with the trust and funnels any Man Ray matters through a dealer.
The Browners soon began to experience what it was like to move in their sister's art circles, getting private tours of Versailles and sitting next to playwright Arthur Miller at museum dinners. One of the brothers moved to Paris to be Juliet Man Ray's caretaker. He printed business cards that read, "Greg Browner, Man Ray's brother in law."

The Parisian art establishment didn't entirely welcome the Browner brothers with open arms. Francis Naumann, a longtime Man Ray dealer, said, "The business cards did seem a little gauche."

When Juliet died in 1991 at age 79, the Browners and their newly reorganized Man Ray Trust were suddenly in control of thousands of works by one of the 20th century's top artists. To settle estate-related taxes, they gave the French government roughly 12,000 of the artist's glass negatives and 6,000 of his best contact prints, together valued around $2.5 million. Those works—which were delivered in 200 small boxes, unorganized—are still being cataloged and digitized by the Pompidou.

In 1995, the trust sold off nearly 550 additional works at Sotheby's in London for a combined $5.9 million. Eric Browner, who sat next to actor Timothy Dalton at the auction, remembers placing a giddy, 6:30 a.m. call to his two nephews in California after the sale. "Your share is $350,000," he shouted into the phone. Both nephews, Kevin and Rick White, made down payments on houses with their share.

Since then, everything else from Man Ray's studio has been shipped and sorted to Mr. Browner's car-repair shop in central Long Island—mainly because he was the only sibling with enough extra room. Today his sons Tim and Roger manage the business and host the occasional curator who asks to rummage through the Man Ray vaults.
Recently, Roger Browner agreed to open them up and lay out a slew of works, including prints from Man Ray's early Paris days of shooting fashion models for Vogue and gold corkscrew earrings he designed that have been worn by actress Catherine Deneuve. He sat down at the trust's decade-old Mac computer to look up the inventory number for the artist's box of cameras. After a few seconds, his eyebrows furrowed. "I think the M key isn't working. Might be time to upgrade."

The family said it has done much to professionalize the trust's operations. The archive is insured now through a $20,000 annual premium, something Man Ray never did, and the trust produced a nine-venue exhibit of works from their archive five years ago. One of the artist's nieces helped bring some clarity to Man Ray's painting oeuvre when she noticed a box of index cards in a Paris gallery that were actually Man Ray's own painting records. The family had bemoaned the disappearance of this box for years; after a few calls and one threatening letter, the family convinced the gallery to donate it to the Pompidou. The trust now has a copy, making it easier to trace ownership histories for dozens of his paintings now.

The family also seems more at ease in art-world settings now. In 2007, Berlin's Martin-Gropius-Bau museum held a news conference to open a major show of Man Ray's work. Eric Browner stepped up to the dais dressed in his signature Hawaiian shirt. He grinned and said, "Hey, I live in Florida."

Since the 2007 appraisal of the archive, which valued the studio's contents at $20 million—and its intangible licensing and image rights at an additional $10 million—some members of the family have been pushing to sell the works. (No one intends to sell or cede the licensing rights, which expire in 2046.) Mr. Browner said he understands why "the young people are interested in the income. Times have been hard."

What will they do if the Getty or another institution takes the studio off their hands? Roger Browner, who works in the car shop, said he'd transform the trust's vault room into a booth for custom-painting vintage cars. Greg Browner Jr., another nephew, said he wants to produce a film based on the artist's autobiography. "You see, none of us is really great," he said. "Man Ray is our great part."