Step Inside Milan’s Must-See Exhibition Celebrating Man Ray’s Century of Light
September 27, 2025- “MAN RAY Forme di Luce” at Palazzo Reale, Milan
The scene is set. Milan’s autumn season ignites with a major cultural event. The Palazzo Reale presents Man Ray: Forme di luce (“Forms of Light”), an extensive retrospective celebrating one of the true pioneers of the 20th century. Man Ray mastered both light and matter, and he was among the first to treat photography as radical art. The exhibition, on view from September 24, 2025, to January 11, 2026, invites you to step inside his revolutionary vision.
Born Emmanuel Radnitsky in 1890, he renamed himself Man Ray — “Man” for himself, “Ray” for light — and spent the rest of his life bending reality to fit imagination. He turned lovers into muses, from Kiki de Montparnasse to Lee Miller. Ray transformed everyday objects into icons, like Le Violon d’Ingres. He reinvented fashion photography into a surrealist playground that Chanel, Schiaparelli, and their successors still echo today.
Inside the exhibition, discover nearly 300 works, from vintage prints and drawings to sculptures and rayographs. Follow his journey from Philadelphia to Paris, where he meets Marcel Duchamp and the Surrealist circle along the way. Encounter his muses, see his provocative nudes, and rediscover the fashion images that still shape how we view style.
A Life Lived Like a Manifesto
Man Ray’s story reads like a manual for reinvention. He was born in Philadelphia, built his name in Paris, worked in New York, and returned permanently to Paris. Each city marked a new stage in his artistic evolution. In 1920s Paris, Surrealist poets such as André Breton and Louis Aragon embraced him. He immortalized Kiki de Montparnasse in photographs that remain as subversive today as they were a century ago. Later, during World War II in the United States, he blurred the boundary between commercial work and experimentation. He shot for glossy magazines while dismantling traditional ideas of what an image could be.
His world was crowded with icons, including Picasso, Dalí, Miró, and Stravinsky, yet he never played a supporting role. His images remain independent: ironic, erotic, and impossibly modern.
Fashion’s Eternal Collaborator
More than any other avant-garde artist, Man Ray understood the seductive power of style. He worked with couturiers such as Paul Poiret, Elsa Schiaparelli, and Coco Chanel, bringing their creations to life in photographs that were equal parts dream and provocation. These collaborations reshaped fashion photography itself, lifting it from glossy cataloging into art with a capital A. Without Man Ray, the visual language of fashion, surreal and sophisticated yet also subversive, would not exist in the same way.
Half a century after his death in 1976, Man Ray’s light has not dimmed. In fact, it burns brighter. Every image reminds us that art is at its most powerful when it dares to misbehave. This fall, Milan belongs to him.
MAN RAY: Forme di luce
📍 Palazzo Reale, Milan
📅 September 24, 2025 – January 11, 2026
🎫 Palazzo Reale
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