Man Ray at The Met: Surrealist Dreams & Art Saturdays

Step into the revolutionary world of one of the 20th century's most inventive artists. Join us on Saturday evenings at The Metropolitan Museum of Art for a special viewing of the major exhibition, Man Ray: When Objects Dream.

This is your perfect opportunity to explore the radical, mysterious, and captivating work of the American master after the peak crowds have subsided. Discover how Man Ray reinvented modern art, challenging the very definition of photography, painting, and sculpture. This exhibition is the perfect start to a culturally rich Saturday night in New York City.

At the heart of the exhibition is the rayograph—a ghostly, beautiful image made without a camera. Man Ray created these by placing everyday objects directly onto light-sensitive paper, capturing their silhouettes in a way that makes them seem wonderfully strange and new. The Dada poet Tristan Tzara perfectly described these images as capturing the moments “when objects dream.”

This is the first major exhibition to place Man Ray's signature rayographs alongside his most important works across all media. You will see:

• Over 160 Works: Immerse yourself in a stunning collection of paintings, sculptures, films, prints, and photographs that trace Man Ray's creative journey.
• Iconic Masterpieces: Come face-to-face with celebrated works like the surreal studded iron, Cadeau (Gift), the mesmerizing metronome, Object to be Destroyed, and the landmark photograph, Le violon d’Ingres.
• Restored Films: Witness three of Man Ray's groundbreaking Dada and Surrealist films—Retour à la raison (1923), Emak Bakia (1926), and L’étoile de mer (1928)—newly restored and screened within the exhibition.
• Dada & Surrealist Treasures: See 35 incredible works from the major promised gift of John Pritzker, placing Man Ray at the center of the avant-garde movements that changed art forever.

• When: Every Saturday at 9:00 AM for Members only & 5:00 PM for the public (from September 27, 2025 – January 31, 2026)
• Where: The Met Fifth Avenue, Floor 1, Gallery 199
• Make The Met the centerpiece of your Saturday evening. Enjoy the Date Night at the Met on Fridays and Saturdays!
• A 9 AM visit allows you to experience this world-class exhibition before anyone else enters the Met. Express entry with Members Entrance at 81st Street.
• A 5 PM visit allows you to experience this world-class exhibition before heading to dinner or another NYC adventure on the Upper East Side.
• If you prefer a Sunday visit, drive into the city and enjoy free street parking around the city only available on Sundays! Before access hour visits for the Members also apply for Sundays!

The following is the official press release from the Met for your reference:

Join the conversation online with #WhenObjectsDream and #MetManRay. We look forward to welcoming you to a night of art and inspiration.

Featuring 160 rayographs, paintings, objects, prints, drawings, films, and photographs, Man Ray: When Objects Dream highlights the principal place of the rayograph—a type of cameraless photograph—within the context of many of the artist’s most important works
This exhibition includes thirty-five works by Man Ray which are part of the major promised gift of nearly 200 works of Dada and Surrealist art from Trustee

Exhibition Dates: September 14, 2025–February 1, 2026
Location: The Met Fifth Avenue, Floor 1, Gallery 199

Man Ray: When Objects Dream at The Metropolitan Museum of Art is the first major exhibition to examine the radical experimentation of American artist Man Ray (1890–1976) through one of his most significant bodies of work, the rayograph. Man Ray coined the term rayograph to name his version of the 19th-century technique of making photographs without a camera. He created them by placing objects on or near a sheet of light-sensitive paper, which he then exposed to light and developed. These photograms—as they are also called—appear as reversed silhouettes, or negative versions, of their subjects. They often feature recognizable items that become wonderfully mysterious in the artist's hands. Their transformative nature led the Dada poet Tristan Tzara to describe rayographs as capturing the moments “when objects dream.” While Man Ray acknowledged the photographic origins of his new works, he did not think of them as strictly bound by medium. Taking Man Ray’s lead, this presentation is the first—more than a century since he introduced the rayograph—to situate this signature accomplishment in relation to his larger artistic output. The exhibition is on view September 14, 2025, through February 1, 2026.
The exhibition is made possible by the Barrie A. and Deedee Wigmore Foundation.
Major funding is provided by Linda Macklowe, the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, The Daniel and Estrellita Brodsky Foundation, The International Council of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Andrea Krantz and Harvey Sawikin, and Schiaparelli.
Additional support is provided by the Vanguard Council.
“As one of the most fascinating and multi-faceted artists in the avant-garde movements of the early 20th century, Man Ray challenged traditional narratives of modernism through his daring experimentation with diverse artistic mediums,” said Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer. “Anchored by Man Ray’s innovative and mesmerizing rayographs along with new research and discoveries, this exhibition invites visitors to explore his ground-breaking manipulation of objects, light, and media, which profoundly reframed his artistic practice and impacted countless other artists. We’re so thrilled to include thirty-five works by Man Ray in this exhibition as part of John’s incredible promised gift.”
Drawing from the collections of The Met and more than 50 U.S. and international lenders, the presentation includes more than 60 rayographs, many of which were featured in important publications and exhibitions at the time of their making, and 100 paintings, objects, prints, drawings, collages, films, and photographs to highlight the central role of the rayograph in Man Ray’s boundary-breaking practice. The exhibition marks a collaboration with the recently closed Lens Media Lab, Yale University, under the direction of Paul Messier, and with photography conservators and curators at various lending institutions, to study more than fifty rayographs.
In the winter of 1921, while working late in his Paris darkroom, Man Ray inadvertently produced a photogram by placing some of his glass equipment on top of an unexposed sheet of photographic paper he found among the prints in his developing tray. As he wrote in his 1963 autobiography, “Before my eyes an image began to form, not quite a simple silhouette of the objects as in a straight photograph, but distorted and refracted … In the morning I examined the results, pinning a couple of the Rayographs—as I decided to call them—on the wall. They looked startlingly new and mysterious.” This supposed accident, now the stuff of legend, has obscured the fact that rayographs might be seen as the culmination of Man Ray’s work up to 1921 as well as the frame through which he would redefine his work thereafter. They harnessed his interests in working between dimensions, media, and artistic traditions, fittingly at the moment between Dada and Surrealism, which writer Louis Aragon once called the mouvement flou (flou means “hazy, blurry, or out of focus” in French).
Unfolding in a series of spaces that intersect with a central, dramatic presentation of rayographs, the exhibition illuminates their connections with Man Ray’s work in other media, including assemblage, painting, photography, and film. In approaching the rayograph in this expansive way, the exhibition also offers a reappraisal of the most productive and creatively significant period of his long career, beginning in New York around 1915 with his ambitious paintings and concluding in Paris in 1929 with his fine-tuning of the solarization process with Lee Miller. A critical factor across the exhibition is the central role of objects for Man Ray’s career, both in the creation of many of the rayographs and in his work more generally.
At its core, Man Ray: When Objects Dream focuses new attention on some of the artist’s most recognized, but little-studied, works, most particularly the rayograph. The exhibition opens with Champs délicieux (Delicious Fields) (1922), a portfolio of 12 rayographs which marks the first time Man Ray presented his photograms to the public. Critics hailed them for putting photography on the same plane as original pictorial works. The presentation concludes with the working copy of Champs délicieux, which the artist canceled and dedicated to his friend, Dada artist Tristan Tzara, in 1959.
Between these two works, twelve thematic sections of the exhibition explore such concepts as the silhouette, the dream, the body, the object, and the game, which are inspired by Man Ray’s experimentation with the rayograph. Other groupings will focus on specific media and techniques, and the artist’s studio, as well as watershed moments in the artist’s production, such as the years of 1923 and 1929, when Man Ray unexpectedly returned to painting. Three of his newly restored films, Retour à la raison (Return to Reason) (1923), Emak Bakia (1926), and L’étoile de mer (The Starfish) (1928), will be screened within the exhibition.
Highlights include such iconic objects like Man Ray’s iron studded with tacks, known as Cadeau (Gift) (1921), and his metronome, Object to be Destroyed (1923), that keeps time with the swinging eye of his companion, the photographer Lee Miller. Celebrated photographs, including his landmark Le violon d’Ingres (1924), in which the torso of the artist and performer Kiki de Montparnasse (Alice Prin) is depicted as a musical instrument, are also featured. The exhibition brings together some of his boldest but most refined experimental works—compositions like Aerograph (1919), a painting made with an airbrush and pigment sprayed through and around items from his studio. For Man Ray, objects could function as metaphors for the body, as demonstrated in works such as Catherine Barometer (1920) and L’homme (Man). Rarely seen paintings in the exhibition, including Paysage suédois (Swedish Landscape) (1926) record the artist's great experimentation, working paint without a brush and in an almost sculptural way, building up and scraping down the surface that reflects his experiments in the darkroom.
Credits and Related Content
Man Ray: When Objects Dream is curated by Stephanie D’Alessandro, Leonard A. Lauder Curator of Modern Art and Senior Research Coordinator in Modern and Contemporary Art at The Met, and Stephen C. Pinson, Curator in the Department of Photographs at The Met, with the assistance of Micayla Bransfield, Research Associate, Modern and Contemporary Art.
This exhibition includes thirty-five works by Man Ray which are part of the major promised gift of nearly 200 works of Dada and Surrealist art from Trustee John Pritkzer. The gift is supplemented by funds from The John Pritzker Family Fund to launch a new research program at The Met, the Bluff Collaborative for Research on Dada and Surrealist Art, which is an interdisciplinary initiative to support new research and programming. Building on the legacy of Dada and Surrealism, it will advance fresh thinking about the power of art and ideas in society today. For more on The Bluff Collaborative for Research on Dada and Surrealism, visit The Met website.
For its inaugural year, the Bluff Collaborative has organized a rich program of film screenings, performance and dance in collaboration with MetLiveArts in order to support the Man Ray exhibition. Among the highlights are avant-garde post-rock duo SQÜRL on November 14, 2025. For nearly a decade the group, composed of Jim Jarmusch and Carter Logan, have captivated audiences with their score for Man Ray’s Dada and Surrealist silent films. Join them for an evening of psychedelic dreamscapes alongside the artist’s groundbreaking films, newly restored in 4K resolution. A performance on December 4 & 5 by American dancer and choreographer Trajal Harrell will explore the relationships between the influential postwar “Five Friends” circle—Cy Twombly, Jasper Johns, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, and Robert Rauschenberg—both as artistic contemporaries and queer men. On January 15, 2026, conceptual artist Alex Da Corte and multi-instrumentalist Emily Wells will present The Glass Age, a lecture as a poem to hundreds of pictures and sound in which Da Corte inhabits the persona of Marcel Duchamp. For this performance, Duchamp finds himself inside the prism world of copies, duplicates, replicas, proxies, memes—the places where, like in the visionary artist Man Ray’s rayographs, image, object, and time coalesce.
Educational programs across audiences—students, families, and educators—will include gallery activations and talks with artists and Met experts as well as workshops focusing on Man Ray’s vision and artistic practice. Highlights include a Date Night on January 9 that will activate the exhibition and Museum's galleries with artist and educator led talks, art making, chess matches, and other activities that capture the experimental qualities of May Ray's practice. Hands-on making programs include an Open Studio in which visitors can drop in and try their hand at the artist's experimental process, and a Teen Friday which will explore the camera-less technique used to make rayographs. Dates for these programs will be announced at a later time.
A fully illustrated catalogue will accompany the exhibition and be available for purchase from .
The catalogue is made possible by the Mellon Foundation.
Additional support is provided by James Park, the Carol Shuster-Polakoff Family Foundation, and Sharon Wee and Tracy Fu.
The exhibition is featured on The Met , as well as on social media using the hashtags #WhenObjectsDream and #MetManRay.

Man Ray's eye has influenced the world of painting, but also photography. Born in Philadelphia on August 27, 1890, his real name was Emmanuel Radnitzky and he came from a family of textile artisans.

After entering the New York Art School, but without any recognition of his talent, Man Ray quickly left the school. He decided to paint anything and everything, but he tinkered and created various objects, such as Tapestry in 1911. This was his first work signed in his name.

In 1915, Marcel Duchamp fled the war and moved to the United States. He exhibited in Gallery 291, an art gallery that Man Ray frequented. The two artists met in the spring of 1915. A real connection took place between the two painters, who were convinced that they were redefining the definition of the work of art and bringing in a conceptual aspect.

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