ArtMuse ArtTalks: Host Grace Anna Interviews Author Mark Braude

As part of our "ArtMuse ArtTalks" series, host Grace Anna interviews author Mark Braude about about his biography on Kiki de Montparnasse, Kiki Man Ray: Art, Love and Rivalry in 1920’s Paris.

Throughout the course of the interview, Grace Anna asks Mark about Kiki’s life, what inspired him to write his biography on her, Kiki's relationship with Man Ray, Kiki’s success as an artist across many mediums, and finally, the importance of honoring Kiki’s legacy today.

If you have not yet listened to ArtMuse’s Two Part Episode on Kiki de Montparnasse, which deep dives into Kiki’s life, we encourage you to listen as an accompanying episode to this interview.

Listen to this special bonus episode of ArtMuse:

This episode is produced by Kula Production Company.

Kiki Man Ray: Art, Love and Rivalry in 1920’s Paris can be ordered online HERE.

Mark Braude is the author of three non-fiction books, Kiki Man Ray being his third. He has been a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar, a visiting fellow at the American Library in Paris, and a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University. He is currently based in Vancouver, Canada, where he lives with his family.

Kiki de Montparnasse was an artist’s model, performer, painter, actress, and memoirist active in Paris during the roaring twenties. Over her lifetime Kiki became one of the most prolific art models in the history of western art, modeling for many of the best painters of her day, as well as the photographer Man Ray, with whom she shared an eight-year long relationship with. Over the course of their affair, Man Ray took hundreds of photographs of Kiki. Kiki played an integral role in the creation of each of these works, co-collaborating on them with Man Ray, despite receiving no official credit.

But Kiki was far more than just Man Ray’s muse. She was also an artist in her own right, and her creativity took many forms. Kiki was an accomplished painter, cabaret performer, and published her own autobiography when she was only twenty-eight years old. Though Kiki de Montparnasse fell into relative obscurity after her death, she deserves to be remembered as the visionary and independent woman she was; a woman who inspired masterpieces by the greatest artists of her age, who painted with unrestrained expression and sang with bravado, whose memoir gained international recognition, and whose free spirit came to symbolize an entire era of European history. 

INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT

Hi listeners, host Grace Anna here. I am thrilled to share a special episode from our ArtMuse ArtTalks series, in which I am joined by the author Mark Braude, who wrote Kiki Man Ray: Art, Love and Rivalry in 1920’s Paris, a gorgeously written biography on the fabulous Kiki de Montparnasse. Throughout the course of the interview, I ask Mark about Kiki’s life, what inspired him to write his biography on her, her relationship with Man Ray, Kiki’s success as an artist across many mediums, and finally, the importance of honoring Kiki’s legacy today.

If you have not yet listened to ArtMuse’s Two Part Episode on Kiki de Montparnasse, which deep dives into Kiki’s life, I encourage you to listen as an accompanying episode to this interview. You can find ArtMuse’s episode on Kiki de Montparnasse by searching for ArtMuse on all streaming platforms, as well as on our website: www.artmusepodcast.com.

For those who haven’t yet listened to our episode on Kiki de Montparnase, Kiki was an artist’s model, performer, painter, actress, and memoirist active in Paris during the roaring twenties. Over her lifetime Kiki became one of the most prolific art models in the history of Western art, modeling for many of the best painters of her day, as well as the photographer Man Ray, with whom she shared an eight-year long relationship. Over the course of their affair, Man Ray took hundreds of photographs of Kiki. Kiki played an integral role in the creation of each of these works, co-collaborating on them with Man Ray, despite receiving no official credit.

But Kiki was far more than just Man Ray’s muse. She was also an artist in her own right, and her creativity took many forms. Kiki was an accomplished painter, cabaret performer, and published her own autobiography when she was only twenty-eight years old. Though Kiki de Montparnasse fell into relative obscurity after her death, she deserves to be remembered as the visionary and independent woman she was; a woman who inspired masterpieces by the greatest artists of her age, who painted with unrestrained expression and sang with bravado, whose memoir gained international recognition, and whose free spirit came to symbolize an entire era of European history. 

Mark Braude’s wonderful biography on Kiki is an important contributor to honoring Kiki’s legacy and getting her story out into the world. Mark Braude is the author of three non-fiction books, Kiki Man Ray being his third. He has been a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar, a visiting fellow at the American Library in Paris, and a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University. He is currently based in Vancouver, Canada, where he lives with his family.

So without further ado, let’s dive into my conversation with the author, Mark Braude.

Grace Anna: Hi listeners, host Grace Anna here. Today I am joined by author Mark Braude to discuss his wonderful biography, Kiki Man Ray: Art, Love, and Rivalry in 1920’s Paris, which tells the life story of the fabulous Kiki de Montparnasse. For any new listeners, if you have not yet listened to ArtMuse’s two part episode on Kiki de Montparnasse, which not only deep dives into her life but quotes Mark’s eloquent writing throughout, both Part One and Part Two, then I encourage you to take a listen as an accompanying episode to this interview.

Mark, thank you so much for being with me here today. I have read and very much loved Kiki Man Ray and I relied on it heavily in my research. But for those listening who have not yet read your book, could you introduce us to Kiki Man Ray, and tell us a little bit about who Kiki de Montparnasse was?

Mark: Sure. Thank you and thanks for having me. I've been looking forward to it. I guess the best way to do that would be to start with the origin of the whole book, which is really the story of this one photograph, is really how I got into the whole thing, which was, if I describe it, it might ring some bells. It's the picture of a woman whose nude torso and back is marked up with the f holes of a violin so that she looks like an instrument and her head is turned to profile and she has a kind of mischievous smile. The title is Le Violon D’Ingres, Ingres’s violin. It was made in 1924 and credited to Man Ray.

And I'd say about nine/ten years ago I was teaching a series of courses in Art History and in the history of Paris. And I would use that picture when I was talking about the 20’s, which was always my favorite era; Americans in Paris, Surrealism, all that kind of stuff. And I would use it to talk about Surrealism. I would use it to talk about Man Ray. And about the woman in the picture, I would say her name was Kiki de Montparnasse, and she was known as the top artist model in Paris in the 20’s, and was the lover of Man Ray when this image was made. And that's all I said really in these classes because that's all I knew. And it just sort of got to bothering me after a few iterations of giving that lecture of like, well, I don't know more about her. And just for the sake of a better lecture and for the sake of my own education, I wanted to dig in a little. 

And so I just tried to find as much as I could about Kiki de Montparnasse. And as soon as I did, I mean, I'm talking maybe two or three days of digging, I was like, “this is a book…this life is so fascinating”. And the story I had and that most people had was completely backwards. And by which I mean, really when that picture was made, the few people who saw it in Paris in the 20’s, 1924 specifically, among the Surrealists in this little magazine where it was originally printed, would've said, “well, that's our iconic Kiki de Montparnasse, the artist that we know well. And she's been caught on film by her boyfriend, this guy Man Ray, this American who's just starting out here in Paris”. And, and so, you know, I wanted to get to the bottom of why had that story kind of been told backwards and who she was.

With Kiki, it turned out, yes she was indeed this amazing model who everyone, not everyone but you know the major artists of that era and in that little space called Montparnasse, names that might not be household names these days, but were big at the time. Chaim Soutine, Tsuguharu Foujita, possibly Modigliani- she might have posed for. They all wanted to capture her in their various media. And she had this really unique look and this really unique energy. I guess the closest thing you could compare it to was the early punks in the 70’s and the Lower East Side and in London. She was really out of her era in a sense. She had the bob before anybody. And so, that is true, she was this model, right? But what I got to learn, which was far more interesting to me, was that she was also an artist in many different forms. Most notably as a cabaret singer. In the mid 20's, she starts to sing at a little club called The Jockey in Montparnasse, and really becomes this local celebrity through her performances, and also a painter, and an illustrator. We can get into each of these as we go. And, as an actress, an actor, and finally a writer, which was really when I knew this would be a book, is when I found that she was a writer and a memoirist and everybody in this era really wrote about it, but she wrote about it quite beautifully. And so, I had her view, I had Man Ray's view, and I had this world.. and so that's sort of where the book comes from.

Grace Anna: Lovely introduction. I think you make such an important point off the bat, which is: we all know Man Ray now. Of course, we all know Modigliani, who we think painted Kiki. There is a portrait that looks very much like Kiki, although it hasn't been confirmed with certainty. But that Kiki actually was more famous than Man Ray at the time of them working together. She was, like you said, a performer. She was a painter who had sold out exhibitions. She was an actress, an extra in a few films as well as in Man Ray's film. And another film called Ballet Mecanique, which came out around that time. So she was this multifaceted creative and spirited woman who was actually more well known than Man Ray at the time and really should be credited for jump starting his career. So I think you make a very, very good point. And I think that anecdote of you, like most people, have seen these photographs of Kiki, perhaps these portraits of Kiki, but history has sort of overlooked her importance as an individual and as a creative, and as an artist in her own right.

Before we dive into her relationship with Man Ray, I really loved this quote from your book and it poses some questions that I hope you can answer but it sort of gets at the miraculousness of Kiki's story that this girl, born poor in the countryside of France came to really embody and represent an entire era of European history. And so I really just think it's so beautifully written. I'm gonna read this quote and have you answer your own questions for us today. So your quote reads: “How did it happen that this young woman, born poor, obscure, and illegitimate, who in her brief life barely made enough to eat, by singing old songs for tips, posing for the art of others, selling sketches to fellow drinkers spied from her barstool- how did it happen that this young woman should be the one to capture the spirit of her age like no one else, and by doing nothing more than making a performance of herself?”. 

So if you could answer some of those questions? How did Kiki de Montparnasse become Kiki de Montparnasse?

Mark: That's a great way of posing the question, turning it on me, because now I'm like “oh gosh, that is a tough question to answer!”. And in a sense, and that’s the project of the book, of course. The brief way of getting into that, because there's a lot there to talk about is…Yes, her background is modest. She is born in a little village called Châtillon-sur-Seine. And it's 1901. And at that point to be born that far from Paris, even if it's a few hundred miles, is like a whole other world. I mean, it's really like this different universe with its own customs. People when she got to Paris were really struck by her accent, the way she rolled her r’s. Her name by the way was Alice Prin. That's her birth name. And yes, she didn't know her father. Her mother was a teenager when she had her and was sent to Paris to sort of escape the local shame in the village. And then Kiki was raised by a grandmother and went to rejoin her and worked a series of menial labor jobs as a teenager, really quite young, and then got to Montparnasse. 

And I think that question of- how did she do it? What is it about her that made her sort of embody this spirit of the age is multifaceted. One, is that she sort of invented herself, right? So she takes the name Kiki, which is sort of just a nickname. Eventually it becomes Kiki de Montparnasse, this idea that she's almost royalty, but also Kiki of Montparnasse. This is the place that made her, this is her little dutchie, if you will, her territory. And she invents this character, which she does on stage at first, and then it becomes something that people want to capture on screen. Also, through her posing, also through interviews- she was kind of a journalist dream, she spoke in headlines. She really got, you know, great, quotable quotes. And through her writing and through her painting, she has this self invented character of Kiki de Montparnasse, who is both a kind of a country bumpkin, she plays up the kind of  “farm girl’ side of her upbringing, and uses these really outdated old jokes and aphorisms. And then at the same time, she's this very hypersexual, hyper confident Parisian sophisticate. Which, in truth, she was quite shy and almost quite conservative in her way. But on stage she's just really fierce, you know? And she's got these two things playing at once.

And she sings these old folk songs, right? But she reinvents them. She just through her mannerisms, her motions, kind of ironic winks and gestures. She vamps it up, I guess is the way to say it. And people really can't get enough of it among the avant-garde of Paris because everyone's trying to do all this new stuff, you know, hyper modern, and she's this sort of throwback, also very anarchic and an avant-garde in her own right. And she's seeing what's going around too with all the Surrealists and channeling all that onto the stage. And I think in that way, that idea of having this character that you become and then whose story you tell through various means on stage, on film, in your paintings ... .Because the paintings are about her childhood. The paintings are about her village, and about her friends around her. And then in her writing where she kind of knows everyone and she's talking about all the people she knows and herself. 

People when they read my book often made the jump to- this is a reality star, but a century ago. And in a sense that's, you know, somewhat clumsy. But I kind of also make the same point in implicit ways, I think it's not totally wrong, in that she's telling this saga of herself that you follow for its twists and turns and it's supposed to be real. It's like the authentic Kiki, but of course it's also a performance. But then she becomes the performance. So that's also kind of its own authenticity. She becomes this character of Kiki de Montparnasse. She can't escape it. 

And so, where I think she sort of captures the spirit of the 20’s is she gets at this freewheeling, right? All the cliches we know about the Roaring Twenties, you know, it’s fun, and it’s all kind of exciting and new and at the same time, there is this pain in the background, right? Everyone's recovering from the trauma of war, the trauma of the flu, which killed more people than the war. And Kiki's own trauma growing up informs her quest to sort of live really as freely as she can. She lived like she was on fire in a sense, you know, she's really, really going for it. And that, you know, I think captures the spirit. 

And then you talk about this idea of fame, right? And I was just thinking back as you said that too, there's this Smith's lyric “fame, fame, fickle fame. It will play hideous tricks with your brain”. And it's this weird thing of how fickle fame can be. She was famous among her group at that time. But what did it even mean? You know, this was just like a few hundred people and she didn't really leave much of a body of work. So much of it was in the moment and you had to be there in this little theater, or in this little nightclub to see or sing or there's a handful of paintings or there's the book, but there's not much more. So there's an effervescence to her that I think also is fitting with this time. 

Grace Anna: Thank you for that. To get on that last point, I have another beautiful quote from your book, that just talks about how hard it is today to have these tangible traces of her because her art was so of the moment, and you say, “Kiki's best work was her most ephemeral. A perfectly timed pause that makes everyone in a nightclub go still isn't something you could trademark or bottle. You can't sell a dance at auction. You can't sell a pose.” And it's really true that a lot of her impact was these things you had to experience in the moment at that time. And those people are so lucky to have experienced her.

Grace Anna: Could you describe, because I think it's really important to understand Kiki, is to also understand this world of Montparnasse. So can you bring us into this world and paint a picture of what Montparnasse was like as Kiki was entering it in the early 1920’s?

Mark: Sure. And it might in the end tie back to that quote. So Montparnasse is this place that has been really well documented. Paris in the 20’s…I love it. It, you know, feels glamorous. And there's Fitzgerald and Hemingway and Gertrude Stein and all that. What I liked about Kiki's story was that we're now getting at the French influence in this place. You know, to me as a North American, the story had come to me largely as Americans in Paris and some Canadians, and the Brits. And you know, you forget in a sense that the reason they're there is because it's France and because of the French, right?

Paris was the most welcoming place on earth in the 20’s due to needing to rebuild after the war and they welcomed more immigrants than any other place, which is not to say it was without xenophobia and racism and all the rest, but I would argue that was the most cosmopolitan society at the time. And that it's not coincidental that this was also a place of great innovation and cultural change. And I think what that is, is that people are getting into this space with people who have different backgrounds who don't look like them, who have different ideas. Eastern European Jews are coming. African Americans who have stayed after the war there. There's a big gay and lesbian population. You know, it's really a mix of a lot of people who might feel unwelcome where they were born and have come here and start to feel a kind of a freedom that they can’t at home, which is a lovely thing. 

And I think, it is exciting to remember, and this was something that I kind of rediscovered as I did the research, was that these are just people in their twenties really. Some of them might be, you know,  just past 30. They're really young and they're just sort of making it up as they go along. All these household names, Jean Cocteau or Gertrude Stein, well maybe leave Stein out of it, but Cocteau and Hemingway and all the rest, Brancusi. People who are, you know, cottage industries in a way, or have their names on the back of cars like Picasso, they're just going to house parties, visiting each other's studios, hanging out at bars, cafes, and learning from one another. And nobody's thinking like, I'm gonna be, you know, a hundred years from now, people are gonna pay millions of dollars for my work. It's just like, how do I survive the next month? I'd like to get well-known. I'd like commissions, I'd like to keep working. But let's see what we can learn from one another. So Man Ray, for instance, is going into Brancusi’s studio to learn about sculpting and he's teaching Brancusi about photography and they're both kind of figuring things out. And I think that kind of mixing of influence, and Kiki's a part of that too, is really cool. It's just sort of like anarchy in a sense, and it just becomes this scene, right?

I don't know if I sound like an old fuddyduddy, but I don't know that we capture that in the same way these days when there's not bodies in a room mixing. I've seen stuff online about the third space, which I think is really cool. That idea of these places that are not work or home where we can actually get together and socialize, and exchange ideas, and I think that's lovely. I think that great things come out of those spaces.

Grace Anna: Yeah, absolutely. I agree. I think it was a very special time and while it's great, there may be some aspects of that now. I think we've also come so far from that kind of environment and Montparnasse really being this safe space for all these different people to come and be themselves and be weird and feel accepted. It was a brewing pot for this creativity and really, most of the biggest names in Art History, in 20th Century Art History, came through Montparnasse and so it is really remarkable. And then to think that Kiki was this Queen of Montparnasse and they all knew her and they all were inspired by her is so fascinating.

So speaking of Americans coming to Paris and coming to Montparnasse, can you tell us a little bit about Man Ray and his relationship with Kiki, both their romantic and working relationship, and the impact she had on his career?

Mark: Yeah, so the book is called Kiki Man Ray, and although Kiki kind of runs away with it, and steals the show, he's a significant part of the story and he's a significant part of her life and vice versa. And so I wanted as much as possible through the archives, to get to times when they were really together and bouncing off one another. And I was quite lucky because there's lots of letters and there's lots of memoirs from other people and we have the photographs and so I was really able to get at the two of them, which I think is the heart of the story. 

He's an interesting guy. He was born Emmanuel Radnitzky in 1890, I believe in Philly, and then grows up in Brooklyn. And changes his name to first Emmanuel Ray from Radnitzky,. just a kind of American, you know, shorthand, and also had, I think, some complicated relationship with his Jewish roots. And then that becomes Manny Ray and then Man Ray. And he was actually married at the time that he came to Paris for the first time, I think it's ‘21. So he's about 30, 31. He has a wife at home, but they’re sort of estranged. And his idea was to go to Montparnasse to meet some of the Dadaist writers and painters and artists who he knew. So Tristan Tzara was the big one. Duchamp, he knew well. And he was gonna go to the museums and really trying to learn from the Masters, the so-called Masters, and then go back to New York where he was trying to make it as a painter mostly, as this kind of Cubist inspired painter and Dadaist. But thinking of that Duchamp idea of the idea being more important in a sense than the medium, he wanted to make work that would really bounce around in your brain after you saw it, that was really his goal. And he is experimenting with photography, and has this camera with him. 

And then he meets Kiki in the cafe, as most people met one another. And there's this spark. And they started out, you know, with the idea that she would pose for him for a photograph that he would then paint from. He said she was too beautiful to paint directly, or I think that was his line. But it pretty soon becomes this romantic thing. I think they're in bed by the second session. And then they shared their lives together for eight or nine years in the 20’s. He never goes back to America. I mean, with the exception of in the second World War, he's really in Paris for like fifty years. Gets a divorce and starts afresh in Paris. And I think that Kiki really helped him to learn his craft of photography, which he was reluctant to do in a sense. He always saw himself as a painter and a maker of objects first and foremost. And that photography was something like he did to pay the bills because he was really good as a portraitist. And Kiki helped him, I think with some intros. He got to know everybody. Everybody led to somebody else. And he had all these great people sit for him. And his work is great. I mean, I'm not trying to denigrate Man Ray's work, in various forms of his amazing, his films are lovely. 

But I think what I'm trying to get at with the relationship- it was messy, volatile, you know, sometimes violent. I think they brought out the best and the worst in one another. But that when it comes to looking at these images, these Man Ray images, especially these iconic photographs of Kiki, it helps, it helped me, and it hope, it helps the reader to understand that once you see her as someone who really confident on stage, who really knows how to play a part, that you can now look at these pictures as little pieces of theater, that have been caught on camera. And so the question is a little bit more interesting. Is this just a Man Ray picture of a possibly interchangeable model? Which is the way that it kind of gets reported and it's the way that, you know, Christie's or Sotheby's would pitch it when they're trying to sell these things? Or is there some possibility that this is a bit more of a collaboration? Is there something a little fuzzy around the edges of who is the artist and who is the model or the muse, so to speak? And can that open up some different discussions about how we think about art in general?

Grace Anna: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, her name is not in the title of any of the photographs that she's in. You know, you mentioned Le Violon D'Ingres and then there's Blanche e Noir, where she's modeled next to the African mask. At ArtMuse, we really do try to put forth the idea that the muse is a co-collaborator, but I think there, there are obviously stronger examples than others, and I think Kiki de Montparnasse is a very strong example of someone who was absolutely a co-collaborator on these works and in fact, other artists, which I found so interesting in your book, other artists did credit her as co-collaborators. Tsuguharu Foujita says…I think the quote is, “I could not say for sure who among the two of us was its author” about his portrait of Kiki. 

And then of course, and this is something we can get into, is Djuna Barnes' study on models and how Kiki is this example of this model that's pushing the boundaries and actually: Who is more important, the model or the artist? Especially if one model is inspiring multiple different artists. So I completely agree. It's such an injustice that Kiki is not credited more for not just jump-starting Man Ray's career as a photographer, but in the actual photographs themselves as a performer. I mean, if you look at the photograph of her next to the African mask, it is unbelievable what she's able to do with her face to really mimic and really look like this African mask. And, you know, that is not to say Man Ray is not a genius behind the lens. His use of light and shadow is brilliant, but certainly they were co-collaborations. 

Do you, do you wanna speak a little bit about Djuna Barnes and maybe even to preface that as well, you know we talk a lot about on the show, how hard it was to be an artist's model. So maybe starting with, how hard it was to be an artist's model. We know that Kiki's own mother disowned her when she found out that Kiki was an artist model, and then how Kiki transformed being an artist's model, which Djuna Barnes credits her with, and how that does make her a co-collaborator on these works of art?

Mark: Yeah. And I should start by kind of apologizing for really preaching to the choir. Of course you, you know, all these things that I'm bringing up because that's really the heart of the project and the podcast.

Grace Anna: Well, we love talking about it, and I think it’s so important.

Mark: Great, and it's like, listen, I have. A PhD in history and visual culture. I taught this stuff at Stanford and I was doing the exact thing that, you know, this is the point, that I had the story wrong. And recently, Christie’s sold a copy of a print of Le Violon D’Ingres. This image that we opened the discussion with, and it was a record setting sale. I think it was like 12 million something. And when it got reported, The Wall Street Journal I think was the one to first report it, the headline was something like “Man Ray’s iconic image of a nude woman sells for 12 mil”. And then in paragraph three, you get Kiki's name and it's just model or model/muse. And as I said, I can't really fault the journal's reporting because it's the same story I know too you know, before really digging in. I think there's countless stories like this, of people who have been overlooked.

But you're absolutely right, her whole story starts with the idea of what it means to be an artist model, and it's very much a commercial enterprise. There is an exchange. People came to Paris from all over because there were great schools. And then after the very stiff academic schools opened, there were then more rebellious schools, and smaller schools. And so there are all these little art institutes, most of them on the left bank. And Montparnasse is a place that has this industrial working class background to it. And so there are these big industrial lots that get converted into gallery spaces, and into academies. You get the cafes pop up to cater to the people who are coming from all over. And so you have this scene, and within this scene there are artists, most of them male, not all of them, are looking for models, most of them women. 

And there was a sort of market where this happened at the Académie Colarossi, and most of the models were Italian because in France it was deemed very low class, I guess would be the word, to be an artist’s model. It was kind of a shameful job. And so there was this idea of like the outsiders will do it, the Italians. And in Italy there was this very deep respect for modeling in a sense, because it had been of their own art history. And then with the war, the first World War, a lot of the Italians are deported as enemy aliens. So the idea shifts a little bit.

And Kiki walks into this world, and it’s now become, by the end of the war, much less formal. This exchange happens of artists meeting models and artist’s models meeting artists at the cafes and one in particular the Rotonde, which is still there and worth a visit. And you have to get into the back room of the Rotonde, which is where everyone hangs out. And you do that by being charming, by being beautiful, by being exciting. There's a sort of gatekeeping that happens. And Kiki at first is really a misfit among these misfits. She's unkempt. She's a bit odd. I mean, she really was out of time and place in her own way. But I think she was funny and she would sit on the bar stool and draw people and kind of shove the picture in their face and be like, that'll be five bucks or whatever the equivalent was in Franks. And people were kind of shamed into paying her for their portrait. And she would tell jokes and she had these stories, and then eventually she sort of wore the gatekeepers down and got into the back room and there's Modigliani and there's all the rest, and Chaim Soutine and Moise Kisling and it all kind of starts from there, this idea of that there's a competition in a sense of like, who can find the most visually exciting material, which happens to be a human being. But it's very much that idea of- I have something, if I can be the one to paint Kiki. And then when it comes to her striking up her relationship with Man Ray, there's a jealousy there. And I think that he was adamant after a while together that she would stop posing for other people. I think both out of romantic jealousy and also very much a professional self-interest, of- this is my material in a sense.

Grace Anna: Yeah. I think the mention of jealousy in their relationships is really important. Unfortunately it seems that the jealousy went beyond her modeling for other artists. It even went as far as her own success as a painter in her own right, and as a performer, and as a beloved member of this community. He really seemed to struggle with her success and this jealousy, it really seemed to be what broke their relationship in the end.

Why do you think Man Ray was so threatened by Kiki's success? And I guess as a follow up, did Man Ray ever credit Kiki as a co-collaborator, as other artists did? Or was part of that jealousy his inability to do so?

Mark: It's a thorny issue. The sort of generous way of looking at it is that Man Ray encouraged her, appreciated her, and was really in awe of her talent. I think there is some of that. I think that he, not so much when she got onto the visual side, I think what he saw as his territory, but I think as a performer, I think he was genuinely trying to encourage her to do that. And then when it got too big, he was like, no you should be at home with me. And they did fall into these very rigid roles in their relationship where she was cooking and cleaning and menu planning and entertaining guests. And he was working. And that he saw her art making as a hobby in a sense. And so he's encouraging it, but within a certain definition of how he wants it to be. 

Where the jealousy comes in, it's interesting, it's a complicated kind of jealousy in that I think his idea was in art, he was going to be free. The role of the artist, the avant-garde artist, is to be free from everything: societal norms, repressions, family, all that stuff. But he was also really ambitious and really commercially ambitious, which is not, you know, I'm not judging him. That's, that's a part of life, right? And he was very commercially successful. Kiki, on the other hand, wasn't, at least from what I saw from her own writing and what people said about her, wasn't really thinking…she wanted to express herself. She had these things she wanted to get across. And she had this art inside of her. She wanted to communicate. She wanted to tell the truth about herself. She wanted to tell lies about herself. She wanted to entertain, she wanted to connect, she wanted to be something that she couldn't be in her daily life. Was she trying to make an intellectual argument about the history of art and her place within it and posterity and stuff like that? I don't have records of that. I think she was much more of the moment, which is not to say she was dumb in any way. That's just her version of making art was much more about the pleasure of it, I think. 

And her approach to money was, you know, she has this quote, “All I need is an onion, a piece of bread, a glass of wine.I can usually find somebody to get that for me and I'm fine”. And she talked the talk, and she walked the walk. That's how she lived. She just in the moment, of the moment, you know, pay my rent, eat my food, get some wine, and I'm fine. Which is a tough way to live for 51 years, and eventually it caught up with her. She drank hard and she did a lot of drugs and it was a fast life, but she truly did. It wasn't, she wasn't putting on airs. That's just how she chose to live. 

And I think Man Ray sensed that early on, like, this is a different kind of freedom that I will never attain because I have different wants and needs out of my life. And so I think it drove him crazy. I think that's where a lot of the grit of this, you know, the book is called “Art, Love and Rivalry in 1920s, Paris” and that rivalry is a key version of so-called muse and artist relationship, where maybe we haven't seen as in depth in that idea of like, it's really, the fact that she drives him crazy I think is a spark. And why a lot of these images are still so alive a hundred years later is that there's something going on there, there's this dance between the two of them, and I think it's hard to define and hard to capture, but I think it's there somewhere as this really unsteady ground between the two of them in that little space where they're making these images. So there's a lot going on.

Grace Anna: Yeah. I thought it was so brilliant how you made that point just now and also in the book, that part of her being a muse to him was not just modeling for his photographs, but her spirit. It was so free and he knew he could never be as free as her, that that was actually part of her inspiration to him in that kind of rivalry sense. Not just her talent, but also this freedom with which she lived her life.

Grace Anna: Could we talk a little bit about Kiki's own work, and in that vein, how multi-talented she was? I mean, it's hard to keep track of all the things that she did. I think the umbrella that you use in the book that I think is absolutely right is this umbrella of storytelling. At the end of the day, she was a storyteller. Whether it was through her paintings or whether it was through her songs or her biography/memoirs. So can you tell us a bit about Kiki as an artist and all these different arenas that she explored? And also I'd love to hear if you have some favorite works of Kiki's, some favorite paintings of hers, I guess, are the most tangible things we can discuss?

Mark:  She would start with this illustrating work very informally at the cafes where she would just kind of draw people and she made drawings of her childhood and I think from an early age she was sort of self-romanticizing and self-inventing in this visual form. And eventually in the 20’s she had some time. And I think this is a very key thing to remember, is that she had some free time and she had a little bit of stability because of what she had been earning as a singer and because of Man Ray's earnings. And Man Ray was away on a job in the south of France and she had the summer to herself. And what she did with that summer was to paint and because she finally, you know, had some peace and quiet. And the paintings…I really like them. They're not for everyone. I find the colors really beautiful and the lines really simple and nice.

There was a guy named Henri Pierre Roché who was a really well regarded art dealer. He also wrote the book that became the movie, Jules e Jim, the Truffaut movie, out of his memoirs of Montparnasse in the 20’s. But he became a serious dealer. He sold some Picasso’s and he sold the Rousseau. And he had a great eye and he legitimately bought Kiki's work and encouraged it and arranged gallery shows for her and said- these are like Matisse’s. He likened her to Matisse. And I don't know that I'm making the point in the book that she was this great painter who should be on the walls of MoMA but I think there's something to the paintings. I think she's putting something out there that was in the air at the time of: experimenting with color and line, and also, as you said, the storytelling and this idea of: here are my friends, here's my village, here are the people I love. There's a lot of love and joy in the paintings. 

There's one I think it's just called Le Gitans, which is like the gypsies, or the caravan, aroma people. And it's just this very pastoral scene and you have the caravan people lying in the grass and it's really great blues and yellows and greens. So that would be my favorite. I think some of them are reprinted in the book, and I think also with just a bit of Googling, you should be able to find a few of them and make your own call. But yeah, that's where the visual side is. 

And then the last thing I would also want to add is that, as a writer, she has this little thin memoir that comes out in ‘29 or ‘30. It’s her autobiography and she’s not even 30 years old when it comes out. And it really makes front page news in Paris because she's such a personality and it's really sharp. She has some great lines about herself, about her upbringing, about her friends. And then when the English edition comes out the next year also in Paris, and these are just small run things, Hemingway writes the introduction and he's taking it very seriously. He's bringing up Virginia Wolf and Daniel Defoe and he only did that for one other writer, in terms of writing an intro, for this bartender in Montparnasse who also wrote a memoir, so I think he was into it if you weren't a professional writer, he was a little bit more generous in giving the intros, but he's not exactly the most giving person when it came to those kinds of things. So it’s quite remarkable. And the intro to Kiki’s memoirs is a fun little document to dig into, too.

Grace Anna: Thank you. I know, I love it. I think he says something like- yes, you can translate the French to English, but you can't translate Kiki. So I think he even says in the English version introduction that you really should read this in French.

Mark: Yes, he totally disses the translator. He’s like, this guy didn't really do a great job. But then on the other hand  it's pretty hard to do it because of who she is. It’s pretty funny to have the intro about diss the like book you're about to read.

Grace Anna: Yeah, I know, I really love that. 

And I think it's interesting because the book comes out sort of just at the cusp of this big change in history and this big change in Kiki's life when the 20’s come to an end, the Great Depression starts, this world that's so colorful and so full of life and freedom starts to literally shut down before their eyes. And, Kiki herself really struggles the rest of her life. She never, again, reaches that sense of stardom and fame and celebrity. And, as you said a little while back, she eventually succumbs to her alcoholism and drug use. 

And I think a lot also has to do, and you did mention this before as well, this divide between these two, Kiki’s: this performative Kiki and this very shy, withdrawn Kiki. I really sensed that in the end, it wasn't just this turn of the decade and this change in time. It was really that battle within her that kind of brought her down as well. 

So, one, could you talk about these two different sides of Kiki and how this contributed in the end to her downfall? And can also just speak to, just as all of her art is ephemeral, this time was also ephemeral and how this time period didn't last very long and with it, Kiki's own downfall followed?

Mark: So to start with Kiki herself, she does fit into that mold that we've seen sometimes with performers either in works of fiction, or reality, you know, looking at lives of people who are public figures, of that idea, of that divide and disconnect between the personal and the private. She was somebody that I think probably today, we would say, has really high social anxiety. She didn't love going to places where there were people she didn't know. And that's part of the reason she just was this Montparnasse fixture. She makes this joke in her book: "My friends tried to drag me across the river to the right bank, but I'm a patriot, I stay where I know and I'll never leave Montparnasse”. And she really liked her places that made her comfortable and friends that she knew and trusted. 

And yet at the same time when she got on stage or in front of a camera, and we have this from her own letters and her own writing, she was hyper confident. You know, she was too nervous to get on stage for the first time. It was an open mic kind of situation. Her friends sort of egged her on. She had to drink a lot. She got on stage and she sang, and it kind of blew everyone away. Not that her voice was so amazing, but it's more about her presence. That's the other thing to remember. There are a few recordings of her that also people dig up with a little bit of Googling, a couple of records she made in the 30’s. But she said: “I feel like the conductor of a train, when I'm on stage, I can take people where I want them to go. I can draw them out. I look at them, I make stories about them in my head, and I play off the energy that the crowd gives me and then I give it back”. And it's really like an iterative process that I think a lot of the great performers have that can sort of read the moment, read the crowd, so it's not like she's a nervous wreck on stage. 

But I think the idea, at a certain point of fame, even if it's hyperlocal, and when it's tied to this idea of a persona, people want the persona, right? And so a lot of it, she struggled with men, kind of groping her as she got off stage, or just assuming that she was sexually available because she put out that sort of femme fatale vamp personality on stage and sort of having to physically fight them off I think was a struggle. And then that idea that it gets to be a grind, right? She's starting to play all over town. She does eventually get to Berlin to play and for her it was alcohol and I think, cocaine. And that's tough to maintain as you age. 

And then that ties into the era. And the 20’s are so interesting because as a historian, you're taught that the dumbest thing we do as humans is to categorize, not the dumbest thing ever, but one of the silly things we do as humans is to categorize things in these decades as if it's like January 1st, 2010 the world changes and then December 31st 2019, it's totally different. We like dates and we need some sort of sense of order, but it so happens that in the 20’s it really is this perfect dovetailing. The Wall Street crash happens October ‘29. It doesn't hit France for a few years, but there is that shift of that we’ve kind of run outta gas, right? 

Like you're dancing on that volcano, its edge, for so many years at such a pace because of the war, right? Because of the reaction: we survived this, we have survivor's guilt. We, or the people who didn't serve, feel guilty or whatever it is. Or we did serve and now we're coming out of the trenches. You know, one out of four people that we used to know is gone. Like all these things, all this pain, right? Drives this huge energy and wildness and searching for meaning, for order, for disorder. And again, how long can that last? So that dovetailing with the idea of the financial crisis then exposing a lot of the inherent weakness of the markets in the finances in the 20’s coming to the fore, and then with that comes a lot of dark stuff in the 30’s, a lot of the simmering hatreds, a lot of the simmering problems nationally, internationally, creeping authoritarianism, all that stuff. So there is this story, and it's very interesting. 

And so she does, it's not to say that her life just ends, there's quite a few chapters that go beyond when she reaches, let's say her cultural zenith in the like 1930, we'll say 1929. But it's not all sad. It's just different, you know? It's sad. Yes, but she finds this guy Andrea La Roche, who's a minor tax official. I mean, you know this because you read the book, but for the sake of the podcast, and he plays the accordion and they hook up and they start living together and they perform in these little restaurants. And yes, her moment has passed, but she's still out there having fun. It's a very simple life, but La Roque said that right before she died, she was the happiest he'd ever seen her. They just got back from a weekend and she was singing old songs and she'd wrapped herself in his coat and they were toasting to the first day of spring. So there were some simple pleasures. But yeah, the end was tough. I think that those last couple of days were tough on her physically, for sure.

Grace Anna: I think you make a really good point. I think there's a quote, I don't have it with me here, but I did quote it at the end of our episode on Kiki, where yes, on paper, it was sad because she was no longer famous, the world had changed, she had gained a lot of weight. She was in the throes of alcoholism and drug use. But Kiki herself didn't find it sad. She enjoyed her life, as you were talking about. She was just in the present and she enjoyed her life. She still found ways to have fun. She found it very amusing that she was in all these paintings when she was younger and was still very proud of all that she had done. So, yeah, it's a good point. It wasn't sad to Kiki, and that is a very important point to make.

Grace Anna: Can you speak to the importance of sharing Kiki's story because your book is so important in getting Kiki's legacy out there. But why is it important that we know Kiki's story and how can we change the way we look at Man Ray's photographs of her or the many portraits of her? How can we see them through her eyes?

Mark: Yeah, I think ‘important' is a freighted word, and I try not to come to any of my projects with this idea of importance or that this has to be out there because then it can seep into the work in nefarious ways. I try to just be like- here's some lives that interest me. There's a question I want answered, and I don't know enough, and I'm gonna dig around and see what I can find. And it always happens that once you start to look deeply in the past and think of people as fellow human beings and try to get at their connections and their struggles, you always get a more complicated story than has been told. It can happen with anybody at any time.

My book that's about to come out is about the writer Janet Flanner, who went as Genêt in the New Yorker and looking at her writing in the 20’s and 30’s. That's somebody who's not totally obscure, but certainly better known than Kiki was. But again, once I started to look at her letters, and her work, even, this totally new story came out. And so I guess the idea, if there's a sort of argument I'm trying to make implicitly, not explicitly, through these kinds of projects, is not that I'm trying to rescue Kiki, although it does, you know, through our conversation it does. There is that aspect. I'm not fighting that and I think it's great to ask the question and destabilize these ideas about artists and muses and all the rest and to say why she is forgotten. Those are good questions to ask, but I think it's more about a bigger project of any footnote you see about somebody in a work of nonfiction, if you followed that footnote to its ultimate end-point through all of the archival records, you would find an entire universe that is different from the one you know and can be enlightening. And so that I think is the fun and the beauty of these kinds of projects is just to follow those footnotes, go into the archives, find the old letters, and prepare to be kind of blown away. I think that’s the beauty of the work.

Grace Anna: Yeah, to go along on the journey. 

Mark: Yeah, exactly.

Grace Anna: The journey of their lives. Yeah, it's true. I find with ArtMuse, I will think of a painting and I'm like: was that person a real person? And then I'll start looking into them and I'm like: “Oh my God. Not only were they real, but they lived this crazy life! Who knew?”

Mark: That’s exactly right. You're, you're doing the same work. I mean, that’s exactly right. And you know, the fun and the struggles of that kind of stuff. It can really change not just how you think about the project at hand, but about bigger questions about what we know and why, and who we know and why, and why we think the way we do. I mean, that's really one of the joys of this kind of historical research.

Grace Anna: Yeah, absolutely. And, like you said, the footnotes have stories too. 

Well, thank you for sharing Kiki's story. I really did love this book and I was telling you, I think for a biography, it's so beautifully written, it flows just like a novel, and it was such a joy to read and refer to in my research and a book I will come back to and return to again. I really thank you for being here today. I thank you for writing such a wonderful tribute to Kiki's life. And for all of those listening, I'm going to put the link to purchase your own copy of Kiki Man Ray in the show notes of this episode. I'm sure our listeners will absolutely love it, especially if they enjoyed our episodes on Kiki. So listeners will be able to purchase their own copy and I know that you'll love it as much as I did. 

So thank you so much again, Mark. I really appreciate you being here.

Mark: Wow, that's so kind of you to say all that. What a pleasure and I really appreciate the time. Thank you.

Thank you so much for listening to this special episode from our ArtMuse ArtTalks series in which I interview the author Mark Braude. We have included a link to purchase Kiki Man Ray: Art, Love, and Rivalry in 1920’s Paris, in the show notes of this episode. Braude’s biography is not only informative but so beautifully written, and I cannot recommend it enough.

We will be releasing more interviews this summer as part of our ArtMuse ArtTalks series as we prepare for Season Three. Season Three of ArtMuse will return this fall.

We cannot wait to continue to share these fruitful conversations with you.

Until next time, bye for now.