Early 1926. There are three of them in the room: Kiki, Man Ray, and George Sakier, recently hired as junior art director for Vogue, whose French edition had launched six years earlier. Sakier’s family had lived near the Radnitzkys in Brooklyn. He used to play tennis with Man Ray’s youngest sister, Elsie. He’d moved to Paris not long after Man Ray, longing to become a great painter or designer.
They have no directive to peg the image to any specific cultural event, nor to display any clothing from one of the magazine’s advertisers. They’re free to experiment. Sakier has brought a mask of polished wood, as tall as a human head but half the width. Skilled carvers of the Baule peoples of the Ivory Coast make similar-looking masks to praise a specific woman’s beauty or dancing skill, or as a commission to honor a particular woman. Dancers donned such masks for performances, but only if the mask’s “double,” the woman portrayed, was present to witness the masquerade. Maybe Sakier’s mask is an original imported from the Ivory Coast, at that time a French colony. More likely it was produced with the tourist trade in mind, an inexpensive mass-made replica of some original piece or newly created to mimic the style of Baule portraits masks. (The mask they used for the photo has been lost for decades.)
For a fashion editor, photographer, and model to come up with the idea of presenting a European woman as modern and alluring through her interaction with some aspect of African culture is hardly a radical move by this time in Paris. Industrial capitalism has led people astray, and Western civilization is in decline, goes the local logic, and white modern artists must look far beyond their homes for vital inspiration. There are so many precedents from which Man Ray, Kiki, and Sakier may be drawing: Paul Gauguin’s fever dreams of Brittany and Tahiti; Rousseau’s jungle scenes (conjured by a man who never left France); Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon. Critics, collectors, and other artists in their circle have started to amass collections of African objects. The influential dealer and critic Paul Guillaume writes in his magazine, Les arts de Paris, about “The Discovery and Appreciation of Primitive Negro Sculpture,” which in his view has revitalized the spirit of European art, until then “menaced by extinction.”
But if primitivism is by 1926 a well-worn concept, Kiki, Man Ray, and Sakier are taking it into a new realm. Rather than providing the fodder for a painting or an object, they’re channeling such thinking into a photograph, a recording of reality, if staged as a Surrealist juxtaposition: “civilized” white woman and “primitive” Black mask.
To the three of them, the mask may be no more than a piece of useful ephemera to offer up to the camera’s insatiable eye. Maybe they see it as a flea market find, no different from an obscure jazz record discovered at the back of a crate, or a Eugène Atget print of a desolate street, bought for a few francs from the old man himself (Atget lived in the same building as Kiki and Man Ray), or some strange sign salvaged from an abandoned construction site. They likely know very little about the mask’s origins, or would not care much about them if they did.
Likely they value the mask for something more than its formal uses or beauty. It allows them to explore their ideas, however misguided, about African culture, which for them is something to be slipped on and off like a dress. They may be channeling all that they would have heard and read and seen from countless ethnographers, racial theorists, colonial propagandists, and hacks pitching exotic travel adventure stories, all claiming special knowledge of the continent. When viewed through their distorted perspective, the mask can stand for danger, debauchery, demonic energy, unadorned and so authentic expression. They may see it as the carrier of nocturnal secrets, black magic, or the harbinger of unsettling eros. To them, it may be a monolithic Blackness, an all-encompassing story of “Africa.”
Maybe they’re thinking, too, about America. They’ve heard Debussy, Stravinsky, Antheil, and other European composers appropriating elements of African American performance in their works. No doubt they know of the wildly popular Revue nègre at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, featuring, among its African American cast of players, Sidney Bechet, the saxophonist, clarinetist, and composer, and most dazzling of all, Josephine Baker, who’d debuted with the show the previous year, not yet twenty, and had quickly established herself as the most famous cultural figure in Paris. The critic André Levinson, in attendance on opening night, making use of multiple stereotypes, suggested that “certain of Miss Baker’s poses, back arched, haunches protruding, arms entwined and uplifted in a phallic symbol, had the compelling potency of the finest examples of Negro sculpture.” Flanner, recalling the same night, described Baker as “an unforgettable female ebony statue.”
With such thoughts in their heads, the mask is meant to make Kiki wild through sympathetic magic as she poses with it. And at the same time, the mask heightens Kiki’s sense of privilege by visually reinforcing the degree of freedom she has to play at being uncivilized. Seeing her as set apart from both Black people and from white bourgeois norms, the magazine’s majority white readership can indulge in the double-fantasy of bohemian whiteness. Kiki, Man Ray, and Sakier are making an image for French Vogue perfectly attuned to the French vogue for fetishizing Blackness: négrophilia. They’re making an image perfectly attuned to a time when at parties, filled with “a great deal of stamping and shouting, and primitive dancing and singing, . . . the ambition of the moment seemed to be to become as African-Negroid as possible,” according to Robert McAlmon (implying fashionable white people in Paris as the group pursuing this “ambition”).
Had you asked Kiki or Man Ray, they would likely have denied being scornful of anyone on the basis of their difference, and more likely would have claimed the opposite, pointing to their socializing, working with, and desiring people of many races. But they both demonstrated the ugly views on race typical among many people of their time and respective backgrounds, views thoughtless and condescending at best, at once fascinated by, fearful of, and filled with contempt for the Other. They idealized, exoticized, and demonized Black people. Kiki recounted in her memoir how at a desperate point in her teenage years she considered prostitution and went to a known area for picking up men. “A Negro looked at me. He scared me. . . . He was so black. . . . Tears came to my eyes and I was discouraged.” After remarking on Man Ray’s tendency to paint exclusively in the same three tones as his photographs—blacks, whites, and grays—Kiki wrote that he was “in despair because I have Negro tastes: I’m too in love with bright colors! And yet he loves the black race.” Man Ray references the same “joke” in his own book.
Man Ray photographs Kiki in a few different poses with the mask, perhaps to leave himself the chance to submit a photo-story told over a series of frames, more likely searching for the composition that works. He shoots Kiki topless, hair slicked back to resemble the mask’s rendering of hair, her hands holding the object to her left cheek, her eyes open, looking off to her left wistfully, a large diamond-shaped earring dangling from her left ear and some silver bangles accenting her wrist. He photographs the mask on its own. He sketches Kiki in pen and ink, holding the mask to her cheek, fudging the dimensions of her face so that it shares the same contours as the mask.
Eventually they find the pose. Kiki bends down low, ear to the table as though listening to the wood, eyes closed in concentration, holding the mask at a right angle to her own face. Two disembodied heads standing nearly perpendicular.
The image that Vogue readers saw in the May 1, 1926, issue shows a young woman resting her head along the top of a table hiding most of her unclothed body from view. Her left hand grips the carved representation of hair on a wooden mask, dark and slim, its chin sitting straight on the tabletop. Light falls in a wavy band along the woman’s dark, wet hair and heightens the pallor of her skin, whitened with heavy powder, throwing into relief her eyebrows like taut string above her closed, mascaraed eyes and the plummy darkness of her heart-shaped mouth. Light catches, too, along the mask’s glossier surfaces, capping its peaks of cross-hatched hair, illuminating its high forehead and cheeks and lending a faint glow to the two convex horizontals representing eyes. Beneath the woman’s head, a pool of shadow seeps onto the table like blood from a wound to the neck, an oval shadow echoed by the contours of the mask.
It is less a photograph than the documentation of a piece of theater. Its effectiveness comes down to props, lighting, costuming, blocking, and casting. The camerawork is incidental. The woman seems completely in control of her performance, eyes closed, far away, lost in her own dream, posing and not posing, present and absent at once, unreadable, inaccessible, her face a mask.
The caption reads: “MOTHER-OF-PEARL FACE and EBONY MASK.” Vogue’s opposite page tells of a music hall show that debuted on the Champs-Élysées that February featuring Chinese swordsmen. This news item’s accompanying photo, of two shirtless swordsmen, has also been shot and printed to maximize any contrasts between black and white. Vogue’s editors have cropped and positioned the swordsmen image to occupy exactly the same space on the page as that given over to the photo of the white woman holding an African mask across the fold: twinned glimpses into two exotic worlds.
Man Ray is listed as the image’s author. His name would have been familiar to many Vogue readers, as the magazine had run a profile on him a few months earlier. The model’s name is not given. There is an accompanying paragraph, its author uncredited:
Face of a woman, calm transparent egg straining to shake off the thick head of hair through which she remains bound to primitive nature. It is through women that the evolution of the species to a place full of mystery will be accomplished. Sometimes plaintive, she returns with a feeling of curiosity and dread to one of the stages through which she has passed, perhaps before becoming today the evolved white creature.
French readers who’d gotten their fill of Baudelaire in school might have spotted in this caption a reference to his poem La Chevelure (“Head of Hair,” “Her Hair,” “The Fleece,” or “Of Her Hair,” depending on the translator), one of several poems he wrote for or about his longtime lover and possibly common-law wife, Jeanne Duval, whom he dubbed Vénus noire, and who likely had a grandmother of African descent. Duval posed for Baudelaire’s friend Manet, who completed her portrait in 1862. Her name is absent from the work’s title. Manet called it Baudelaire’s Mistress, Reclining.
At some point in 1926 Man Ray sold one of the prints of the photograph he’d taken of Kiki holding an African mask to Jacques Doucet. Now known as the Doucet print, it was produced by combining four different negatives. Doucet added it to his substantial collection, which included Brancusi’s Muse endormie II, a sleeping muse whose ovoid head rests at an angle similar to Kiki’s in the print. Unclear how much he paid for the print. Whatever Doucet and Man Ray called the work at the moment of their exchange, it wasn’t Noire et blanche. In a letter to his sister Elsie, Man Ray referred to the picture as “Kiki holding the African sculpture head” and on the backs of a couple of prints he wrote “Kiki with African Mask.” The retitling was performed by unnamed others, removing Kiki from the story. In 1928 a reproduction of the photo would appear as Woman with a Mask in a Belgian magazine, and in 1931 in a German magazine it became Noire et blanche, the title by which it is commonly known today.
Some experts regard the Doucet print as the finest Man Ray produced from the original photograph. But there are several versions in circulation. Man Ray fussed with the image long after its creation, returning to it again and again, reediting it across decades, producing two dozen variations. He reshaped Kiki in many ways, softening her, darkening her, erasing parts of her, touching her up, drawing in shadows to emphasize the angles of her nose or to give depth to her eyes. He thinned out her eyebrows, adjusted the thickness of individual lashes, removed a stray strand of hair, a mole. He filled out her lips and buffed her skin so its luster would more closely match that of the mask. He seems to have been perpetually dissatisfied with how Kiki looked. The mask itself he never touched.
Kiki and Man Ray sucked so much of Paris in the decade’s first blazing half into this one rectangle, without leaving the confines of a bare room. Paris as the height of fashion. Paris at the heart of Empire. Paris that fetishized Africans as primitive and African Americans as modern. Noire et blanche is a picture about everything that isn’t shown.