Following the flip of a coin, William Wegman bought a grey Weimaraner, taking the only male from a litter of seven because, as he recalls in an interview with Michael Gross for New York, it looked to him "strange and distant." He did not actually want a dog, but had decided that, if he did own one, he would name it Bauhaus, a pun on the minimalist German school of design popular during the 1920s. Unfortunately, the puppy did not really suit the name, resembling instead a "little old grey man." Pondering his dilemma, the artist watched, he explains in his Gross interview, as a "shaft of light like a ray blasted down," bathing the dog with an eerie brilliance. He recalls thinking, "it was as if the God of Art were telling the dog, 'Your name is Man Ray'"--an appropriately ironic form of homage to the...