In the backroom of a Long Island auto body shop sit 16 huge safes containing more than 4,000 artifacts from the estate of surrealist/dada artist Man Ray. How did the items — ranging from hundreds of his photographic prints to his briefcase to his own art collection — end up there?
Over at Vantage, Noah Rabinowitz's photo essay about the curious location of the Man Ray Trust. From Vantage:
The artist’s second wife, Juliet Browner, set up the original trust upon his death, but when she passed away in 1991 at the age of 79, the contents of the studio were shipped to Eric Browner’s car-repair shop — mainly because he was the only one of her siblings with enough room. Today, his sons Tim and Roger, manage the business, hosting the occasional curator who asks to explore the vaults…
Man Ray first met his wife’s family in 1951, when the couple stopped over in New York on their way back to Paris. The artist told the Browners that 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…
They soon started to move in their sister’s art circles, sitting next to Arthur Miller at museum dinners and getting private tours of Versailles. One of the brothers moved to Paris to be Juliet Man Ray’s caretaker when she became ill. He printed business cards that read, “Greg Browner, Man Ray’s brother-in-law.”
