Kiki Man Ray: Art, Love, and Competition in 1920s Paris
To Mark Broad
The doors open at the same time that Kiki de Montparnasse begins to sing. Who didn’t leave a record of their time spent in 1920s Paris? Especially if you manage to get into the Jockey, known for its sticky floors, graffiti walls, and stiff cocktails. There, Kiki, the queen of the neighborhood, was rumbling nostalgic songs. If you could smell it, her voice said, “Garlic hits the hot butter and wine in the pan.”
Marc Blaude’s frenetic and hilarious biography aims to rebalance the many stories of Left Bank Paris in which model, memoirist and muse Kiki is usually cast as a bit player. He makes the environment come alive with all of its grit and energy, but also brings greater socio-political pressures that myopic mythmaking leaves out. The still vivid trauma of World War I and the growing conservative backlash against everything the cosmopolitan city represents. Montparnasse, like Greenwich Village, was a carnival, where the expected reversal of order was tolerated and the outcasts of society could temporarily rule.
Kiki was one such outcast. Born in 1901 in the village of Burgundy to an unmarried country girl, Alice Her Pudding was raised by her grandmother along with her five illegitimate cousins. Her Alice did not hide or deny her origin. They made her character. She is her charm, her wildness and especially her generosity. Even when she was singing for a few soos at a dive bar, she would buy you a drink if you were short, but she didn’t crave her country life . At the age of 12, she was sent to live with her mother in Paris. In her arty and subdued Montparnasse (then simply called ‘The Quarter’) she found her own home, people and her vocation.
When Alice was just sixteen, a sculptor invited her to pose in his studio in a desolate alley where many artists made their living. I found it to be an easy, lucrative business. And while modeling and sex work have long been associated, they were perfectly safe. Her mother objected and marched into the artist’s study to drag her daughter into her home. But Alice found what she was good at and she cut her contact with her mother to keep it going.
In order to get a stable job, I needed to meet more artists, and to do that, I had to conquer Cafe Rotonde. The Rotonde, in the heart of the Quarter, had a large terrace, a bohemian clientele and strict pecking order. Alice worked hard to charm her owners, and she soon settled in, joining the studios of Jewish exiled artists like Modigliani, Chaim Soutine, and her close friend Moise Kisling. Did. Nicknamed Kiki, often a slang term for her whore, she became more assertive. People liked her jokes and her belligerence. When a waiter at another café insisted she dress better, she countered that “cafés are not churches” and added that “all American bitches come in without hats”.
Oh yes, Americans — what would 1920s Paris be without them? ” There was the artist Emmanuel Radnitsky. He was “a pure product of immigrant America,” both in his ambition and his penchant for self-improvement. Man Ray, as he established his own style, was a foreign European in New York who toyed with throwing out all the structures of art, society, culture, and its attendant rules under the banner of Dada. first fell into the crowd of In 1921 he followed his friend Marcel Duchamp to Paris only to discover that everyone wanted to talk about America. left a Belgian poet passed by Adon Lacroix, his wife. When they parted, he hit her with a belt and told her to “explain Mark to her lover.” and a terrifying glimpse into the inhumane attitude towards women with whom he had intimate relationships.
Kiki and Man Ray met at a cafe like everyone else. They slept together during their second photo shoot and soon began sharing a small studio a block away from Rotondo. It played its traditional role as a companion. She entertained with her spirit of abundance betraying their lack of money. In return, Man Ray refused to say he loved her and adhered to the idea that “a romantic relationship is a kind of war.” Rather than being a painter, he longed to be hailed as a great painter and was battling his own talent. Despite neglecting his work, he made a good living as a portrait photographer. And in the Quarter, “everyone led to someone else”: from Francis Picabia to Gertrude Stein to Jean Cocteau to James Joyce.
Man Ray photographed Kiki more than anyone else. Their most famous image together is both silly and wonderful. It’s Kiki’s bare back and buttocks, the profile of her folded limbs and turbaned head, her f-her hall with the violin layered on her skin. Braude is somewhat strained to reveal the significance of the picture’s status as the most expensive picture ever sold at auction. It is a “picture of life,” he suggests, marking the final farewell to war, or perhaps “a dreamer’s prelude to the inevitable disappointment of reality.” More simply, it’s a know-it-all joke about the role of a model and a thorny question about her collaboration with an artist lover. Can she be a musician, or just an instrument?
Despite being lively, this attempt to make Kiki stand out has been utterly unsuccessful in making her memorable as an artist. Blaude describes her as a talented, if undedicated, painter, a realist within Surrealism, whose art and temperament is rooted in concrete pleasures rather than in her abstract ideas. explained that it was “Clear skies pulsate with such blue that you can dive in,” he writes of her paintings of rural landscapes and characters from her childhood. Like Manray, she developed an interest in film and appeared on screen credited as ‘Kikirei’ or ‘Kiki Manray’ in her experimental works such as Fernand Léger’s 1924’s Ballet Her Mechanique. Did.
But most of all, night after night, and year after year, Kiki performed live in the cafes and bars around the Quarter, her natural shyness in fighting her love of singing until alcohol and cocaine brokered peace. . Everyone remembered her, but aside from her few minutes on tape and film, her presence as a model in countless works of art was ephemeral. What Kiki created did not acquire the value and status of her peers, and as Braude observes, markets and museums shape the legacy of art. You can’t auction charisma.
Joanna Scutts’ latest book is Hotbed: Bohemian Greenwich Village and the Secret Club That Sparked Modern Feminism.
Kiki Man Ray: Art, Love and Competition in 1920s Paris To Mark Brode | Illustrations | 304 Pages | WW Norton | $30
