Kiki’s body told her whenever she’d reached her fill of city living, eating too little and drinking too much, at which point she would buy a ticket for the next train bound for Châtillon-sur-Seine. She spent a few weeks there in March 1922. Evenings she walked under broad canopies of oak and hornbeam. Nights in her old bed were quiet as a tomb, the skies outside bursting with stars. And then, as soon as she felt restored by Grandmother Prin’s cooking and the country air, she’d be itching again for Paris.
From a café in the drowsy village square, she wrote Man Ray. She was always first to start a communication when they were apart. Man Ray subscribed to the idea that a romantic relationship was a kind of war, and the winner was whoever revealed less of himself to the other. Among their friends, he made sarcastic pronouncements about love’s impossibility, playing the jaded lothario even as everyone saw how smitten he was with Kiki.
She wrote to him in her spidery scrawl:
You shouldn’t complain because you have one of the most beautiful little women of the Rotonde. Not dumb, in love, not boring, not a woman of luxury, not a whore, and not syphilitic (a little miracle). . . . I love you too much. To love you less I’d have to be around you more. And that would be good because you’re not made to be loved, you’re too calm. I have to beg for a caress, for a little bit of love sometimes. . . . But I have to take you as you are. . . . I bite your mouth until it bleeds and get drunk off of your cool mean stare.
We have no record of Man Ray’s response.
She wrote to “Dear beloved-Tzara,” too, complaining with comic exaggeration of her sadness. “The trees are still bare . . . and you and Man Ray are probably right now in the middle of sitting down to a nice coffee. Is there no justice? What have I done to deserve such suffering? I wander around without seeing a thing, like a sleepwalker.” She signed the letter “poor crying Kiki.”
Tzara kept Kiki’s letters until he died and reportedly drew on them for sections of his unfinished novel (circa 1923), Faites vos jeux (Place Your Bets), though the connection is not explicit. His responses to Kiki do not survive.
In Paris, Man Ray wrote his own letter, to his patron Howald, telling him about having released himself “from the sticky medium of paint.” He was working “directly with light itself,” tinkering with a process he dubbed Rayography. He discovered this new method in the darkroom after dropping a blank sheet of photo paper into the developing tray. When he fished it out, he saw ghostly markings wherever the sheet had brushed against the measuring glass, funnel, and thermometer submerged alongside it in the bath. He repeated the accident on purpose, and it again yielded weird spectral silhouettes.
He used whatever he found in the studio. Thumbtacks, tumblers, an egg, keys, a cheese grater. He mashed them together or paired them with abstract cutouts and placed them onto dry photosensitive paper. Coiled wire, a candle, a comb. He moved lights around to cast their beams from various angles, flashing them on and off, or jiggling them, lending depth and movement to the images so that each one looked like an entire movie reel compressed into a single still. He’d trim a bit from one piece of developed film and place it on another as the chemicals worked in the tray. Rayography freed him to make photographic images in layers, applying light and shadow like brushstrokes, rather than trying for it all in the moment of a shutter’s release. Later came lit matches, incandescent bulbs, a pistol, a silhouette of Kiki’s head drinking from a wineglass, and another of his and Kiki’s heads pressed together in a kiss. Sometimes he had a finished idea in mind. More often he was seeing what came from his conjuring as the images bubbled up before him.
Man Ray wasn’t the first to play with ways of circumventing the camera by drawing directly onto film. But he pushed camera-less photography in a new direction by showing how light, paper, and developer could be used to make the stuff of dreams and fantasy. And he did so at a time when people still debated whether photography even qualified as an art form. Each Rayograph hinted at the possibility that photography’s greatest value lay not in its supposedly indexical nature but in how it could reveal the ways we fail to see anything clearly. The Dadaist writer Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes interpreted the Rayographs as truthful recordings of scenes that had themselves been falsified. Man Ray “invents a new world and photographs it to prove that it exists.”
Duchamp, back in New York where he’d helped to open a shop specializing in dyeing ostrich feathers for the fashion trade, sent a joking note of congratulations, one scientist acknowledging the other’s latest breakthrough. Howald wrote as well to voice his concern about this unexpected swerve. And he warned that those few Americans who knew Man Ray’s name might forget it if he stayed out of the country much longer. Man Ray answered by telling Howald to help himself to as many paintings as he wanted from among those he’d left behind. He had removed himself from “the fierce competition amongst the painters here,” he told Howald. “I have something unique.”
By the early spring, Kiki had recuperated and returned to Paris. Sometimes, alone in the studio while Man Ray was off on a job, she would draw or paint watercolors. They were mostly of recollections from childhood, by turns tender and sardonic. If she didn’t feel confident painting some part of her tableau, she would cut out a photograph or illustration from a magazine and paste it onto her picture. Her scenes were sunlit and uncluttered, giving the impression of endless space and lazy time, everything open and unfinished and airy. She showed no interest at that time in having a showing of her work, though she might sometimes gift a picture to someone stopping by. Man Ray admired Kiki’s skill and encouraged her to continue. And yet he considered her image making as little more than the solution to “her own problem of what to do with her spare time, [which] hung heavily on her hands,” as he wrote in his memoir.
One night toward the end of May, the dealer Henri-Pierre Roché came to the Grand Hôtel des Écoles to see about hiring Man Ray to photograph some paintings that John Quinn was thinking of buying. Quinn was Roché’s most lucrative client, a wealthy New York insurance lawyer who helped to launch the Armory Show, fought against obscenity laws, and lobbied his government to abolish taxes on imported art, saving himself a fortune in the process. Roché was at that time relatively novel in buying works for his clients while showing them only photographic documentation and describing the pieces by telegram.
Parisian, tall, and urbane, Roché also collected contemporary art for himself and did it well, with perfectly timed taste. Having no academic training, he’d developed his eye for emerging talent by paying attention to the comments and habits of friends like Duchamp and Léger. Parallel to his writing work, he cobbled together a career combining the roles of artists’ agent, publicist, talent scout, curator, buyer, and dealer. (In his seventies, Roché would draw on memories of his bohemian youth to pen Jules et Jim, which François Truffaut adapted to film. While the ceramicist Beatrice Wood is widely credited as the model for the character of Catherine, it’s worth considering whether Roché threw Kiki into the mix as well.) Roché was a “general introducer,” in Gertrude Stein’s words. He’d been the one to introduce Stein to Picasso. He knew how to connect person A with person B so they would lead him to person C, his true quarry.
Roché was the first of anyone who knew her to take Kiki’s art seriously, including Man Ray. Having come to their apartment to hire Man Ray, Roché left having bought two watercolors by Kiki. (Which ones aren’t known.) Roché wrote in his diary that with their summery tones and quick lines, they reminded him of Matisse. His purchase shouldn’t be understood as a friendly gesture. Roché was no philanthropist. He was also cognizant of Kiki’s status in the neighborhood. He described going after his visit to the Grand Hôtel studio, with Tzara, Man Ray, and Kiki “to the Rotonde, where she is one of the queens.” He also understood Kiki’s position as outsider and insider at the same time. He described her in his diary after that first meeting both as “the mistress of Man Ray . . . of whom I see beautiful nude photos,” and as “a Burgundian, smart, knows her way around.”
By Roché’s account of that visit, we can deduce that Man Ray had started producing nude photographs that viewers would have understood as meant for private enjoyment rather than public display, apparently with a commercial angle in mind. Man Ray showed him some “very moving pictures of lesbians, in the most luscious poses,” as Roché described, which have not survived. In his memoir, Man Ray seems to describe making these shots. He wrote of how one day an artists’ model asked if he would take nude photographs of her that she could give to painters so she wouldn’t have to undress every time she auditioned for a posing job. Man Ray agreed so long as she returned with another woman, as he wanted to make some shots that went beyond “a single static nude.” He wrote that the women “were more at ease than if they had been alone; at my suggestion, they even took some intimate poses with arms around each other, making for rather complicated anatomical designs.”
Roché also wrote of being shown explicit photos of “love-making between a man and a woman.” His accounts are supported, somewhat, by Jacqueline Barsotti’s claim that when she first began posing for Man Ray, she heard rumors that he’d “started [his career as a photographer] with pornography.” Roché also wrote of bringing over his own erotic photographs taken of various lovers for Man Ray to develop.
Roché hired Man Ray to shoot three Picasso paintings for Quinn’s inspection, offering him thirty-five francs a print. This led to Man Ray’s first meeting with his idol, that spring of 1922. After completing the job, he took Picasso’s portrait as well, rendering him as a commanding presence in front of his paintings, his severe look softened by the slouchy cable knit cardigan he wears over his shirt, vest, and tie.
That summer, with Man Ray’s steadier income from portrait work, they took a studio in a well-appointed block of artists’ flats on 31 bis, rue Campagne-Première. Now they were five minutes rather than five feet from the Rotonde. From their double-height main room, a wooden staircase twirled up to a narrow balcony, dappled for much of the day by light seeping in from an oeil-de-boeuf window. The balcony stretched just wide enough for a bed. They had the luxuries of central heating, gas, electricity, a rented telephone, and a bathroom that doubled as a darkroom, as well as the relative rarity of a doorbell. It felt palatial, this studio slightly less tiny than the last one. They found a worn Persian rug and some creaky chairs from the flea market, splurged on a wind-up gramophone, and decorated the main room with a big Rayograph of some ferns, a few of Man Ray’s paintings, and a favorite photograph that he took of a menacing-looking Duchamp.
They adopted a routine that Kiki called their “little life.” She organized his workdays and handled his appointment book. When she spotted the names of women she didn’t know, she altered the letters to make them indecipherable. He took this as a sign of devotion, evidence, as he put it, that “Kiki had been domesticated.” She answered the phone and door. She helped him interact with French-speakers. Their friend Malcolm Cowley referred to Kiki as Man Ray’s “bedside dictionary.” Afternoons she kept away so he could shoot sitters uninterrupted. If she did happen to be home when a client called, he told her to hide up on the balcony until the session’s end.
In the evenings Kiki and Man Ray would meet at one of the cafés for a drink before returning home for dinner. If he’d been invited to anything that might lead to a commission, he could cancel without notice. There is no record the same privilege extended to Kiki if she found posing work. Kiki did the shopping and cooking and serving. She stretched their money to create fabulous Burgundian dishes with artfully prepared salads and expertly chosen cheeses, always paired with good wine and followed by brandy. Kiki’s seemingly innate ability to serve just the right food and drink according to the social situation, and to have attained that knowledge without money or much exposure to traditional forms of “high” culture, should have been a wonder to Man Ray, just as this aspect of French life surprised so many visiting Americans. “Certainly, a dominant part of the aesthetic civilization of France is based upon the creative faculty of choice,” Janet Flanner, at that time the Paris foreign correspondent for The New Yorker, said in an interview. “Taste, based upon nothing else. In America, buying just what is advertised—that is not taste. That’s opportunity.”
When they had guests, Kiki sang folk songs after dinner. She would emphasize a lyric here and there with a knowing smile or well-timed gesture, singing as though in sole possession of a song’s secret truth, which could be hinted at but never revealed. Pitched for the pleasure of an audience no larger than three or four (any more would have made her too self-conscious), her voice rang out clear and strong and perfectly tuned.
At night’s end Man Ray usually returned to the slow tactile labor of the darkroom where he often stayed until dawn. “I spread out on the bed while he works in the dark,” wrote Kiki. “I see his face lit by the little red light. He looks like the devil incarnate. I have no patience. I can’t wait for him to be done.”
The 1922 Bastille Day celebrations in mid-July kicked off a nightly bacchanal that many Montparnasse memoirists would recall as continuing nonstop all the way to summer’s end. On the night of the fourteenth, a young woman named Thérèse Maure was out celebrating with some dancer friends and a few Russian artists at the Rotonde. They sat on folding chairs lined up to face out to the street like a theater’s rows and watched as Kiki danced in the boulevard Raspail, dodging traffic while leading the terrace crowd in a new craze, le fox (the foxtrot). Le fox represented a shockingly modern stylistic leap relative to how people had been dancing just a few years earlier. Kiki, still unsure of how exactly the dance was done, rocked with laughter at her poor performance, getting everyone to laugh along with her.
Having fled a cosseted childhood in an affluent suburb of Paris and now trying to live in relative anonymity in Montparnasse, Maure was drawn to this dancing woman, whom she’d never seen before. She seemed as unbridled as Maure was reserved.
Later in the night they got to talking and discovered they lived next door to each other. As they got to know each other better, they found they’d been born a few months apart, and both were fascinated by tarot. Kiki and Thérèse would take turns that summer reading cards and offering consolation when one felt troubled. Together they spent hours in the evenings getting ready to go out. Sometimes Kiki painted her eyes in triangles to match the shape of her earrings, or matched her eyebrows green to her dress’s color. After going to the annual Bal des Quat’z’Arts (Four Arts Ball), they held hands, joining in the custom of ending the night by jumping into the fountain at Place de la Concorde. Each would eventually keep a mouse as a pet—Kiki’s white, Thérèse’s black—which they brought to the cafés in tiny baskets.
Thérèse took on the role of Kiki’s protector, a dynamic most apparent whenever Kiki drank. Thérèse had studied the experimental methods of Georges Hébert, a former naval lieutenant whose rigorous course for women adapted classical ideas about perfecting one’s body and spirit to suit the modern age. She was now teaching it, training women in boxing, modern dance, and gymnastics in Paris and at a camp in the seaside gambling resort town of Deauville. Whenever she and Kiki went to one of the big costume balls (Man Ray rarely joined), they would dance with each other the whole night. If you danced with a man, he assumed you were his property, Thérèse later explained to an interviewer. And when Man Ray left Paris for work, Thérèse would often share Kiki’s bed, as Kiki hated to sleep alone.
Thérèse would remember Kiki as “an extraordinary girl . . . beautiful [and] pure . . . an artist.” Like many of Kiki’s admirers, Thérèse appreciated her wicked sense of humor. (For Kiki, the grimier the joke, the better: she once suggested that the appropriate punishment for a journalist who’d been found guilty of blackmail was to throw him into a public toilet and pull the chain.) Kiki in turn called her friend “a walking encyclopedia.” She was known among their circle for her impressive memory and her wide-ranging curiosity. “She and I make one person,” wrote Kiki. “If something happens to one of us, it happens to both of us—even punches, whether given or received.”
Following Kiki’s lead, Thérèse recognized that Montparnasse’s cafés were where you went to change your life. It was at the Dôme café, across the boulevard from the Rotonde, that Kiki and Man Ray introduced her to the poet Robert Desnos. He was just back from two years of mandatory military service in Morocco, a quiet charmer with floppy hair, oyster-colored eyes, and a sensuous mouth. Thérèse tried, unsuccessfully, to teach him how to throw a good punch after he showed up one night sporting a black eye of mysterious provenance. He took to calling her Thérèse Treize (Thirteen). As they became involved, she adopted the nickname as her own.
There was power in an alias. As one artist’s model from that era, Zinah Picard, put it, “the liberation of women after the war . . . was instinctual. . . . It was important to leave one’s family—for example, Thérèse, taking the name Treize so she would not be known by her family. You visited your family, but they never knew what you were doing.” And people who’d grown up in the city could still break from their families through a change of address. Desnos had also rebelled against his family’s expectations. His father, who ran a wholesale butchery at Les Halles, was embarrassed to learn that his son lived in converted artists’ studios in Montparnasse on the same patch of grass where he used to buy vegetables to sell alongside meat from his market stall.
For Treize and Kiki, and for other young Frenchwomen who came to Paris from elsewhere, seeking to live an unconventional life in Montparnasse meant more than fun and familial rebellion. Reinventing oneself took bravery. As personal desires merged with political ones, pursuing one’s own happiness constituted a genuine attack on the country’s Catholic conservatism, even if it started with something as seemingly small as a name change. In the wake of the Great War, as neighboring Germany threatened to grow stronger and more populous each year, French women lived under immense pressure to marry and produce children. The unofficial collusion of the state and the Catholic Church, both concerned about dwindling birthrates, yielded such repressive measures as the outright banning of the sale of contraceptives in 1920.
But in Montparnasse, you could drive your own car, your lover in the seat next to you, both of you smoking, wearing whatever you wanted, your hair cut however you liked, and no one seeing you would think twice about it. No one would laugh at your calling yourself an artist, either. It was a job title, as valuable to a modern society as any other. And while you worked to have enough to eat while dreaming of the break that might see you living comfortably, the prevailing idea was that the process should be as important as the product or its rewards. “We were not then concerned with the results of our actions,” wrote Cocteau (if decades after the fact, and by then wealthy and famous). “None of us saw things from the historical viewpoint—we merely tried to live and to live together.”
Late in that summer of 1922, Kiki and Man Ray hosted a housewarming party. Kiki did an enormous shop that morning. Everyone was told to bring a bottle of something, whose contents Tzara immediately poured into a communal pail as guests arrived. The Japanese painter Tsuguharu Foujita, who drank only mineral water, played jazz records that he and Desnos had scored at a flea market. Jacques Rigaut, another poet, notorious for slicing a button from the clothing of everyone he met to amass a huge collection of stolen mementos, suspended himself by one hand from a hook high in the ceiling, to which he’d jumped from the balcony. For Man Ray, the night offered a chance to display himself as main consort to the Quarter’s beloved Kiki.
At one point late in the night, Kiki looked down from the balcony to see Man Ray chatting up the two daughters of a decorated general—and bolted down to smack him on the head. She swore at him and then the two sisters before dashing back upstairs. He rushed up to her and said that he’d only been trying to ascertain whether they’d held more value as models or potential clients. He and Kiki had made up by first light, when the building’s concierge arrived waving a signed petition from the neighbors demanding their eviction. Man Ray slipped him a few bills to quash the issue.
Some other current had pulsed alongside the night’s jokes and impromptu doggerel and invitations to share meals and beds. People showed their public faces in the cafés and raised public voices in the chalky pages of obscure journals, but the real Montparnasse was created nightly over spilled drinks and free-flowing conversations in small rented rooms like theirs on rue Campagne-Première. Out of their intimate clash of incongruous personalities, Kiki, Man Ray, and their friends were developing a shared sensibility, their private lexicon of nonsense words and secret signals, the whole system shored up by their sense of self-fascination.
Only when they were together could they recognize how profoundly they’d been shaped and misshaped by the hard facts of the recent past, even as they tried to deny the power of history. Only when together could they sort through the problems unique to their generation, one not so much lost as scattered. And lonely above all. A generation unable to see three young men huddled to share a joke at a table without picturing the missing fourth taken by the war. One that saw plainly in the women wearing black what the officials would eventually confirm: a quarter of France’s male population aged eighteen to thirty, gone.
“Those who in early youth were witnesses of nothing but death and destruction, those who survived that cataclysm of stupidity (which seemed as if it would never end) turned with a kind of fever toward life,” wrote Soupault, who’d been injured in battle. “My generation wanted to be alive at all costs. We wanted to love life—with which we had good reason to be disgusted. And we did love it. The greatest evil was to be dead. We would always distinguish among persons we knew, by saying that so and so was ‘alive,’ but so and so was ‘dead.’ ”
The feelings Soupault described weren’t limited to former soldiers. Anyone their age, born around the turn of the twentieth century, had already witnessed so much, so quickly: the tumult of great cities growing skyward; the discovery of radioactivity and the X-rayed exposure of inner mysteries; Einstein’s smashing of Newtonian conceptions of time and space, and the shocking proposal that one person’s subjective experience of time could unfold differently from someone else’s; the spread of thick cables across ocean floors and the building of radio towers; Freud’s suggestion of a subconscious mind, irrational, illogical, and secretive; a hardening of positions in an increasingly polarized mass press and the invasion of propaganda into every facet of daily life; the newfound ability to massacre from the air; food riots; bank runs; the revolution in Russia and the fall of a three-hundred-year-old dynasty; reports of men on both sides executed by their own officers for failure to kill.
One could hardly be expected to make sense of the era’s cruel mathematics, when people spoke calmly of one man dead for every meter of soil gained, say, in this battle or that one; of more French dead than any one country had yet lost in the history of armed conflict, and that number reached even before the waves of influenza had completed their own terrible accounting. How to make sense of the new technological wonders: tear gas, chlorine gas, phosgene gas, mustard gas, flamethrowers, depth charges, machines guns, tanks? And meanwhile the language of their newspapers and books held no relation to the language of their streets, let alone the language of the trenches. It was the language of an ancient civilization.
Léger, who’d been gassed at Verdun and after the war seemed to live every second as though he were on fire, wrote to a friend of how “the man who for four years has been exasperated, tense and anonymized finally lifts his head, opens his eyes, looks around, stretches, and finds his taste for life: a frenzy of dancing, thinking, yelling out loud, of finally walking erect, shouting, yelling, squandering. An eruption of energy fills the world.” For some, amnesia was a side effect, a result of the violence and dislocation they’d experienced. For others, amnesia was a conscious strategy, a way to try to survive unstable times. It felt like the best possible answer to the era’s particular demands: to approach time as a flurry of moments to be dealt with as they came. They were being not reckless but cautious.
And with such caution came the need for communion. All of them locked in the same tight spaces trying to sustain the perpetual nowness of their lives. There was nothing to find in the past but bad debts and dead bodies. And when they looked ahead, they ventured only so far as the next chance to talk, to fight, to dress up, to scheme, to be young together late at night.