Man Ray’s Deadpan Wit on Display at the Met

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“ When Objects Dream ,” the sensational Man Ray show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through Feb. 1), is centered on the artist’s refined experiments with the cameraless images he called rayographs: the shadowy impressions left on photographic paper by scattered objects after the paper has been exposed to light. It should come as no surprise that his first experiments in the form, published, in 1922, as a suite of twelve abstract images, are among his most accomplished. Ray had already channelled the antic, subversive spirit of Dada and Surrealism with a series of readymade sculptures that included a flatiron studded with a row of tacks.