Like many good photographers, he was instinctively attracted to people who would subsequently become legends. He snapped Duchamp quickly, and made his own art snappily. He saw how to make surreal objects that side-stepped the usual procedures of sculpture. Everyone knows his Cadeau (1921), the flat iron with nails protruding from its surface. This piece looks rather furtive, as though it were better in its photographs.

The equally well-known Object of Destruction (1923/59), a metronome that winks and clicks with a photograph of an eye (Lee Miller's) at the end of its long finger, is a little more intriguing - but not for long, as is the way with metronomes.Exciting yesterday in Paris, somewhat dead now: that is the story of Man Ray's internationalism. The paintings show him to have been the pasticheur of De Chirico and Magritte Occasionally he hit something. One intriguing painting, cleverly entitled Man Ray (1914), is a futurist-abstract miniature that turns out to spell his own name if you look at it for long enough. I wonder about the sprightly bullfight picture, Course de Taureaux, a mixture of Mir and Picasso. The Serpentine gives the date as 1925-26.I think it could have been painted a decade later, Man Ray's paintings being unusually laggardly within the context of the high-brow avant-garde.He was more on the mark with the camera. His rather ordinary instrument (a Kodak, available to anyone) served his instinct for the time and the style of the Franco-American love affair.

In the darkroom, a silver gelatin gave a beautiful and obviously lubricious sheen to photographs that might indeed have dealt with modern, shimmering love, but they lack heart and remind one of magazine photography. TH! `Man Ray, 1890-1977' continues at the Serpentine Gallery, Kensington Gardens, W2 (071-402 0343), to 12 March.. THE PRINTER Guido Morris was born in 1910, under, he would romantically explain, the sign of Cancer. In the mid-1960s, his passion for printing, his bad debts, his epicene good looks and his amorous adventures made him a legendary figure among a c oterieof bibliophiles, printing historians and St Ives bohemians But by then he had long abandoned his craft. From 1955 he worked as a guard on the London Underground, dying in poverty in 1980.

He had taken the Arts and Crafts project to extremes, disc overing, like so many others, that the economics did not add up. He is now, belatedly, being honoured in a comprehensive exhibition of his printing at the Tate St Ives. The Arts and Crafts movement of the late 19th century was characterised by a measure of business sense. Its protagonists pioneered design reform but made use of commercial firms to realise their wallpaper, textiles, furniture and pottery.

Although William Morris, Walter Crane and William De Morgan certainly had an intimate understanding of making processes, they rarely executed their own designs. But by the turn of the century greater stress was placed on the designer as actual maker, working as s pontaneously and directly as possible. It was a philosophy that drove its upper-middle-class exponents to extremes of living. So a figure like Michael Cardew lived in poverty in Glouces-tershire, digging clay, creating clay bodies, throwing pots and firing them in an enormous country kiln, often with disastrous results. Trial and expensive error characterise the researches of many of the finest inter-war craftsmen and women; yet out of that difficulty came objects of great beauty, comparable in their stripped-down intensity to some of the sculpture of the period - the direct carving of Gill and Epstein, of Hepworth and Moore.When, in about 1934, Guido Morris decided to dedicate his life to printing, he had an equivalent standard of truth to materials. In the world of private presses this kind of truthfulness was expensive, involving handmade papers, specially cut punches, hours of pain-staking press work, fine bindings and wood-cut embellishments. The famous inter-war presses such as the Ashendene and the Gregynog were financed with Medici-like extravagance by their owners. But Morris had no private money and, in any case, his artistry would always outstrip sensible economics.