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The best business decision Emmanuel Radnitzky ever made was to call himself “Man Ray.” Two words, two syllables; one from earth, the other of heaven. The nomenclature wouldn’t have made a difference, though, if he didn’t associate himself with the right people—namely, Alfred Stieglitz and Marcel Duchamp. Stieglitz was a photographer who brought the European avant-garde to America, opened Man Ray’s mind to photography, and helped facilitate his passage to Paris, changing his life and career forever. Duchamp was the spirit of the avant-garde wheeling through history on a squeaky unicycle. The first time he met Man Ray, they played a game of tennis in an orchard in New Jersey. There was no net. Man Ray called out the score—fifteen, thirty, forty, love—and Duchamp said the same word after every stroke: “yes.”

Let that mantra linger in your head as you approach “Man Ray: When Objects Dream,” a brilliant sparkplug of a show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It explains how one American artist learned to multiply himself into a Dada-Surrealist octopus, saying yes to so many things that no one could keep count. Man Ray was a painter, photographer, gizmo-maker, draftsman, filmmaker, chess-set designer, writer, poet, editor, publisher, adman, cartographer, prankster. He also had a habit of inventing niche art forms, or at least pretending to. One was called the aerograph. The other he conveniently named after himself: the rayograph.

A rayograph is basically a nineteenth-century photogram. You take an object—say, a twig—place it on photosensitive paper, expose the paper to light, and then develop it in a chemical bath, revealing a twig-shaped silhouette. What Man Ray figured out by accident, one night in 1921, in his little room at the Hôtel des Écoles, in Paris, was that you could shoot light at translucent objects, producing not only a contact silhouette but gauzy, buttery, demented types of shadows. As Man Ray liked to point out, the shadows were just as interesting as the objects they consorted with.

If you know Man Ray primarily as a maker of visual jokes—such as “Cadeau,” a clothes iron with tacks glued to the useful part (rendering it useless), or “Le violon d’Ingres,” a photo of a woman’s back with sound holes overlaid (turning her into a cello)—the Met show won’t disabuse you of this notion so much as rewire it. The tack-iron and back-cello are here, but the focus of the exhibition is the rayograph. The rayographs, after all, are what earned Man Ray his avant-gardist credentials. They are also the point at which Man Ray’s life and history, photography and painting, figuration and abstraction, collide.

Born in Philadelphia in 1890, and raised in Brooklyn, Man Ray was the son of a seamstress and a tailor. From an early age, he liked shapes and naked women. The shapes were usually geometric, and the women were geometries to be looked at, drawn, and pursued. One of the defining moments of his life was the 1913 Armory Show, where the shock of Picasso, Matisse, and Duchamp not only cracked open American culture but left Man Ray unable to produce work for six months. A second educational moment occurred one day in a life-drawing class at the Ferrer Center, in New York, when an attractive blond woman with green eyes posed, nude. “I felt I’d be content to watch her and not do any work,” he wrote in his memoir. “I went home that night with my head in a whirl, immense possibilities opened before me both in art and love.”

After moving to Paris in 1921, Man Ray became the court portraitist of the high moderns—Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein, Picasso—photographing anyone of artistic merit who came within spitting distance of Montparnasse. Parallel to that work was his fashion photography, which brought in good money, and his more artsy boudoir-style experiments. Favorite subjects included his lover and muse, Kiki de Montparnasse (Alice Prin), the artist Meret Oppenheim, and Lee Miller, who apprenticed for Man Ray before becoming a major photographer in her own right. André Breton speculated that Man Ray saw his female sitters the same way he saw objects in his rayographs: “How astonished they would be if I told them that they are participating for exactly the same reasons as a quartz gun, a bunch of keys, hoarfrost, or fern!”

The Met’s stress on quartz gun and fern—that is, on the rayographs—is a welcome departure from Man Ray’s familiar cast of naked and famous people. His first batch, “Champs délicieux” (Delicious Fields), appeared in one of the most interesting years of the twentieth century: 1922, the annus mirabilis of literary modernism, which saw the publication of “The Waste Land,” “Ulysses,” and “Jacob’s Room.” Art-historically speaking, you can stand on 1922 like a mountain ridge. Behind you is the Valley of Dada (roughly 1916-22) and before you is the Jungle of Surrealism (1924-onward). Where you’re standing, wrapped in fog, is the so-called mouvement flou: the blurry zone between the two. Man Ray is one of the few Dada-Surrealist cusp figures who finessed affiliations with both movements without alienating either one. With Talleyrand-levels of aplomb, he navigated the affections of Tristan Tzara, the monocle-wearing high priest of Dada (who visited Man Ray’s room at the Hôtel des Écoles the day after the rayographs were invented), and Breton, whose ancient sculpture of a head dreamed up the Surrealist manifesto. Tzara supposedly hailed the rayographs as “pure Dada creations.” Breton praised Man Ray for forcing photography to abandon its “pretentious claims” to veracity, to fact. In a single stroke, Man Ray had pushed photography to its limit and put painting on its heels.

In “Les Champs Délicieux,” there are a dozen rayographs. We find silhouettes of recognizable items—hair comb, smoking pipe, metal coil—or just glowing lunar shapes: a gyre of white, a pattern of holes, the slightest intimation of an egg, but not an egg. Most of the rayographs don’t have titles, which seems fitting. They all feel like they belong to the same dream, one in which you keep leaving objects behind and forgetting what they’re for. Part of the pleasure is how the rayographs wobble between metaphor and utensil, abstraction and figuration. They’re somewhere between a Rorschach blot and an X-ray.

One of the best tricks for looking at the rayographs is to think of Ezra Pound’s comment about Man Ray “painting with light.” Imagine that, just for a minute: that the rayograph isn’t a flytrap for random silhouettes on a tabletop but a canvas filled with precise strokes of white and black pigment. (Once you see it, it’s hard to unsee.) Before Man Ray hitched his career to photography—a choice he always half regretted—he was a devoted painter. The exhibition briefly lurches back to 1915, to the paintings and prints that he made in his twenties, and though a lot of what you’ll find is downstream Cubism, the thrill is seeing how Man Ray figured out what he wanted from the rayographs before he found them. His defining painting from the period, “The Rope Dancer Accompanies Herself with Her Shadows” (1916), shows a tightrope walker umbilically linked to large swatches of shadow that cover more than three-quarters of the canvas. As in the rayographs, shadows are the main character.

The surprise delight from this early period are the so-called aerographs. With an airbrush borrowed from his job at an ad agency, Man Ray would blast droplets of gouache onto board or heavy paper and use stencils to organize the spray. “Admiration of the Orchestrelle for the Cinematograph” (1919) is a wonderfully finicky diagram for nothing, with clean geometries offset by the occasional umbrella. Man Ray fantasized about making a picture as “a purely cerebral act,” escaping the gooeyness of the medium; the aerograph presented a nifty solution. For him, painting was more than just using a “stick with some hairs attached to it,” he liked to say. It was the art of creating an idea.

The nineteen-twenties were a boom time for Man Ray. Glossy magazines like Vanity Fair and Vogue wanted his portraits and rayographs, and he started making short films, like “Retour à la Raison” (Return to Reason) and “L’étoile de mer” (The Starfish). His objets d’art proliferated: deconstructed lampshade, tack-iron, metronome with eye, baby’s arm coming out of a bucket. In 1929, he struck gold with another darkroom accident—“solarization.” One night, Man Ray and Lee Miller exposed a series of negatives to light while they were still developing. The glitch smoothed out the eccentricities of texture in the image and cast a dusky halo around every shape. Man Ray’s signature trick—setting up his camera far from the sitter, capturing them with a telephoto lens, and then enlarging and cropping in postproduction—gives his standard portraits a remote intimacy, like you are looking at someone across the room while also standing next to them. Solarization deepens that effect and adds a third dimension, as if you are also seeing them outside of time. The results are magic.

The exhibition winds down in the thirties, after Man Ray soured on photography. He tried to beat a path back to painting, with results that excited pretty much no one. The paychecks from fashion magazines had been nice, as were the social benefits, but he wasn’t getting the recognition that he craved as an artist. If any American feels a slight throb of pride to know this country produced at least one bona-fide Dada-Surrealist, we should remember that Man Ray disliked the U.S., and felt no one here understood him, or attempted to. The only time he moved out of France was during the Second World War, when, by some cruel twist of fate, he ended up in Hollywood.

Who was Man Ray? It’s a mystery that even his four-hundred-page memoir doesn’t satisfyingly answer. Here was a multi-hyphenate artist and commercial photographer, with an invented name, who could be asocial at times and take off his clothes at a dinner party at others. He liked fast cars and white wine, freedom and pleasure. One historian described him as “humorous and defensive,” not unlike a caged monkey. Another said he was “half longshoreman, half professor.” Kiki de Montparnasse liked the way he spoke out of the side of his mouth. That detail stands out, if only because he approached everything indirectly. Even in his self-portraits, he’s sometimes nowhere to be found. In one, from 1916, he created a penguin-looking assemblage with sound holes for hips and a doorbell for a belly button. In another, from 1920, it’s just a blurry head wearing a straw boater. His preference was to be behind the camera, not in front of it. He liked the remove of a lens, a pun, an airbrush, the shadow cast by a ray of light