The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 9 July 2024
by Mark Braude
Nineteen-twenties Paris: one of those times and one of those places that comes back to us again and again in soft-focus nostalgia for youthful days of freedom and creativity in a heady time between two great global conflagrations. The names that arise from that era are set in the stone of 20th-century history. Authors, artists, singers, dancers who lived then and there and made that time their own. Some are iconic. Who knows how many are long since forgotten?
Alice Prin, born in 1901, was a young girl who grew up in straitened circumstances and soon found herself on her own on the streets of Paris just as the first world war was ending. She was resourceful and motivated. She was also at the mercy of the culture and found herself living on the fringes of the sex trade. But she was also a performer, and sang and danced in clubs, cafes and restaurants across the Montparnasse neighborhood of Paris, right at the time that the district was coming to life with artists and writers who would make their mark on the world. And Alice Prin, now taking the name Kiki bestowed by her friends, entered that world as a popular singer and personality, and perhaps most significantly as an artists' model. She appeared in paintings, sketches and photographs and was soon the iconic 1920s Parisienne, with her bobbed hair, sharp spare features, vibrant sexuality and forthright independence.
Man Ray was an American artist who came to Paris in the 1920s to make his mark in the hotbed of European art. He was a painter, first, of odd abstracts, and then an inventive photographer, going on to become one of the most famous photographers of the century. But first, he had to struggle in Montparnasse, like so many others. And there he met Kiki at one of her singing gigs. Soon they were an item, then a long-term couple, famous in Montparnasse and in the art world at large. Kiki continued to serve as an artists' model, but also became Man Ray's muse, appearing in a large number of his most famous photographs. Indeed, one of those photos, depicting Kiki with the f-holes enhancing her viola-like figure, in the second decade of the twenty-first century drew the largest price ever paid for a photograph, over twelve million dollars. But in the twenties, Kiki and Man Ray were also a volatile mixture, and their stormy avant-garde relationship burned its way through the decade and disintegrated at just about the start of the 1930s. By then, Kiki had shown her own artwork, and published her own memoir, one that drew praise from no less than Ernest Hemingway.
Sadly, the same historical moment also marked Kiki's decline. Dependent on drugs and alcohol, the all too familar path of dissolution took hold in her life. She kept singing here and thered, but became a ghost of herself and of the Montparnasse of her youth. She died in 1952 and was buried in a pauper's grave. Man Ray lived until 1976 and was buried in a handsome tomb in Montparnasse cemetery.
Given perhaps not quite sufficient documentary detail, Braude nevertheless writes an engrossing and engaging account of Kiki, arguing for her significance as an artist and model, and as the personification of that vibrant time in Montparnasse. He gives her the credit she is due, despite living in the shadow of Man Ray. A reader might, after reading this, hope to read someday a telling of Kiki's life from a cultural feminist standpoint. But that does not detract from the moments we have spent with Kiki in this one of many Parisian heydays.