Sometime late in 1921, Kiki went to see Man Ray in his room, six flights up in the former maid’s quarters at the top of a charmless hotel. Below them ran rue La Condamine, tapering through the sleepy neighborhood of Batignolles in northwestern Paris, far from tourist sites. Man Ray still lacked a real mental map of the city. Like most Americans who came over in the early twenties, he would have placed the soul of Paris on the Right Bank, home to the Louvre, the Jardin des Tuileries, the Champs-Élysées, and the grands boulevards around the Opéra. He knew as little about Montparnasse as he did about Kiki, limited to his impressions from the night he saw them both for the first time.
Kiki was nervous. She found Man Ray more nervous than she was. He asked her to stand against a wall where the dark of her simple dress contrasted with the washed-out wallpaper. She cocked a shoulder and turned her face away while keeping her heavy-lidded and heavily shadowed eyes to the camera, a standard ingénue pose, taking cues from memorized photographs of actors Theda Bara and Dorothy Gish. Their first portrait, artless and plain.
Kiki was seeing Man Ray for the first time, too, in a way, as she walked among the canvases, collages, assemblages, talismans, and totems that he’d brought in his steamer trunk, the sad catalog of his past. To avoid a hassle with customs inspectors, he’d described them all as souvenirs, preemptive remedies against homesickness. Kiki would have seen a narrow jar filled with ball bearings swimming in olive oil; a broken alarm clock’s guts in a glass box into which smoke had been puffed and imprisoned; and hanging on a wall, the piece with the most sentimental value of all, Tapestry. She would likely have found the canvases, collages, and Tapestry more to her taste than the assemblages. She preferred painting, drawing, and eventually photography to three-dimensional art, and while she enjoyed invention and the occasional abstract (and later Surrealist) flourish, figurative representations thrilled her more than all-out abstraction or overly conceptual work.
Kiki undressed behind a screen and came out covering herself with a bashful hand, shy about her relative lack of pubic hair, the “defect” she’d mentioned when they first met. Sometimes before a session, she would draw in some darkness below her belly with black makeup. (The state of Kiki’s pubic hair was a detail both she and Man Ray highlighted in their respective memoirs, as did others, including the Canadian poet John Glassco.)
Man Ray failed at first to register her clearly. He could think of her only in relation to his private pantheon of muses. Something in the way she moved called to mind Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s painting The Source, of a young woman, nude, pouring water from a pitcher. He would have seen it at the Louvre. Ingres had struggled with the canvas for three decades, conjuring an idealized nymph as an allegory for artistic inspiration, but painting her in a way that made the work double as a semirealistic portrait of a flesh and blood woman, an ambiguity that frustrated viewers when it was first displayed. Evoking that Ingres pose, Man Ray had Kiki stand before a white backdrop with one leg bent, her right hand covering herself, her left arm draped languorously over her head. He tried another shot with her perched on a dark sheet, more kneeling than lounging, her right hand just too high up on her hip to look natural while the other clung to the fabric, drawing the eye to the oversize costume jewelry bauble she wore on her ring finger.
What was Man Ray wearing? We have no record. Likely the best version of his usual getup, which, judging by the photos from these years, meant an American-cut broadcloth shirt (16 neck, 33 sleeve) with striped tie, thick slacks, and a good wool or cotton jacket, all finely tailored if threadbare and hanging just so on his compact frame. Perhaps on a peg somewhere hung the lightly colored homburg he favored for going out. No artist’s smock, no eccentric ornaments. The beret would come later. To Kiki, he looked younger than his thirty-one years. But he wasn’t beautiful. The artist’s model Jacqueline Barsotti, a friend of Kiki’s who posed for Man Ray in the 1930s, said of him: “He wasn’t handsome, his nose had no opinion and went all over the place. . . . It was a great pity that he did not smile a lot. That little grin of his changed him altogether.” Some women found his dark, hangdog looks alluring in combination with his guardedness.
Midway through the shoot, Man Ray lost focus. Kiki recalled him saying, “Kiki! Don’t look at me like that! You trouble me!” He would tell it this way: “I got her to take a few poses, concentrating mostly on her head; then gave up—it was just like the old days in the life-classes; my mind wandered, other ideas surged in.”
They abandoned the session and went out for a dinner she devoured. He wondered how often she got a proper meal. “All I need is an onion, a bit of bread, and a bottle of red wine,” Kiki liked to say. “And I’ll always find someone to give me that.”
At dinner, she recounted stories from her childhood, from her jobs. A painter had adopted her, she said, alluding to Mendjizky, and was waiting for her on the coast. But she refused to leave Montparnasse for anyone. Someday, she told Man Ray, she might return to take her place among Châtillon-sur-Seine’s five thousand villagers, a quiet life, maybe she would raise some pigs. For now, she wanted to have fun. She mentioned the room she was then sharing with a girlfriend on rue de Vaugirard. An imperfect setup because she always had to find somewhere to sleep on short notice whenever her roommate’s lover popped by.
Man Ray in turn told Kiki about home and why he’d left it. He’d come to Paris to connect with a few artists “who were doing advanced work.” And to make pilgrimage to the museums, to sit in silence with his imagined ancestors, hoping to see as they did. Vermeer for interiors. Hans Holbein the Younger for faces and hands. Rembrandt, whom he revered for painting a scullery maid like a queen, for everything. He’d given himself three months, intending to return to New York. But now that the months had stretched to six, he could no longer say he was passing through. “Everyone is on the streets,” he’d written to his brother a few days after arriving, “with wine and beer everywhere. Something is surely going to happen to me soon.”
Kiki’s story about Mendjizky on the coast was more complicated than she let on. It was true that Mendjizky had asked Kiki to travel south with him, but at the time of her first session with Man Ray he was still in Paris. And Mendjizky and Kiki were still together, loosely. But Man Ray, taking Kiki’s mention of her uncomfortable living arrangement as encouragement, ended the night by inviting her to stay with him anytime she liked. He wasn’t the rich American she might have imagined, he told her, but he was happy to share what he had with her. She told him that she would think about it. And in the meantime she would come for a second session.
He developed their first shots that same night. They looked rigid and rehearsed. He thought Kiki stood like a badly made statue, her body in jarring disharmony with its borrowed pose. He thought that maybe if you squinted, you might mistake the photos for reproductions of academic paintings, but otherwise they were failures.
Kiki went to Man Ray’s room a few days later for the second session. She looked at the shots from the first session. She was satisfied that at least the nudes weren’t vulgar.
They prepared to work and wound up on the bed. This time with both of them undressed, they took no pictures.