AN ITALIAN HEIR, A FRENCH NOVELIST, A JAPANESE PAINTER, AND AN AMERICAN COLLECTOR
In a suite at the Ritz overlooking the Place Vendôme, Man Ray photographed the Milanese textile heir Luisa, Marchesa Casati. Tall, skeletal, and terrifying, Casati was one of those glamorously disheveled aristocratic eccentrics who float in and out of the era’s juicier anecdotes, flitting through gilded rooms across the continent, arriving at a dinner leading a cheetah by a diamond leash or walking her borzois at three in the morning through the Piazza San Marco naked but for a string of pearls around her neck. At the Ritz, they brought her live rabbits to feed to her pet boa constrictor. She dyed her hair bloodred and framed her eyes racoonishly with kohl, enhancing their darkness by powdering her skin pale white. She was one of the wealthiest women in Europe. Among her preferred ways to rid herself of that fortune was to commission portraits. “I want to be a living work of art,” she said. She was the first of Man Ray’s sitters to bear a title.
He deemed their session a failure. A blown circuit caused a lighting mishap that led him to blur and double-expose every shot he took. The Marchesa insisted on seeing some record of their time together, so he mailed her a hazy print. She saw herself with three sets of false-lashed eyes, pupils giant because of the belladonna drops she used to dilate them, and her mouth reduced to a muddy void. She loved it. He’d captured “her soul,” she told him. She ordered prints to send her friends, and many of them requested sittings, wanting to see their own souls similarly caught on film. Kiki, who may in a roundabout way have spotted a kindred spirit in Casati, judged Man Ray’s shots of the Marchesa among the best work he did.
Man Ray, by the fall of 1922, had shot a few more photos of Gertrude Stein, meant to be used when publicizing her writing in America. One of them appeared in Vanity Fair that summer. (He meanwhile avoided Stein’s Sunday salons, wanting to avoid making deep connections with other Americans). Other artists wanted their portraits done as well: Georges Braque, Juan Gris, Léger. André Breton stopped by the studio while he was shooting Matisse. “Breton, expecting to find a sympathetic iconoclast found himself facing an instructor in painting!” Man Ray reported to Stein. “And as they talked, it seemed to me that the two men were speaking entirely different languages.”
He shot dozens of people with less famous names but healthier finances, who sought the affirmation that came from having his signature beneath their printed faces. He sold two photographs to the savvy designer Jacques Doucet, who was amassing one of the era’s finest collections of modern art, placing Man Ray’s works among a group that would soon include Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. And in another major coup, his Rayographs appeared in America for the first time, in a full-page feature in Vanity Fair. Condé Nast Publications was trying to build both mass readership and highbrow cachet for the magazine, less than a decade old, by featuring images from artists with national reputations. Placing his Rayographs and the portrait of Stein in Vanity Fair not only introduced him into the lucrative Condé Nast fold but helped to establish his name as an emerging talent in front of an American audience.
As the steady work started coming in, he fell into a deep depression. Perhaps now that he’d established a beachhead in Paris, he was processing the full force of having abandoned his American life, his wife, his limited gallery connections. Or maybe his crash came from the recognition that he wasn’t destined to be the great painter he’d imagined, that if he ever did make any contribution, it would come through in a flimsier, more ephemeral medium. Whatever the reason, he struggled to get out of bed for a stretch in that fall of 1922. To his parents he mentioned only a “nasty cold.” To Howald he apologized for having “been in bed . . . suffering from headaches, etc.” In truth he entertained suicidal thoughts.
Kiki watched over him, cooked him healthy meals, brought newspapers to busy his mind, juggled finances so they had enough to keep the apartment well warmed, and barred him from drinking. She kept him on the Hay Diet his physician had prescribed, a newfangled regimen that required a strict balance among foods deemed acidic, alkaline, and neutral. Followers of the diet had to avoid eating potatoes on the same days as fruits, or fruits on the same day as meat, and were advised to drink huge amounts of liquid, especially orange juice and Perrier. Man Ray wrote to his parents that he was being well taken care of, that he “had a dozen friends working for me, bringing me things to eat, heating my studio.” He made no mention of Kiki.
An unlikely assignment pulled Man Ray out of his torpor when Marcel Proust died of untreated pneumonia that November. Cocteau asked him to produce the lone deathbed portrait, having gotten permission from Proust’s brother. Man Ray was summoned to the cork-lined bedroom on boulevard Haussmann and told to make a print for the family and another for Cocteau. Man Ray saw greatness two days dead before him. Using low light and a long exposure, he shot Proust supine, sunken eyes shut, shrouded to his neckline so that in the photograph his dark full-bearded head appears to float among the whiteness of linen.
Some saw an era’s end in Proust’s passing. So much of Proust’s world had already died before he did. And what was left was being reborn or renamed. The French 75, prized as a field gun for its quick loading, now referred to a hard-hitting cocktail. The British transformed German shepherds into Alsatians. In Paris, you no longer ordered a café viennois but a café liégeois. Meanwhile Berliners who’d lifted pints at the city’s Café Piccadilly and the Hotel Westminster returned to the Vaterland Café and the Hotel Lindenhof. Every map in the world had been rendered nonsensical. Republic of Armenia Union of Soviet Socialist Republics Second Hellenic Republic Somalia Italiana Lithuania Western Samoa Mandate Czechoslovakia Yugoslavia Petrograd. History seemed to be nothing more than coming up with new names for old things.
As she helped see Man Ray through his depression, Kiki’s fame as a model was spreading quickly, thanks to a portrait done by a close friend.
Tsuguharu Foujita, descended from a noble samurai family, had left Tokyo and his young wife for Paris before the Great War. He fell in with Modigliani, Picasso, and Soutine and made unprecedented pictures by mixing his Japanese training with the latest Parisian techniques while nodding to the traditions of French folk art. He wore hoop earrings, bangs down to the tops of his circular glasses, and a toothbrush mustache. He made his own clothes on a Singer machine, cigar in mouth, working the pedal with his sandaled feet. He dressed sometimes as though heading to the ancient agora in a flowing tunic, feeding rumors that he led mad dances in the Bois de Boulogne with fellow members of a neo-Grecian cult. In the Quarter, they called him “Fou-Fou” (Crazy-Crazy). He was seen at every costume ball, opening night, charity gala, and studio party, recognizable in a noisy crowd by his high-pitched giggle. But he remained underappreciated by the critics and dealers and buyers, until Kiki helped him break through.
The first time Kiki posed for him, early in 1922 in his ragged studio near the Rotonde, she arrived silently, holding a finger to her smiling mouth before undraping her coat to reveal herself, a trick models used so they could arrive for a nude session without marks left by the elastic pull of underwear. Foujita recalled much singing and dancing, Kiki stepping on the Camembert cheese he left on the floor, and that he didn’t get any painting done. Instead she took her place in front of his easel, low to the ground since he liked to paint seated on the floor, ordered him to stay still, and drew. After a while, Kiki stood up, handed him his pencils now half-chewed, took her day’s pay, and left with her portrait of Foujita.
At the Café du Dôme, Kiki sold the portrait to Roché. With a few clean lines, she’d captured Foujita’s trademarks. Bangs, owlish glasses, mustache. He holds his right hand to his face as though using thumb and finger to measure something beyond the frame, his look cold and appraising. Along with an especially prominent Adam’s apple, Kiki gave Foujita a more sharply defined chin than the double one he had in life, perhaps flattering her friend.
Painter and model kept to their assigned roles for the next session. Foujita had Kiki recline nude on a daybed of crinkled sheets, engaging the viewer directly, evoking the pose of Manet’s Olympia, drawn in turn from Titian’s Venus of Urbino and other predecessors. “He looked at me with such intensity that it was like he was undressing me a second time,” Kiki wrote in her memoir. “Suddenly he would come right up to you and inspect a part of your anatomy so closely you’d start panicking. But then he’d go back to his canvas with a satisfied look.” Foujita tucked Kiki’s hair behind her ears to expose her high cheekbones. He rendered her face as smooth as water-pummeled stone, turning her naturally olive skin to ivory and her eyes from amber-speckled green to black, giving them a feline quality they lacked in life. (Foujita painted a lot of cats).
He framed the finished piece in an elaborately patterned toile de Jouy. After its unveiling in that year’s Autumn Salon amid the Beaux-Arts splendor of the Grand Palais, Reclining Nude with Toile de Jouy sold for eight thousand francs and etched Foujita’s name into the public consciousness. Its impossible glowing whites provoked jealousy among his peers, who never divined—since Foujita banned all rivals from his studio—that he mixed them to a viscosity that let him paint over them with a dark sooty hue like those produced by Japanese sumi (inksticks used for calligraphy and brush paintings), and that those crisp black strokes were what made his whites shine so lunar-bright.
Foujita would soon rank among the most financially successful painters in Paris, buying himself an expensive Ballot touring car, whose yellow hood he ornamented with a cast of Auguste Rodin’s Man with a Broken Nose. He was an astute self-promoter. Journalists in Japan mocked him for what they saw as his shamelessness, suggesting that French elementary schools used Foujita as an example to introduce the concept of racial tolerance, teaching students not to be “contemptuous of all Japanese because of him. It’s alright for the students to be utterly contemptuous of Foujita alone.”
When recounting the creation of Reclining Nude, Foujita wrote that neither he nor Kiki “could say for sure who among the two of us was its author.” He told of sharing some of the money from the painting’s sale with Kiki, pressing a stack of bills into her hands, and how an hour later Kiki had spent it all on a hat and a dress, closing with this detail not to dismiss her as a spendthrift but to underscore his admiration for how eager she was to grab whatever made her happy in the moment.
Many women in Paris were drawn to Foujita’s playful, generous nature. Rumors circulated about an affair with Kiki. Foujita always maintained that their relationship, although very close, remained platonic. Kiki made no comment.
While Kiki reveled in her and Foujita’s success at the Autumn Salon, Man Ray, though working steadily again, suffered another setback.
“Hallo, Boys. Cheer up. Dr. Barnes is among us.” So went a piece in the Montparnasse review, anticipating another spree from the visiting American chemist Albert Barnes, who was using the fortune he’d made in antiseptics to amass one of the great collections of the era, which already included dozens of Cézannes and nearly two hundred Renoirs. Barnes spent two weeks that December touring studios, mostly in Montparnasse, often following a morning spent looking at works presented by little-known artists who gathered outside his hotel, rolled-up canvases in hand. He left with works by Utrillo, Kisling, Derain, Jules Pascin, Marie Laurencin, and the late Modigliani. His purchase and subsequent stateside showing of nearly two dozen works by Soutine put Soutine on the course toward international recognition and high-priced sales.
Barnes returned to America having paid no visit to his fellow Philadelphian Man Ray.