History is fickle. Who becomes known as great in their field, whose work is displayed in museums or taught in schoolbooks? When there is a tangible product – a building, a painting, a book, whatever – the chances seem higher that you’ll be remembered. But what if you were mainly a muse to others, what if you could enthrall audiences with your voice but never recorded an album, if you created works of art that people liked and even bought, but you didn’t create in the popular style of the day, or you were a woman in a man’s world?
Most readers will not have heard of Kiki de Montparnasse, born Alice Prin in 1901, in Châtillon-sur-Seine, about 240 kilometres southeast of Paris, to an unwed mother who wasn’t much into mothering. But most would likely recognize her – she modeled for many an artist (Alexander Calder, Tsuguharu Foujita, Amedeo Modigliani, to name a few, as well as Maurice Mendjizky, with whom she fell in love for awhile). And, during her seven-year relationship with surrealist photographer Man Ray (who thought himself more of a painter), she posed for him many a time. In 2022, one of Ray’s most famous images of her, called “Le Violon d’Ingres,” sold for $12.4 million, the most expensive photograph ever sold at auction.
Yet, what of her own work, her talents, her accomplishments?
Cultural historian Mark Braude gives Kiki her overdue due with his latest book, Kiki Man Ray: Art, Love and Rivalry in 1920s Paris, which Braude will discuss with University of British Columbia professor emeritus of history Chris Friedrichs at the JCC Jewish Book Festival on Feb. 24, in an event called Art & History: Paris, Jews and Surrealism.
While Kiki wasn’t Jewish, so many of the artists she hung out with were, including, of course, Ray, who was born Emmanuel “Manny” Radnitzky. If she hadn’t lived among the who’s who of Dada and Surrealist art, perhaps she wouldn’t have been overshadowed, mostly forgotten. She was a commanding performer, she sold at least a few dozen paintings, wrote a memoir, appeared in films. By all accounts, a success. But, as “Queen of Montparnasse,” the early-1900s bohemian paradise in Paris, Kiki lived on the more wild side. Addiction would speed along her end – she died in 1953, only 51 years old. Another reason, perhaps, that her legacy was not as lasting.
As much as Braude’s account is about Kiki, it is about the time in which she lived and the people among whom she lived. Because, “as she experienced her era and channeled that experience into her art, Kiki shared drinks and cigarettes and ideas with many of the people who would shape how their century saw and thought and spoke: Modigliani, Stein, Picasso, Barnes, Matisse, Guggenheim, Calder, Duchamp, Breton, Cocteau, Flanner, Hemingway,” writes Braude. “And Man Ray, whose emergence as a modern artist must be understood as intimately linked to her own.”
While Kiki may not have left much physical evidence behind of her influence, it doesn’t mean she wasn’t influential. Living as she did, with whom she did, Braude writes: “Evolving in concert with them, watching them become who they were, challenging them and joking with them, working with them and through them, Kiki, too, played her role in shaping the cultural history of the past hundred years.”
Braude’s book is not only a fascinating read, but a reminder that none of us is insignificant. Even if our names are lost to history, we matter, we impact others and the world around us.
For the full book festival schedule, visit jccgv.com/jewish-book-festival.