The forgotten star: Kiki de Montparnasse with Dr. Mark Braude

Gary: Today's special episode is an interview with acclaimed author Dr. Mark Braude. His works include The Invisible Emperor, Making Monte Carlo, and the subject of today's podcast, Kiki Man Ray. Kiki Man Ray was one of The New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2022, named to best of 2022 lists by The New Yorker, Harper's Bazaar, Artnet and others, and a nominee for the American Library in Paris Book Award and the Vinh Award. Mark has been a visiting fellow at the American Library in Paris, a post-doctoral fellow at Stanford, and an NEH public scholar. Today we are delving into the story of Kiki de Montparnasse, one of the most famous celebrities in the 1920s Paris, but whose legacy has largely been forgotten, remembered only in the photographs taken by the famous American photographer Man Ray. In today's episode, we are shining a light on this larger than life figure and exploring why she has been forgotten.

Thank you so much for being on the show, doctor Mark Braude, your book, Kiki Man Ray: Art, Love and Rivalry in 1920s Paris is both very exciting and well received by all that I have read about it. It's been really jumping up on the charts. Let me ask you, what led you to research and write about the largely forgotten cabaret star Alice Prin, aka Kiki de Montparnasse?

Mark: First, let me say thank you for having me. I've been looking forward to it. The genesis of the project started with some teaching I was doing, a series of courses at Stanford 8 or 9 years ago, all related to the history of Paris, the cultural history of Paris, especially in the 20th century. And I always like to teach the 1920s that post-World War, First World War art scene. And I would talk about the Surrealists, and I would talk about Americans in Paris, and I would talk about Man Ray. I would show this iconic image of a black and white photo of a woman whose nude torso has been marked up with the f holes of a violin or a cello. It's called La Viola Dangle. It's from 1924, and I would say, this is by Man Ray. And talk a bit about Man Ray and about surrealism and about the subject of this picture, the woman in the photograph. I would say her name was Kiki de Montparnasse, and she was the most sought after artist model of her era in Paris, and was said to be romantically linked with Man Ray at the time of this images creation. And that's all I would say because that's all I really knew. And after doing this for a few times, it just got to bothering me that I didn't know more about her. So really, for the sake of a better lecture, I went and started digging around as much as I could to find out about this woman, this artist model. And I would say within 2 or 3 days of finding what I could, I knew there was a book there. She was so much more than the women who posed for this picture. She was an artist, a singer, a cabaret performer, an actor, and most importantly to me, a writer. She wrote this wonderful memoir, and I really wanted to look at her life, and especially in conjunction with Man Ray and in this era in 1920s Paris. So it was really just out of kind of pure ignorance and then curiosity.

Gary: That's usually where the best books begin, I find. And speaking of that, let's dive in. You begin your book by providing the background of our star. Tell us all about Kiki's troubled life and what led her to Paris.

Mark: So she was born Alice Prin in1901 in the little village of Chateau Suzanne. Uh, a few hours outside of Paris, in the provinces, in the Dijon region. And really, as you would know at the start of the 20th century, to be removed from Paris, really to live in a world apart. Uh, this was a place with its own rural and agrarian culture and folkways and, um, you know, as I said, a kind of a universe apart from the capital. She she grew up in poverty. Her mother was unwed and a teenager when she had Alice and was sent away to Paris to really escape her local shame as they saw it there in the village. And so this young Alice was raised, along with five other cousins who were born out of wedlock by their grandmother and got sort of rudimentary schooling. School wasn't really for her and was sent up to Paris when she was about 12, just before she was 13, and legal to work to be rejoined with her mother and get to working, really. And she took a series of menial jobs that started to become related to the to the war effort. As The Great War kicked off in 1904, she worked at polishing dead soldiers boots to get put back into rotation. She fixed parachute material, all sorts of those kinds of jobs. And that's really where I think her life could have kept heading, except for she had this real hunger for art, for the art world, for artists themselves, poets, actors. She wanted to be in that world. And so she happened to be living in this working class neighborhood of Montparnasse where her mother had settled. And it so happened that that was also a place, of course, where artists were coming. And she gravitated towards that world and sort of made her own way without any social connections, without any money, with very little education, and inserted herself into that world was quite a bit of skill. And, you know, the one thing I do want to say is that you mentioned the word troubled. And yes, I think that from an outside perspective it looks like extremely difficult circumstances and was really someone who had survived by her wits and didn't always get three meals a day. She herself, as far as I know, never really thought of herself as someone from a troubled background. She loved her village. She loved her grandmother. She loved that community and was proud in a sense of where she came from and thought of it as yes, there were struggles, but there were also a lot of benefits of the sort of closeness of that she had with those people that she grew up with. And she always pined for it, even while she became this ultimate Parisian sophisticate, which we can talk about, uh, as we as we go forward here.

Gary: You talk about the art scene during World War One? Given that one out of five fighting age men died during the Great War, at least in France, most people tend not to think about Paris art scene during this time. Tell us all about Parisian art under the strain of war.

Mark: That's a great question, because we think so much about Paris, Montparnasse as these places that become hotbeds of innovation after the war, right, after this great crisis, this great cataclysm, and then changing how everybody is seeing the world and reacting to it. And yet, as you say, there is, of course, an art scene going on during the First World War. And those changes that we talk about are really happening in real time as people are interacting with what's going on at the front. And there's back and forth people,  movement of people, movement of messages, movement of ideas. One of the best ways to really start to answer that question is to think of the story I'd heard about Picasso, that he recounted to his art dealer decades after the war, and he said. He had been summering or vacationing in Avignon that summer of 1914. War breaks out, France declares, when France officially declares war on Germany right at the beginning of August. Picasso accompanies two other artists, Georges Braque and Andre Derain, to the train station because they're going off to serve, and Picasso, remembering this years later, would say we never saw one another again. That was it. That was the last time we saw one another. But of course, in truth, they saw each other often for years. For decades after that, they were very close. They lived long lives, and three of them. What Picasso meant, of course, was that once they had gone off to war and once the war kicked off, no one who had that experience was able to see someone who hadn't had that experience in the same way ever again. There was this huge disconnect. And hat is happening in 1914, 1915, 1916. That there is this great shift in how people are thinking about time and space, and it really gets translated into art right then. You know, Gertrude Stein talks about the war as a Cubist war because it smashed time and space in our conceptions of those things. And those ideas are flowing, uh, as the war is taking place. Now, Kiki herself, at least this young Alice who had turned into Kiki, who had sort of adopted this nickname of Kiki. Was trying to make her way as an artist model. She had her own struggles going on during those years that were completely separate from what was happening in the war. She's a teenager, she's coming of age, she's trying to earn a living, and she's trying to make her way as a model. So she starts going to a little cafe called La Rotonde, which is in the heart of Montparnasse. And that's where there was this informal model market, if you will, a place where painters would go to meet potential models and models, would go to meet painters, and they would arrange to pose. You had to sort of earn your way into that pecking order. Kiki charmed her way into the back room where these transactions took place, simply by her charm, by her sense of humor, her style. She had this very, um, particular haircut. She had the bob haircut before it became fashionable, and a look that people really competed to capture. So even in these very last years, the war in the early first years of the 20s, she's really I would liken her to kind of a punk in the 70s, somebody who looked very different from everyone else had this intense style. And the painters, most of the male in Montparnasse were really all trying to capture something about her that seemed to them to capture this unsettling spirit of the times. And that's the beginning of her career. Um, but as I said before, not by no means the most interesting part of her career to me.

Gary: In 1921, Emmanuel Radnitzky, who went by Man Ray, arrived in Paris. Tell us all about the fateful meeting of the American artist and the woman who would be his muse for roughly a decade.

Mark: So Man Ray, born Emmanuel Radnitzky in Philadelphia and grew up in Brooklyn. To Jewish immigrants from Russia. Comes to Paris in 1921 just for a three month tour. He wants to see he's himself developing as a painter. He saw himself as a painter first and foremost, and would actually see himself as a painter for his entire life, primarily thought of himself as a painter. Doing these kind of cubist inspired abstract works, and he goes to Paris to meet some of the artists that he admires and who he's been communicating with. Tristan Tzara at the focal point of the data movement in Paris and in Europe, and wants to see the museums, wants to go to the Louvre and do the tour right, and then come back and keep trying to make it in Manhattan, where he's struggling to get recognized as a painter and as a maker of objects. And he's just starting to dabble a little bit in photography, just really as a hobby. He met Kiki in a cafe, as everyone seems to have met one another in the 1920s and Paris.  She was being berated by the staff of the restaurant because she wasn't wearing a hat, which was deemed inappropriate, that people would have thought she was a woman for hire, according to what the restaurant manager said. And they were trying to kick her out, and Kiki threatened to boycott. And there was a big, huge scene in Man Ray comes in and tries to sort of save the day in a sense by inviting her to his table. They share a drink, they hit it off and he told her, you know, he thought she would be a great subject to paint, but that he wanted to photograph her, since he was too shy to paint her in real life, in a sense, he wanted to photograph her nude and then paint from those photographs. That was his line, in any case. And she reluctantly, because she didn't really know him. But there was a mutual friend who vouch for him, agreed to pose for him, and they took some amateurish, let's say, shots together. They had a couple sessions, and by the second session they were really drawn to each other physically, and there was a big romantic charge. And they really just hit it off and moved in together. And Man Ray ended up moving to Montparnasse, this neighborhood he had knew nothing about, and Kiki introduced him around. They set up a little home together and a little tiny studio, and Man Ray ended up staying in Paris for 50 years, so for some time during the Second World War, when he was back in America. So three month tour ended up being 50 years, I think, largely thanks to Kiki. This first, one of the first great loves of his life. And somebody that, as you say, he saw as a muse, somebody who inspired him. And that's where a lot of the book is. What I'm trying to get at is this notion of the muse and who's inspiring whom, because they're trying to sort of work things out together. As Man Ray took more interest in photography. Kiki was really the catalyst for that because they had these sessions of photography where they're really making things up as they went along. They tried different poses, they tried costumes, they tried different lighting. Man Ray was starting to earn a living by shooting photographic portraits of acquaintances and artists in Paris, because he saw it was a way that he could support his painting. And it just so happened that that was where his true brilliance lay was in photography. And as I say, I think it's Kiki that really, and Kiki took credit as well for helping him to discover his true calling in that medium. However, just as that's happening, I think that Man Ray, through his own art making, is also inspiring Kiki. And she gets toward doing her own art making in that decade that they roughly decade that they spent together in Paris.

Gary: Like the artists you write about, you try to capture the living essence of Paris in the 1920s. Tell us all about your work in trying to remake the Années Folles. Literally, the crazy years of Paris.

Mark: Well, this is where I thought I was particularly lucky to have stumbled upon Kiki's story, because so much has been written about the 1920s in Paris, and we have this Midnight in Paris version, this very mythologized, romanticized version. And I love that stuff as much as anyone else. But I wanted to get another part of this.  The French people themselves, who often get left behind, especially in this American in Paris, Roaring 1920s and faux narrative. Kiki, as a French woman, offers another way into looking at this scene and this time, and really gives evidence of the kinds of energies and ideas and, movements that people are drawn to. Why they're actually there in Paris in the first place are people like Kiki, who are so different. And I'm talking about people like Hemingway and Fitzgerald and all the rest. In Paris. They meet people like Kiki, who are so different from themselves and have such different experiences. Kiki was really a way into so many different scenes there because she, as I said, she was this huge draw as a cabaret performer. She sang these very traditional French songs that then she put these modern twists on, and it became the big sensation of the 1920s in Paris musically, that people would, would really line up to go see her in this little club called The Jockey. And it was a kind of avant garde, almost surrealist act, you know, this blending of old and new and urban and sophisticated and also rural, character of Kiki de Montparnasse that she created, drawing from her village upbringing. But also mixed with all of this, kind of hip scene that she was in in the 1920s. Paris, it all comes together. And so for me, that was a different way of getting at the crazy years. This is by looking at somebody who's in it and also, in a sense, removed from it.  She's not in that typical American in Paris crowd.  She's not a tourist, right? She lives there. This is where she grew up. And giving evidence of how these neighborhoods, how these scenes take place, is that you have these deeply rooted people who have reason to be there and who are, let's say, you know, to use a word that we use a lot now, authentically living their lives in ways that others from outside deem romantic, deem exciting, and deem worthy of investigation to help them on their own kind of missions, to create art, to create newness. It's a very cosmopolitan, this is the last thing I'll say in a long answer, it's a very cosmopolitan neighborhood, Montparnasse in the 1920s. And that is why it's so much wonderful and new art and writing and music came out of this place. It was, as Marcel Duchamp said, the most international community of artists ever assembled at that point. I'm not saying that Paris in the 1920s was completely devoid of hatred toward outsiders, but it was for that time in the world, one of the most accepting and cosmopolitan places on earth. And all of these people came there from everywhere, from Tokyo, from Eastern Europe, from New York, from rural France, and got together and were in these apartments, in these studios, in these cafes, sharing ideas, sharing their work, collaborating in new ways. And that scene was extremely exciting.

Gary: Since you have touched on it, let me ask. Your book includes a number of famous characters who crossed paths with Kiki and Man Ray. Can you tell us all about these figures and the role they played in Kiki's life and the local art scene?

Mark: So I'm glad you asked that because that lets me get to highlighting Kiki's role within this scene. She was somebody who had developed, as I said, this character of Kiki de Montparnasse, this larger than life, very confident version of herself. She was, in truth, quite a shy person. But on stage and in her various media in which she created the story of herself, she could be ultra confident, ultra sexy, ultra sophisticated, and she figured out that she could tell the story of Kiki de Montparnasse on us in all sorts of different ways. She did it in her writing. She did it in interviews because she became this little celebrity in Paris and was always in the press. She did it on stage through her singing and storytelling. She did it as a painter, and she did it in recorded form as she cut a few records. As she does that she's interacting with all sorts of people. Jean Cocteau, Ernest Hemingway, Sujata Fujita was quite well known as a painter in his time Peggy Guggenheim, Marcel Duchamp, and of course, Man Ray, and including many others that I'm leaving out Djuna Barnes. I mean, the list could go on and on, and everyone who comes into contact with her notices that there's something special about her. She just seems so alive, so open to the possibilities of that era. And so full of wonder and so wanting to learn everything and go everywhere and see everything and meet everyone. And she really did. And all of these people, I'm very lucky as a writer, as a historian, they all left great archival material behind about their interactions with Kiki. It doesn't seem like anyone who met her just jot it off a sentence. It was always pages and pages of what she did and how she acted, what she wore, what she said. And I think they all, each of them took something from her and translate it into their own art making. So she was both this muse, both this person who captured the spirit of the age for the people watching her, as well as somebody who I think inspired through her own art making because she was so free about it. She really she said, all I need in life is an onion, a piece of bread and some red wine, and I'll always figure out a way to get that. And she practiced what she preached. She really never had any money. She just wanted to have enough to get through the day, through the month, and to express herself in some way. She wasn't chasing fame, and I think a lot of these people who were hung up on fame, who were hung up on many, were really jealous of her in a sense, for this freedom and inspired by her. And so, you know, it's no wonder that she drew all of these people toward her. And that's why I just love that she could become this fulcrum through which to tell all of these other stories concurrently.

Gary: Yes, that was one of my favorite quotes from your book, and it's incredible that such a well-known and famous artist could retain perhaps that sense of humility that she took from her relatively obscure upbringing. During this period, the Parisian art scene was caught in the midst of a number of movements in rebellion against everything that came before. What role did Kiki and Man Ray have in this strange world?

Mark: Here again was an opportunity for me to try and get at this very well-known moment in a new way, in that Kiki and Man Ray were both, in their own ways, outsiders to the main currents of what was happening in Paris. Now, while I said, of course they knew everyone and they were at the center of it as artistic practitioners, they were somewhat removed. Man Ray was hanging out with all of these Dadaists and then Surrealists, and there was a lot of infighting, a lot of tension, especially between André Breton, the kind of de facto leader they called him, the pope of this group and all of the other big personalities Louis Aragon, Tristan Tzara, lots of infighting, lots of people going silent on whether they're taking pot shots in their little magazines against each other. Man Ray’s like Switzerland, I say in the book, Man Ray's apart from that, I think because he's an American and also because he's really working primarily as a photographer as the 1920s go on, and all of these other people are painters and writers. And so he kind of has neutral status. So he's always friendly with everyone, but also somewhat removed. And yet, as an American in Paris, he's also removed from the American in Paris crowd. He goes out of his way to avoid the Steins and Fitzgerald's and Hemingway's of the world. He knows them, but he really is in Paris because he wants to hang out with the French and he tries to learn French. And through Kiki is really meeting a lot of French people and has no interest in kind of nostalgic stories for New York, let's say. So that was really interesting to me. And then Kiki is interesting in that she's observing all of this. She's helping to inspire people, but she, really some of it she doesn't really take it all seriously, and I quite like that she has this quote. If she says, well, we hung out with these guys who called themselves Dadaists or Surrealists, and to me I couldn't tell the difference and I didn't know what any of it really meant. She's sort of playfully mocking them. She says to me, they just were a bunch of spoiled kids who were playing at rebellion, and so she could really take the piss out of these people in a sense, because yes, they have these, and that's not to say in any way to denigrate her and say that she's unintelligent, she's highly intelligent, but she just isn't going to go along with all of their highfalutin ideas. Sometimes she is going out of her way to poke holes in their theories. And because, you know, she sees it as in some way false. She just really likes people at the very, very base level. That's what interests her, you know? What are you eating? What are you seeing? How do you walk? And she's observing all of this, those kinds of things, very human level interactions are what interests her most.  That is why she becomes this great observer of  Montparnasse. And it all comes to a head in this 1929 memoir that she writes about Montparnasse, which is the great document to me of the era.

Gary: At the height of her fame, Kiki was named the Queen of Montparnasse and wrote an autobiography with an introduction by none other than legendary American author Ernest Hemingway and artist Shigeru Fujita. Since then, Kiki has largely been forgotten, even as Man Ray remains a celebrated figure in art history. Why is this the case? And feel free to talk more about her autobiography as you are particularly interested in this part of her lasting legacy.

Mark: Well, let's start with her as Queen of Montparnasse, which is this wonderful thing that took place in 1929. Just as the decade is coming to an end, and many are seeing the era, in a sense, coming to an end. A lot of people are losing steam. Some of the Americans are starting to return. There just seems like it's the moment has kind of passed or is starting to pass. They have this mock celebration where, Kiki on stage is crowned as the Queen of Montparnasse and people play it acting almost like her courtiers, and they bow to her.  It's quite funny in a sense, but also really for Kiki, a kind of validation. She really was somebody who always wanted connection with people and to feel like she had a family because her own biological family was so estranged from her. She and her mother fell out quite early over her modeling work, in fact. And of course, she was away from her village and the people that she loved there. In Paris, she finds this chosen family and for her to be Kiki de Montparnasse, literally Kiki, Queen of Montparnasse, but also Kiki of Montparnasse. Kiki from Montparnasse meant a lot to her. Even though it was this silly thing, I think for her it was this great moment in her life where she was truly, truly happy and felt accepted. Now in that same year of 1929, she starts to write these memoirs. She writes about her childhood. She writes about coming to Paris. Tracing the story that I've told here about going from these menial jobs to starting to pose and then starting to make her own way as a singer and as an actor, and she's on film and all the rest. As she does, that actually tells that story. She's also telling the story of this neighborhood, of this community at its height. And that is where I think she really shines. So the book Kiki Souvenirs comes out in French in 1929, self-published a few hundred copies, but it is a huge success. The copy seller instantly and. Many I would say most of the major newspapers give it real, legitimate coverage. It's on the front page, places like Le Figaro, right? A conservative newspaper is really treating this as a serious piece of writing. And what people gravitate to are the sort of earthiness of the prose, the insight into this community and really start to see. Kiki, in the words of, I'm paraphrasing here of the Figaro reviewer, as an ethnographer of Montparnasse, somebody on the inside who can, let's say, report on this tribe and the rituals. Right? And she's very good at sizing people up in a few sentences. She's funny. Uh, the book is only 50 or 60 pages. It also has what makes it this wonderful document. All sorts of portraits of Kiki from the people who captured her in, on celluloid and in, um, ink and, and paint and in all the other mediums. There's paintings of her, there's photographs of Man Ray. And so it becomes this, this kind of audio, this textual and visual document of her life, the story of herself. Now a year after it comes out, this enterprising publisher named Edward Titus, who is the husband of Helena Rubenstein, who has a lot of money from a cosmetics business and has this little printing press. Uh, Titus decides, well, this should be in English. And so he gets it translated by this journeyman translator named Samuel Putnam. But his big coup is to get his friend and Kiki's friend, Ernest Hemingway, to do the introduction. Hemingway only wrote two introductions in his career. He was not somebody particularly generous in that regard. One was for Kiki and one was for a bartender that he really liked in Montparnasse, Jimmy Charters, who also wrote a memoir about this time. So there's something about this era and its characters, I think, that spoke to him. And the introduction is a really interesting document. A lot of it is about Hemingway himself and about how he feels this ambivalent feeling towards Montparnasse in this era that is just passed, which you both seems to love and hate. But when he gets to Kiki and gets to her writing, he really engages with her as a fellow writer with a level of respect that I was really surprised and quite taken by. He brings up and talking about Kiki Virginia Woolf, EE Cummings, Daniel Defoe, and in correspondence that I found from Hemingway to to this guy in the States who's trying to compile a bibliography of his work, he said, you know, I wrote this because I was friends with Kiki, but I wouldn't really have done it unless I admired the writing. And there are parts of it, he said, that I think are really great. And especially he mentioned there are ways that she was looking at Montparnasse. So that was great to have this English translation come out. What happened? And then it seemed like Kiki was primed for this big success in America. What happened was that the initial shipment of the translated editions, which were going to come out with Random House, got seized by the American customs officials and deemed obscene because there were no, there was not any foul language, but there were very frank depictions of sex and frank depictions of drug use and alcohol use. Kiki was a lifetime, you know, heavy user of drugs and alcohol and very frank about her sex life. And so the book that was it never went anywhere. And again, we have Kiki's reaction, which is sort of a shrug of the shoulders, like, it's okay, you know, I did it here in France. My friends got to read it. And that's about all I need success wise. So we could say, okay, she wasn't terribly ambitious and that's why she's been forgotten. That might be part of it. I think, also, there's the usual misogyny of women artists in the 1920th century that we've seen. But with Kiki especially, I think that why she is largely forgotten this, you know, in terms of her art making, has to do with the kind of things that she was putting out. All of it was ephemeral in a sense. You know, her great, her great magic for great charisma was on stage at the cabaret where she would sing and dance and joke. And really, she said she felt like the conductor of a train. She could really hold an audience in her hand and make it go where she wanted. She could pause for effect. She could kind of wink.  She shrugged her shoulders. She did all of these things, these sly movements that really could sell a song. Let's say I have that information from the documentary. Evidence of people seeing her and being struck by her performances. But that's not the kind of thing that you can bottle and sell, right? It's not something that you can auction. So we have her appearances in some films. We have her own paintings, a few, we have some drawings, and we have this book, but really there's not much at the heart of what she did on stage, that that can be remembered. And so I think, you know, that sort of has been lost. Now, what you can of course, bottle and sell is posing for a photograph, which she did, often hundreds and possibly thousands of times with Man Ray and what I wanted to get at with the book was that I saw these pictures, these now iconic pictures of Man Ray that had taken off Kiki, and that I kind of started the whole genesis of the book as collaborations. I came to see them as little pieces of theater. Once I understood that Kiki was this great performer and had such charisma and had such stage presence, I came to see that what she did in front of the camera was as important, I thought. As what Man Ray was doing behind the camera. And so to bring it back full circle to this work, La Viola and Angola, just as my book was coming out, it became the most expensive photograph ever sold at auction at Christie's, fetching for one print more than $12 million. And all of the coverage to every single newspaper that I saw. Framed it in exactly the same way that I had framed it when I first started teaching that image. Man Ray's iconic photograph of nude women sells for record setting price. However, when that photograph first appeared in 1924, in the pages of a little surrealist magazine, the people who saw it were far more likely to think of it as there's our iconic Kiki who has been captured on film by her boyfriend, this photographer Man Ray. And so that was really what I was trying to do with the book as I went along, was to try and see, could we have a more dynamic and more collaborative version of the story of artist and the so-called model photographer and the so-called muse? Uh, could we blur those lines a little bit? And I think the lives of Kiki, Man Ray and how they intersect at this time and place help us to really complicate that story and in new and fun ways.

Gary: The book is Kiki Man Ray Art, Love and Rivalry in 1920s Paris. It is a tour de force that has been getting a lot of praise. Thank you very much for being on the show.

Mark: I thank you so much. It was really my pleasure.

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