I was talking with our history department office manager Dianne a couple of days ago and she mentioned how much she had enjoyed reading a graphic novel from a few years back called Kiki De Montparnasse. She explained to me that the Kiki of the title was actually a woman named Alice Prin who was a model for any number of artists working in Paris in the 1920s. She was especially associated with a surrealist painter and photographer known as Man Ray. I was immediately intrigued.
Critic Hilton Kramer once said that Man Ray was among those artists whose “principal gift seems to consist of a cheerful ability to submit to new aesthetic currents without encountering the least resistance from their own personal culture or beliefs….” That’s not quite a compliment but it’s very perceptive. Ray was notable, Kramer says, “both for the speed and vigor with which he adopted the most radical stylistic innovations, and for the nonetheless rather dim impression his long career has left on modern art as a whole.” Wow.
Such faint praise aside, as a photographer, Man Ray created some striking images, some of which seem to encapsulate Jazz Age Paris as a whole. This is where Kiki comes in. She’s featured in many of his most famous photographs.
She was born in eastern France in 1901 and raised by her grandmother. Shortly before the outbreak of WWI she moved to Paris to find work. She worked in bakeries, factories, and print shops. Then she began to be a model for sculptors.
In the fall of 1921, she met an American artist named Emmanuel Radnitsky—who went by the name Man Ray—and who’d only been in Paris since July. The two became constant companions for the next 9 years. The more he turned to photography for his art, the more central she became to his visions. She was his muse. He featured her in his experimental films and in his most striking photographs. In 1924, he photographed her from behind sitting up straight, her back bare to the waist. After the photo was developed, he painted two holes on it, on her back, like those on a violin and then rephotographed the photo. It’s one of the most famous pieces of visual art from the 1920s and a hallmark of surrealism. If you’re keeping score, in 2022 an original print of the image set a record for the most expensive photograph when it sold for $12.4 million.
A few years ago, we talked about a painter named Dora Maar who became one of Picasso’s numerous muses. It’s good to know and remember the names of people who are behind the stories. Thanks, Dianne.
