Kiki and Man Ray moved into the misnamed Grand Hôtel des Écoles, popular among artists because its small and modest rooms came cheap. In their cell were a bed, a window, three cameras, and some lighting equipment. A bittersweet perfume flooded the place whenever one of them opened the door to the closet they’d turned into a darkroom. Their street, rue Delambre, ran short and narrow, shadowed for much of the day by a stretch of buildings spanning either side. The carrefour Vavin, at the end of their block, lacked streetlights, and motorists honked twice while navigating webs of streetcars, bicycles, wagons, pedestrians, dogs, and the occasional herd of goats. At daybreak men doused the streets with pails of water, washing away the night. Kiki introduced Man Ray around Montparnasse. They were steps from the Rotonde.
Some of the locals swore Montparnasse’s best days belonged to the previous era, the anxious, bloody years that a later generation would decide hadn’t been anxious or bloody at all but a belle époque. The loudest parties had all been had, they said, the most dangerous personalities had all left for some other utopia, or flamed out young like Modigliani (thirty-five, tubercular meningitis) and his common-law-wife Jeanne Héburterne (twenty-one, jumped from a window on the day of his funeral). But people talk that kind of nonsense anywhere a new scene is taking shape—the privilege of each generation to make the new one feel they’ve arrived just too late for the main event. For Kiki and Man Ray it must have felt as if the bright days were just beginning.
Man Ray saw himself as a painter above all. But paintings were hard to sell. He was worried about money and wasn’t doing good work. He wrote to his patron Howald, saying he still felt like an “infant” in the city, yet asking for fifty dollars a month for another six months to break from this fallow period. Howald wired him some money. Next he wrote to his parents asking them to send what they could.
While painting and making assemblages, he figured he could take on jobs photographing portraits, as well as catalog and magazine work. And he would keep shooting the work of friends who wanted to send prints to dealers and clients, but he would now ask for proper pay. He meanwhile took assignments as a society photographer, betting on his camera as the siege weapon with which to breach a world he imagined well stocked with buyers for his paintings: the rich in need of beautiful distractions who might one day make him rich as well.
These fashionable and cultured rich were a community even smaller and more insular than the Quarter’s and regimented by a stricter schedule, with its revolving parade of Diaghilev ballets, concerts by members of Les Six, and costume balls where each night’s new masks hid all the same faces. Man Ray got a taste of their world shooting a fall line for Paul Poiret, set up by the critic and musician Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia, wife of Francis. Man Ray had photographed her in New York. Poiret had once been the premier figure in haute couture but had to curtail his business during the war. The Poiret aesthetic, reveling in its own luxuriousness, had felt radical in the prewar years but no longer kept rhythm with the times; nor did it suit the realities of mass production and mass consumption. That Man Ray had no experience shooting clothes might have heightened his appeal for Poiret, who told him only to make sure his pictures looked different from anything else out there.
Lacking a proper studio, Man Ray went to work at the designer’s rambling headquarters on the Right Bank. It had its own open-air theater and nightclub, L’Oasis, built to pump some cash into the business and help cover the design house’s losses. Man Ray brought only his secondhand camera.
On entering the atelier, he noticed Maiastra (1911), one of Brancusi’s polished bird sculptures, perched on a mantel in front of a tall mirror. He saw that all he needed to do was pose the model, Poiret’s wife, Denise, by the Brancusi piece. Its dazzling modernity would make her and her clothes dazzling and modern, too. In a single frame, he caught model, dress, bird, and their reflections in the long glass, each one amplifying the beauty of the other. (In so doing, Man Ray invented the practice of shooting models in designer clothing against a work of modern art, roughly thirty years before Cecil Beaton shot his iconic Vogue photo-story with models posed in front of Jackson Pollock’s drop paintings.) Next, Man Ray had another model lie on a pile of fabric bolts in different colors, arms stretched out at ease, a coy expression on her face. He used long exposures to compensate for the room’s low lighting. The shots came out as informal and dreamy, unlike any previous fashion images. Roughly half a century later Richard Avedon would credit Man Ray with creating the concept of the fashion photographer whose style was as recognizable as that of the labels for which they shot.
The Poiret job was quick work and paid well. Man Ray sensed he could prosper so long as he delivered photographs that helped the designers and magazine editors sell whatever it was they wanted sold. And if he gave them pictures of quality, rivaling works he would have shown in a gallery, who could say they lacked merit? In his view, the directive was the same regardless of venue: to wake people up and point them toward some other more fully realized life. And to make money while doing so.
A bonus from the shoot: Man Ray acquired (or borrowed) an exquisite geometrically patterned Poiret dress, along with an embroidered blazer and matching headband. It would have been an unattainable purchase. Kiki posed in the ensemble seated on the floor of their studio, the skirt splayed out around her as she held up one edge of its fringe to display the pattern to full effect. In the photograph, Kiki looks almost buried by the extravagant outfit, which takes up most of the frame, her personality getting lost as a result. Of the hundreds of images Kiki and Man Ray made together, the finest were those in which she wore the simplest clothes or none at all.
By the end of 1921, Man Ray secured his Parisian debut. One of the Quarter’s most stylish couples, the wealthy Dadaist poet Philippe Soupault and his wife Suzanne “Mick” Verneuil, were launching a modest gallery space in their bookstore. The venue’s location was obscure enough that the show’s catalog included an intricate map pointing to its location, a few blocks from Les Invalides north of Montparnasse. Soupault and Verneuil wisely chose the recently arrived American for their inaugural exhibition. Picking from among the usual Montparnasse crowd would have led to infighting. Man Ray was like Switzerland, a nonbelligerent state.
Tzara drafted an artist’s bio for the flyers, pure Dada hokum: Man Ray, before stumbling upon Paris, had been “a coal miner, a millionaire several times over, and the chairman of a chewing-gum trust.” His exhibition would be held “under the sponsorship of the Dada Movement. Neither flowers, nor crowns, nor umbrellas, nor sacraments, . . . nor metric system, nor Spaniards, nor calendar, nor rose, nor bar, nor conflagration, nor candles. Don’t forget.”
Dozens of red balloons crowded the inside of the bookstore so that people on arriving couldn’t see any of the works on display, or too much of each other. When Man Ray gave a signal, some co-conspirators took lit cigarettes to the balloons, revealing the walls to the sounds of popping and cheering. There were some Cubist-inspired paintings, a few of the garish canvases he’d done with an airbrush, a spiral paper assemblage, and some readymade-like objects. Most of the works dated from his New York and Ridgefield days. There were no photographs.
People seem to have had a good time. The American journalist Matthew Josephson recalled of the opening night that the guests were young and “very bourgeois in appearance and dress, but full of laughter at one another’s sallies and capers. . . . Evidently they did not make the mistake of taking Art seriously—with a capital A.” But Man Ray failed to attract any buyers despite pricing his work aggressively. “All our friends lack money as I do” was how he explained it to Tzara. Though interest in the movement was waning, Dada-related events could still make news on shock value alone. But the show garnered only a couple of sentences in a single newspaper listing gallery openings.
The best thing to come from the exhibition was a work inspired by Erik Satie. He showed up a few hours before the opening, more undertaker than composer with his black bowler hat, black umbrella, black frock coat, silvery goatee, and pince-nez. (Cocteau liked to tease Satie by saying he looked like a civil servant.) Meeting Man Ray for the first time, Satie, who spoke fluent English, challenged him to create an object on the spot for the show. They went together to a hardware store where Man Ray bought a flatiron and some shoemaker’s tacks. He glued the tacks to the iron’s base, creating a compact machine for destroying clothes, which he titled Gift.
Man Ray’s iron-seething-with-nails got lost during the show’s run. But before it disappeared, he’d documented it with a photograph that in turn became the work of art he titled Gift. By Man Ray’s twisty Dada logic, this secondhand representation exuded even more aura than the original, the idea superseding the thing itself. Who could prove there ever had been an actual iron-with-nails before the photograph came into being? (Nearly fifty years later he would oversee the production of five thousand replicas of the original iron-with-nails. Now these objects were presented as the works of art. He signed each of the five thousand replica Gifts and sold them for $300 apiece.)
No recollections of the show, which ran from December 3 to New Year’s Eve, remarked on Kiki’s attendance. And Kiki was not someone whose presence at an event tended to go undocumented. She may have been in Châtillon-sur-Seine to celebrate the holidays with her grandmother. Less likely, but possible, is that she stayed away, perhaps not yet sure how she felt about Man Ray, or still hesitant about so publicly associating herself with him. Although she and Man Ray lived together, Kiki at that time remained reluctant to quit Mendjizky outright. As one of her friends recalled, Kiki was sad to leave Mendjizky and didn’t do it “at once but rather stayed away one night here, one night there, and soon did not go back to him.”
Despite Kiki’s apparent absence from the show, her relationship with Man Ray clearly grew stronger as 1921 gave way to 1922. She was soon writing to friends of her excitement for her new love. In a postcard to Tzara (“Zara,” she called him), she drew herself and Man Ray embracing. She emphasized their large noses, hers pointy and his beaklike, writing, “Our two noses make sparks because we’re both well born,” a pun in French, as bien née, “well born,” sounds like bien nez, “good nose” or “big nose.”
Kiki encouraged Man Ray in the wake of his show’s failure. He worked constantly. He photographed Francis Picabia, imperious behind the wheel of his 85-horsepower Mercer. Through an introduction from Picabia, he photographed Gertrude Stein, in a first shot looking aloof beneath her rows of Cubist explorations, and in a second, pensive, seated next to Picasso’s portrait of her in which she leans forward as if listening to someone out of the frame. He captured Stein and Toklas in a wide shot to take in the gorgeously peeling walls, the fresh-cut flowers, and the wood and stone fireplace decorated by a ceramic jug on the mantel, as big as Toklas’s torso, and slim terracotta figures. And finally Stein again, alone, at a second session in the far less luxurious setting of the Grand Hôtel des Écoles, of which she wrote, “I have never seen any space, not even a ship’s cabin, with so many things in it and the things so admirably disposed.” Recalling their first meeting, Stein wrote, in the voice of Toklas, that Stein told him “she liked his photographs of her better than any that had ever been taken except one snap shot I had taken of her recently. This seemed to bother Man Ray.”
Shortly after the Stein sessions, he photographed Cocteau, holding up a picture molding to frame his birdlike head. He photographed a monocled Tzara balancing on a high landing, cigarette held between thumb and pointer while an axe and a clock loom overhead like the sword of Damocles on a timer. He photographed a close-up of Artaud’s hands, playing sugar cubes on a black table as if they were piano keys. He photographed Philippe Soupault, shirtless and menacing, looking more prizefighter than writer, if prizefighters boxed while smoking and sporting fedoras and polished Malacca canes. He photographed the American writer Sinclair Lewis seated in front of a big wooden wine press that Brancusi had spotted in a secondhand store and that looked like one of his sculptures through Man Ray’s lens. He photographed a head-and-shoulders shot of a smiling Erik Satie, looking like a cuddly grandfather.
Everyone led to someone else. Man Ray went to Adrienne Monnier’s bookshop and lending library to hear James Joyce read from his soon-to-be-published novel Ulysses, and a few weeks later he got hired by Monnier’s lover and protégée Sylvia Beach to shoot publicity stills for it. Beach would sell Ulysses at Shakespeare and Company, her shop across from Monnier’s, while Monnier sold the French translation. The Joyce session ended up being a frustrating one. Joyce had undergone eye surgery and, despite his thick smoked glasses, struggled to look into the lens, blinded by the glare from the lamps. Beach gave Man Ray free advertising by hanging some of his portraits on her bookshop’s walls alongside the William Blake etchings and the pictures and writings of Wilde, Whitman, Poe, and dozens of others occupying nearly every inch of wall.
Man Ray photographed quickly, usually about ten or so feet away from his sitters to avoid distorting their features while using a long lens to flatten out features. He allowed for some blur if it should happen organically, trusting he’d get what he wanted by cropping, enlarging, or playing with the grain of the picture in the darkroom. He was a compulsive retoucher of his photographs. Let there be chaos in front of the camera, because there would be coolness behind it, was his thinking. The scenarios he shot at that time could be imaginative, but he lit his scenes simply. He would place a single bulb on a stem between the sitter and the wall to ring the subject in light, or hang a bulb from above to highlight the sitter’s hair while the sitter held a metal sheet out of the frame to reflect the light from below. He was almost antitechnique. He wanted to make images that could “amuse, annoy, bewilder, inspire reflection,” he once said; “not to arouse admiration for any technical excellence.”
In his first year in Paris, more than all the clients and friends combined, he photographed Kiki. She was the sitter who had the most patience with him as he figured out what he was doing, in the safety of their studio. Their shots from 1921–22 didn’t feature elaborate costuming or theatrical poses, as in some of the images they would make a few years later. Instead they look dashed off, the photographed equivalents of pencil sketches or watercolor studies, and with the intimate feel of casual snapshots taken of a loved one, which on some level they were.
A few months into their relationship, Man Ray photographed a spare, head-and-shoulders portrait of Kiki sweetly smiling, looking like someone you would want as a confidante. He used a short depth of field, bringing her eyes, nose, mouth, and the edges of her bobbed hair into focus while the edges of her head and body blend softly into the hazy background. Unlike many of Man Ray’s portraits of others from around the same time, the shot doesn’t try to make a joke, or pose a question, or even excite the senses. There is only Kiki as she is, radiant and happy, waiting to hear your secrets.
Kiki and Man Ray produced three nudes in this same period. Each one showed Kiki’s body in a fragmented form. First he photographed her at close range, framed from the waist up, lying down with her eyes closed as if sleeping, but with her lips parted to reveal her teeth, almost snarling. The combination of sleep and snarl produces an uncanny, borderline frightening effect. This photo of Kiki, tightly focused on a closed-eyed model who lies west to east across the frame, her right cheek pressed against sheets, offered a counterpoint to Man Ray’s earlier painting of Adon Lacroix, tightly focused on a closed-eyed model, lying east to west, her left cheek pressed against sheets. Maybe he just liked the composition. Or maybe he sensed that his encounter with Kiki was both a continuation and a reversal of his relationship with Lacroix.
The second and third nudes Kiki and Man Ray made in 1922 play with erasure. In one photo, she holds a silk cloth against her hip bones. Her exposed upper half floats against a deep black backdrop offering no discernible separation between her hairline and the drape behind her. She hides her right hand behind her back and stands far enough away from the lens that her face turns into a semiabstract signifier of femininity: two black arched eyebrows, two dark patches of eye shadow, the two nostrils of a nose that the camera’s low angle turns retroussé, and a slash of red lipstick. The viewer sees only the edited version of Kiki that Man Ray wanted to present. Or we’re seeing only what Kiki wanted to show us.
In the other photo, posed against the same black drape, Kiki’s individuality comes across more, though she still appears in an abbreviated form. Again, she hides her right hand from view, this time behind her head, while her right arm drapes backward as if she were stroking the back of her slicked hair, a pose found often in classical sculpture that Man Ray used regularly. And again, like some recovered marble sculpture whose limbs have been lost to time, Kiki’s legs have been chopped off, this time by some white fabric draped against her thighs, on which rests her left hand and wrist, displaying a thin gold bracelet. She engages the viewer directly, looking down from above as if in judgment, but with a sense of being simultaneously appraised.
If Man Ray put a huge amount of thought or labor into composing, lighting, or retouching these early nudes, it was well hidden. He seemed to understand Kiki’s innate gift for performance—although she had yet to appear on any stage—and that his main task was to be there to capture her as she presented herself. He could at this time have said about Kiki something similar to what the photographer Clarence Bull said about Greta Garbo: “Others had tried before me to solve the mystery of that beguiling face. . . . I accepted it for what it was—nature’s work of art. . . . She was the face, and I was the camera. We each tried to get the best out of our equipment.”
Outside the studio, they took two snapshots that survive from 1922. These are relatively rare artifacts among Man Ray’s thousands of negatives. He wasn’t the kind of photographer who carried a camera wherever he went, waiting for the right moment. The snapshots look not much different from the kind any other young couple in Paris might take, if more skillfully executed. In one Kiki stands alone in a cobblestoned street on the hill of Montmartre, finding the spot just where the bright sunlight ends and the street behind her trails into darkness, while the outline of one of the domes of the Sacré-Coeur basilica peeks through in the background. Later that same day Man Ray caught Kiki leaning alone against a fence by the stairs behind Sacré-Coeur, displaying her cloche hat and the boxy handbag she took with her everywhere. The pattern of her long coat echoes the maze of northern Paris behind her, receding into shadow, in a visual rhyme with the first image’s cobblestoned street.
Kiki’s favorite picture from their first year together was neither a carefully posed nude nor a casual snapshot but a straightforward if slightly blurry portrait, in which she wears a simple dress and a prim felt hat. She sits casually in a wooden chair with her hands clasped on her lap, a faraway look in her eyes, like a bored schoolgirl waiting for the end of class. Kiki cut a print of the picture into an oval and gave it to Man Ray with the inscription, “1922, all my love to sweet little Man Rey, little Kiki,” misspelling his name as a joke, maybe to play on rey, meaning king in Spanish, or maybe just trying to take the piss out of someone who took his identity so seriously.
Man Ray didn’t yet try to show or sell anything they’d done.