A groundbreaking exhibition at Melbourne's Heide Museum of Modern Art brings together the works of American-French surrealist Man Ray and Australian modernist photographer Max Dupain, offering fresh perspectives on both artists' contributions to 20th-century photography. Curated by Heide's artistic director Lesley Harding and French curator Emmanuelle de l'Ecotais, the show presents a comprehensive cross-section of works that challenges traditional narratives about artistic influence and modernist photography.
For most Australians, Max Dupain's name immediately conjures one iconic image: "Sunbaker" (1937), depicting a male figure lying on the beach with his bronze shoulders creating a striking silhouette against bleached sand and sky. This photograph, featuring one of Dupain's friends who had just emerged from the surf, became emblematic of Australian modernist photography and a certain ideal of Australian beach culture. However, nearly a century of endless reproduction has gradually transformed this modernist masterpiece into something resembling advertising material, while simultaneously reducing Dupain's diverse artistic legacy to a single image.
The Heide exhibition serves as a welcome corrective to this oversimplification. While Man Ray was born in Philadelphia and moved to Paris in his early thirties, becoming deeply embedded with dadaists and surrealists including Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp, Dupain remained largely in Sydney, working as a commercial photographer while developing his artistic practice. The two artists never met, and it remains unclear whether Man Ray was even aware of Dupain's existence, despite Dupain being an admirer who encountered Man Ray's work through magazine reproductions.
Rather than forcing artificial connections between the artists, the curators have organized the exhibition thematically around fashion photography, nudes, portraits, and other subjects, allowing works from both photographers to engage in visual dialogue. This approach reveals both similarities and striking differences in their artistic approaches. Visitors often find themselves guessing which photograph belongs to which artist before checking the wall labels, frequently discovering they were incorrect in their assumptions.
Both photographers demonstrated a keen focus on the interplay between shadow, light, and rounded forms, though their methods differed significantly. Man Ray typically worked in studio settings with controlled lighting, as evident in his beach-themed photographs of fellow surrealist Meret Oppenheim wearing a beach bonnet (1932). In contrast, Dupain embraced natural lighting and outdoor settings, as seen in "Beach Play" (1937), which shows a woman in a bathing suit photographed from below against the sky as backdrop.
The sun plays a critical role throughout Dupain's body of work, appearing repeatedly in naturally lit photographs and still lifes such as one showing a kitchen vessel covered in shadows created by light filtering through blinds ("Still Life," 1935). This vernacular approach reflects what curator Helen Ennis describes as Dupain's more spiritual aesthetic, contrasting with Man Ray's surrealist experimentations that employed light's "fugitive aspects" and "oscillations between light and shadow" to create what Ennis calls "a poetic vision of reality—of surreality."
Man Ray's surrealist inclinations are evident not only in his technical innovations like solarization—a technique involving brief exposure of negatives to light to create halo-like effects—but also in his subject matter. Phallic imagery, beloved by psychoanalysts and surrealists alike, appears frequently in his work. "Anatomies" (1929) shows a woman positioned so her neck and chin resemble male genitalia, while "Érotique Voilée" (1933) places Meret Oppenheim behind a printing press with its handle functioning symbolically as a phallus.
While Dupain created several surrealist-influenced works, including "Homage to Man Ray" (1937), which depicts a woman's chest covered by her hands using Man Ray's solarization technique, his aesthetic leaned more toward spiritualism than psychoanalytic surrealism. Works like "The Birth of Venus" (1939), a double exposure of a pregnant woman flanked by identical Venus statues, possess what the exhibition notes describe as a "cultish vibe." Another portrait of artist Hera Roberts (1936) shows her gazing into a round mirror with her face reflected in symmetry, as if summoning a higher being.
The exhibition features remarkable portraits from Man Ray's artistic milieu, including images of Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso, and Joan Miró. His "Portrait of André Breton (in Front of Giorgio Chirico's Painting The Enigma of Day)," believed to have been taken shortly after Man Ray's relocation to Paris, serves as a virtual who's who of Paris surrealism. The show also includes a small gallery dedicated to the women in both photographers' lives—Lee Miller and Olive Cotton, respectively—featuring Cotton's photograph of Dupain after surfing ("Max after surfing," 1939).
Some curatorial choices prove less successful than others. A specially commissioned soundtrack by composer Peter Corrigan feels gimmicky and detracts from the visual experience. Similarly, mirrors positioned around the gallery in V formations, each reflecting works by both artists in a compare-and-contrast format, appear to be a calculated appeal to social media audiences rather than serving the art itself. These elements reflect what seems to be an inevitable "experience-making" trend in contemporary art exhibitions, where viewers expect to center themselves in the artistic encounter.
Despite these minor distractions, the strength of the works themselves and their thoughtful arrangement create lasting impressions. One particularly striking piece, Dupain's "Blanket Rhythm" (circa 1934), initially appears as an abstract composition of white curved lines interspersed with black planes. Only gradually does the viewer recognize the subject as a folded woolen blanket—a masterwork of light and shadow whose sensual mood and tactile qualities contrast sharply with the sleek surfaces of "Sunbaker."
The exhibition successfully demonstrates that both photographers were pioneering modernist artists who experimented extensively and influenced generations of subsequent photographers. By avoiding the trap of reinforcing a simple pipeline from European to Australian modernism—which often compounds the provincialism that has long plagued Australian art discourse—the curators allow each artist's unique vision and cultural context to emerge clearly.
"Man Ray and Max Dupain" continues at the Heide Museum of Modern Art in Bulleen, Victoria, through November 9, offering visitors an opportunity to rediscover both artists' full range of artistic achievement beyond their most famous individual works.
