Undeterred by recent allegations that certain “vintage” Man Ray prints are counterfeit—charges that cooled plans for a retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art—the Getty is mounting a selection of some 100 of the artist’s 300 images from its collection. Curator Katherine Ware is taking a broad view of the American Dadaist-turned-expatriate Surrealist, sampling work from 1916 to 1951, including portraits, nudes, photograms, clichés verre, and solarized and hand-altered images. Did the spark go out when Man Ray left Paris for Los Angeles, as conventional wisdom has it? The photographs and writings from this period included here suggest otherwise.

— Amy Gerstler