The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (395 page)

 
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Ray , Man
.

See
MAN RAY
.

 
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Rayonism
(
Rayonnism, Rayism
; also Luchism).

A type of abstract or semiabstract painting practised by the Russian artists
Goncharova
and
Larionov
and a few followers in the years 1912 to 1914 and representing their own adaptation of
Futurism
. Rayonism was launched at the
Target exhibition
held in Moscow in 1913. In the same year Larionov published a manifesto stating: ‘Rayonism is a synthesis of
Cubism
, Futurism and
Orphism
.’ The style was bound up with a very unclear theory of invisible rays, in some ways analogous to the ‘lines of force’ which were postulated by Italian Futurist theory, emitted by objects and intercepted by other objects in the vicinity: the artist, it was said, must manipulate these rays to create form for his own aesthetic purposes. Many Rayonist paintings are very similar in style to those of the Futurists, with particular emphasis on breaking up the subject into bundles of slanting lines. In other works the subject virtually or completely disappears. The movement was short-lived, as both Goncharova and Larionov virtually abandoned easel painting after 1914 and they founded no school.

 
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(1893–1968).
British poet and critic, regarded as his period's foremost advocate and interpreter of modern art. After serving with distinction in the army in the First World War he worked at the Treasury, then in the ceramics department of the Victoria and Albert Museum, 1922–31, before becoming Watson Gordon Professor of Fine Arts at Edinburgh University, 1931–3. By this time he had published several collections of his verse as well as various art-historical studies (including
English Stained Glass
, 1926, still a standard work), critical works on English literature, and the first of his philosophical works on art,
The Meaning of Art
(1931). In 1933 he returned to London as editor (1933–9) of
The Burlington Magazine
, Britain's foremost scholarly art journal, and his attention turned increasingly to contemporary art; in 1933 he published
Art Now
, the first comprehensive defence in English of modern European art, and in 1934 he edited the modernist manifesto
Unit One
. At this time he lived near Henry
Moore
, Barbara
Hepworth
, and Ben
Nicholson
, and he acted as the public mouthpiece of the group of artists of which they were the centre. He was interested in
Surrealism
as well as abstraction and was one of the organizers of the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition in London. In 1947 he was co-founder of the
Institute of Contemporary Arts
in London. Among his many books the most influential was probably
Education Through Art
(1943), which used the insights of psychoanalysis to promote the idea of teaching art as an aid to the development of the personality. His other books include
A Concise History of Modern Painting
(1959) and
A Concise History of Modern Sculpture
(1964), much used as introductory surveys by students. By the time he wrote them he was becoming disenchanted with contemporary artistic developments, but he was known as ‘The Pope of Modern Art’ and was regarded as ‘an international authority and indeed something of a sage. It was not a role to which he ever pretended, for he was a man of conspicuous modesty’ (
DNB
).

 
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ready-made
.

A name given by Marcel
Duchamp
to a type of work he invented consisting of a mass-produced article selected at random and displayed as a work of art. His first ready-made (1913) was a bicycle wheel, which he mounted on a kitchen stool, and this was soon followed by others, notably
Bottle Rack
(1914),
In Advance of the Broken Arm
(a snow shovel, 1915), and the celebrated
Fountain
(a urinal signed R. Mutt , 1917); most of the originals have disappeared, but several replicas exist. Duchamp himself distinguished the ready-made from the
object trouvé
(found object), pointing out that whereas the
objet trouvé
is discovered and chosen because of its interesting aesthetic qualities, its beauty and uniqueness, the ready-made is one—any one—of a large number of indistinguishable massproduced objects. Therefore the
objet trouvé
implies the exercise of taste in its selection, but the ready-made does not. When
Fountain
was rejected by the hanging committee of the
Society of Independent Artists
, Duchamp defended his creation by writing: ‘Whether Mr Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under a new title and point of view…[he] created a new thought for that object.’ The ready-made was one of
Dada's
most enduring legacies to modern art. It was much used in
Pop art
, for example, and Robert
Rauschenberg
calls
Bicycle Wheel
‘one of the most beautiful pieces of sculpture I've ever seen’.

 
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