The era is one of renewal, the American will largely contribute to it. Montparnasse is the nerve center of this cultural activity, the cradle of what we call the “school of Paris” and Man Ray is its common denominator.
A protean artist, he appeared as the link between writers, poets, artists and collectors of all nationalities who then populated Paris, the incarnation of the capital's cosmopolitanism.
the author evokes the arrival of Man Ray in Paris, his installation, his encounters, particularly romantic ones, and his progressive artistic evolution from Dadaism to Surrealism. Little space is left to the work itself, the artist is mainly described as this worldly dandy around whom all the major or secondary personalities that included Montparnasse, Tzara, Breton, Foujita, Lee Miller, Kiki, etc. gravitated.
Herbert Lottman attempts here to create a “biography” of Montparnasse between the wars, borrowing from the style he happily practiced on numerous occasions. times.
The story is full of anecdotes and strives to describe very precisely the topography of the “Quartier”, from artists' studios to cafés and other places of entertainment.
If these details well document life as it could be in the neighborhood and the conditions of artistic creation, the long passages devoted to the tumultuous sentimental life of Man Ray are more difficult to justify.
Are we not then in the most anecdotal aspect of the artist's biography? This work does not in fact aim at an analysis of artistic creation at the time. His point is more in the suggestion of the intellectual ferment which animated the “Quartier” in those years. Herbert Lottman creates here a hybrid work, between the artist's biography and the painting of an atmosphere, that of Montparnasse between the wars, between the novel and the newspaper. Raphaële Stopin