Readings: KIKI MAN RAY: Art, Love, and Rivalry in 1920s Paris, by Mark Braude
Behind every great man ... is a woman likely to be erased
1KIKI MAN RAY: Art, Love, and Rivalry in 1920s Paris, By Mark Braude, W.W.Norton & Company, August 2022
Have you ever heard of Kiki de Montparnasse?
Google with care, I implore you. What tops the results list is a high end purveyor of lingerie and pleasure accessories. For example, for a mere $425 you can get yourself a pair of “gold” handcuffs; and while you use those, why not wear the leather high waisted corset panty?A steal at $535. If you’re on a tighter budget, maybe just some restraint tape. It’s only forty bucks.
I wonder what Kiki, Queen of Montparnasse, nee Alice Prin, would make of her name being used to profit yet another someone or other, and not her. She, whose memoir had an introduction by Ernest Hemingway. She about whom famed chanteuse Edith Piaf said, “I was intimidated by her brilliance.” She who was muse and model for and lover of the artist, Man Ray. And many other artists. She who ruled Paris when it was the center of the art world in the 1920s. She was an artist, painter, singer, actress, writer, and essential to the birth and explosion of the avant-garde, surrealist, Dada movements.
She was an icon. A star. It.
Have you never heard of Kiki De Montparnasse?
Neither had I. I had some vague notion that Man Ray was a photographer, but that was the extent of my knowledge. I’ve some passing acquaintance from my reading of Dorothy Parker and the rest of the Algonquin Round Table bunch with others mentioned in the book; Janet Flanner, Gertrude Stein, Picasso, Modigliani (truth - I know of him because it was said Streisand looked like one of his paintings), and Ernest Hemingway, some of whose novels I’ve read, and, too, because of his connection to Martha Gellhorn, whose letters were collected in a pretty brilliant book called YOURS, FOR PROBABLY ALWAYS, by Janet Somerville, who I know from Twitter.
But I’d never heard of Kiki.
Mark Braude, cultural historian, was teaching, using an image of a photograph of her which had recently sold for $12.4 million at auction, and he began to wonder why he, who was studied in and taught about art, Paris, and history, knew nothing about the woman in this iconic image, not even her name. He wrote KIKI MAN RAY to find the answers to those questions.
The book — like Kiki herself — is not just one thing. It is part biography; we learn a lot about Kiki through non-linear explorations of different periods of her life. It is part history book; with the contextualizing of Kiki’s surroundings and the people she met and knew, where they spent time, how they spent time, we learn a lot about the 1920s. And it is part sociological/anthropological study; what is it about the world, the way we attend to and record history, that a woman of such importance, who was herself as much an artist as any of the men from that time period whose names and work we do know, is now mostly forgotten?
And the combination of all those approaches — which one would think would create a difficult to follow mishmash — makes for an eminently readable, provoking, fascinating read.
Now I know who Kiki de Montparnasse is, and I wonder how many other women — and other marginalized people of any gender — are lost to history? Mark Braude does a great service to society and culture by bringing to light someone whose contributions have been — more or less — erased. Kiki knew who she was. She said this about ManRay:
“He made his best photos with me, he understood my body, my type. In the end, m, the model— I was the one who gave him his genius.”
And about her life:
“The point was that we were free to choose who we wanted. We were liberated women. We invented the concept, and what’s more, without even knowing we were doing it.”
But she also understood the price she paid:
“They turned me into an image: ‘Kiki’. And I was obligated to live up to it, even when I didn’t feel like it. Because it wouldn’t be Montparnasse without Kiki. I’m part of the scenery.”
Her final chapter was not pretty, nor fitting for someone whose presence had given so much to so many. She was aimlessly wandering the streets, emaciated and ill, singing for those who had no idea how she’d shaped the world in which they lived. But much of her genius was intangible, or, as Mark Braude says, her best work was her most ephemeral, having to do with being in a room with her. He puts it this way (and best):
A perfectly timed pause that makes everyone in a nightclub go still in uneasy anticipation isn’t something you can trademark and bottle. You can’t sell a dance at an auction. You can’t sell a pose.
Though I’d only just gotten to know her in KIKI MAN RAY, at the end of its 250 or so pages, I mourned her loss, and our loss, not knowing who she was, not having access to her work, to her genius.
KIKI MAN RAY by Mark Braude does its part to remedy that loss. I wish there had been more images of the photographs and paintings which are referred to in the book, the 8 pages of them are not nearly enough … but that’s what Google-image search is for. Just beware the lingerie and sex toy sellers.
Full Disclosure: I was sent a copy of this book by the publisher, with no strings attached. I did not promise to write about it, I was not asked to.