Though he was far from financially secure, Man Ray was earning well through portrait commissions, by selling prints of his more avant-garde photography to collectors, and by providing visual content for magazines, whose global reach and need for pictures kept expanding as the decade progressed. “Busy as a cockroach,” he wrote to his sister Elsie. From one spread for American Vogue he’d made enough to live on for five months. He, Picasso, Foujita, Kisling, and Derain were known as the only artists in Paris able to buy new cars entirely from their income. And to the great displeasure of Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, and others, he had no qualms about charging his friends high prices for portraits if he knew they could afford it. He took pride in not coming cheaply.
Early in 1926, the Americans Arthur and Rose Wheeler visited Man Ray’s studio to have Rose “done” by Man Ray. As Sylvia Beach said, “To be done by Man Ray or Berenice Abbott meant you rated as someone.” After looking over Man Ray’s work, Arthur Wheeler told him he should stop the photography and make a film, since cinema held “the future for all art and money-making.” He proposed to stake Man Ray in making a movie and offered as a shooting location his cliffside villa in Bidart, at the foot of the Pyrenees, in French Basque country. Wheeler knew little about Man Ray and less about the movie business but was rich enough not to have to worry about the soundness of his judgments. He also missed seeing how shooting the world’s Rose Wheelers was Man Ray’s way to finance his painting, which he saw as his real work. Man Ray liked that he could pursue photography with little overhead and working alone, or at worst with an assistant or two. He didn’t advertise, had no plans to expand into a major operation. Filmmaking was costly and complicated, and he’d shown little interest in pursuing it further after his first experiment with Return to Reason, which in the first place he’d embarked on almost passively, answering Tzara’s challenge. He was very happy being an amateur. He loved film as a medium, not as a profession.
Which didn’t mean he was unwilling to take the Wheelers’ money. In the several pages he devoted in his memoir to the occasionally brilliant but mostly meandering sixteen-minute film he made, Man Ray is most eager to talk about the paycheck, claiming the Wheelers paid him ten thousand dollars, only half of which he spent on production. The evidence points to him getting three thousand, still a giant sum, which would support him in Paris for three years. Apparently able to produce the film using whatever equipment and cash he already had on hand, he sent the entire paycheck to Elsie, who had an account set up for him. Man Ray told her it was to “put away for when I come back to New York, or if an emergency happens here.” He also asked her to use some to send him photo supplies and, for Kiki, “half a dozen pairs of good but not too expensive stockings, one pair black and the others nice flesh tints, for between a dollar and one-fifty, smallest size.”
He completed the shoot in an offhand manner: he had no script, no plot, and planned to shoot “whatever seemed interesting,” gathering just enough footage for a short film, after which he’d figure out some kind of progression for the sequences, discovering the narrative as he went. Rose Wheeler appeared in a few scenes, possibly a stipulation of the commission, offering the Wheelers one more way to show that they had been “done” by Man Ray. The poet Jacques Rigaut appeared as well, brought in for his movie-star looks, dubbed by Man Ray the “dandy of the Dadaists.” Working no more than a couple hours each day, Man Ray spent the remainder “on the beaches lolling in the sun, at elaborate dinners with other guests [of the Wheelers], and dancing in the night clubs.” It all unfolded like “a holiday.”
He titled the resulting film Emak Bakia, after the name of the Wheelers’ rented property, a Basque expression loosely translated as “Leave me alone.” He kept in contact with the couple after the shoot, writing to Stein a year later to ask if Rose could come with him on his next visit. In all his letters to Stein, there is no mention of him ever asking to bring Kiki.
Kiki didn’t join Man Ray on the Emak Bakia joyride. But he did film her, once back in Paris, for the climactic final sequence. Four years into their volatile relationship, perhaps he took the assignment to get away from Kiki for a while. He might instead have wanted to keep Kiki away from Rose, his film’s nominal star, so that the Wheelers could feel the spotlight was on her alone; or away from the reputedly lecherous Arthur Wheeler. But it might equally have been Kiki, seeking momentary refuge, who encouraged Man Ray to go alone.
When Man Ray left Paris for the Wheelers’ villa overlooking the Atlantic, Kiki moved into Treize’s apartment in the Hôtel Raspail, overlooking the Montparnasse cemetery. There she enjoyed an unprecedented combination: a close friend, enough money to get by, a sense of stability, and large swaths of time free from tending to the needs of another. And during this time Kiki produced a great amount of art.
She set up a place to paint in the apartment, while down the block Treize ran an exercise studio for women, teaching calisthenics and weightlifting. Treize tried to get Kiki to partake, but as she’d explained to Treize after another exhausting failure, “I can do it, but my ass won’t move.”
In a photograph Treize took that summer, Kiki smiles broadly as, bare-armed and barefoot, she tosses out a pail of water into the Hôtel Raspail’s sun-dappled courtyard. Treize took another in the courtyard of Kiki in a wooden chair, balancing a canvas on her lap, holding it with one hand and painting on it with the other. She looks happy in this shot, too, sitting stiff-backed in her smock by an ivy wall. More striking than her smile is the look in her eyes, fixed intently on something or someone in the distance, not shown in the photo, a look that calls to mind Simone Weil’s definition of prayer as nothing more than “absolutely unmixed attention.”
This wasn’t the first time Treize caught Kiki in a moment of joy on camera. A couple of years earlier she’d taken a picture of Kiki in Brittany, likely using a Kodak Brownie or other inexpensive handheld camera using roll film that had been in common use since the turn of the century, giving millions of people like her and Kiki the newfound power to document their travels. Mass access to photography was then helping to spur the growth of mass tourism, and vice versa, as people sought ever more picturesque settings in front of which to display themselves for the camera.
Aside from Kiki’s nudity, Treize’s Brittany photograph has all the familiarity and ease of a snapshot. Smiling, wearing nothing, on a grassy ridge overlooking the ocean, Kiki leans back so that her hands, pressed to the ground, support her weight, her left hand visible, fingers splayed, the resistance pushing her shoulder up to graze against her cheek. Her calves and feet curl beneath her thighs, shielded by vegetation. There’s a beach in the distance fronting the low-slung structures of a town’s edge. Beyond that the horizon line under a cloudless sky.
Of all the pictures taken of Kiki, this is the one where she looks most comfortable in her own skin. She’s still posing, unable to resist thinking of how her positioning will influence the final image, an occupational hazard. But the result looks completely natural. She smiles for no other reason than to show her pleasure, her happiness for the day, her surroundings, and her friend. She lies naked not to become The Nude but because it’s warm and she feels like it. She looks freed from concern for anything beyond the person in front of her, and for how the grass and sun feel to her, and what she smells, and what she hears. In so many photographs and paintings of women from those years, the subjects are meant to look unmoored, aimless, pining for some other place. Kiki doesn’t pine. She meets the camera head on and bursts out laughing. She gives herself to Treize’s camera freely, just as she will later offer the recording of this moment to another friend as a gift.
Kiki sent a print of the photo from Brittany to Kisling, with the inscription, “To my very dear Kiki Kisling. In love, I give myself to you” a declaration seemingly meant platonically, as they’d been friends for years. Kisling kept the picture but scratched out the inscription’s last sentence. He was apparently a devoted husband and father. “I was no worse a husband than any other,” Kisling said of marriage, with his usual dryness. And Kiki adored Kisling’s wife, Renée Gros, who according to Kiki had the best laugh in Paris. So it seems unlikely that Treize and Kiki were trying to produce a work of art meant for public display when they made it.
And yet it is among the finest portraits of Kiki. To look at Treize’s photograph alongside all Man Ray’s photographs of Kiki is to try to understand what the artist Dora Maar meant when she spoke of her own posing for Pablo Picasso, with whom she was involved in the 1930s and ’40s.
“All his portraits of me are lies. They’re all Picassos. Not one is Dora Maar.”
Kiki in that summer with Treize at the Hôtel Raspail produced many paintings. The majority concerned village life. Conjuring memories of the countryside from her Paris studio, she portrayed peasant women feeding fat-cheeked babies; sailors in taverns; a street peddler hawking his wares; circus performers; luminous washerwomen; wandering musicians; a farmhand on his day off. She never reduced subjects to oddities or romanticized them as types. She saw her people rather than watched them. And she examined herself as well. Some of Kiki’s dark-haired female figures look to be self-portraits, if more figurative than literal. In one she pulled directly from her pose for Treize in Brittany.
Connecting all the images is her style. Her lines are clean, joyful, and unguarded, her colors vivid, her outlook forgiving, even nostalgic, occasionally bordering on surreal, with exaggerated human features and eerie, impossible angles. The sunny skies pulse with a blue you could fly into. The foregrounds, earthy browns and leafy greens, are populated by people out of scale with their surroundings, as when a child draws herself as big as a house. Kiki often turns her figures to stand at a forty-five-degree angle relative to the viewer, like theater actors who cheat toward the audience as much as possible while still engaging with each other across the stage. One sees in the number of paintings and their variety that Kiki is honing her vision, learning through the work, even as the overall effect is one of effortlessness.
Along with her village scenes, Kiki painted people closer at hand: Cocteau; La Tarare; and least successfully Man Ray, looking more cartoon vampire than human. Modigliani’s influence is there in Kiki’s impossibly slim faces with close-set eyes and in the lightness of her lines—“supremely elegant . . . the mere ghost of a line, but it is never blurred,” as Cocteau described Modigliani’s strokes. The portraits read primarily as documentations of her neighborhood and her scene. When she focuses on lone sitters, she places them as close to the viewer as you might stand when talking to a good friend. It’s as if the portrait has served as an excuse for Kiki to make a connection, to sit across from someone and soak in everything they say and do. In paintings featuring several people, she’s more often at a remove. Still, she places her subjects on the same plane relative to the viewer, so that you feel part of the crowd, looking neither up at nor down on these people.
Whether portraits or pastorals, Kiki stripped all her pictures down to the basics, reminding the viewer, through everything she chose to omit, that much of the modern world is unnecessary. She focused on life’s essentials: affection, music, friendship, dancing, food, wine, adventure, nature, labor, beauty, sex.
Along with her work, Kiki had fun while Man Ray was away. She was out at her favorite cafés, enjoying seeing friends. The Surrealist writer Jean Gegenbach, who’d taken to donning ecclesiastical clothing, half as a prank and half in hoping a religious turn would help him combat his suicidal despair, spent time with her on the terraces. He recounted how a certain “fat and Polish monsieur, Catholic, was outraged to see a young clergyman, roses in his boutonnière, sipping his cherry brandy in the company of Kiki Ray. But I reminded him that the Christ never shunned the company of courtesans.”
And yet Treize remembered, too, the late afternoons when Kiki could grow melancholy, singing and crying along to Ethel Waters’s “Dinah,” one of the year’s hits, which she played again and again on Treize’s phonograph.
Dinah
Is there anyone finer
In the state of Carolina?
If there is and you know her
Show her . . .
At summer’s end, Kiki and Per Krohg hosted an informal joint exhibition at the Hôtel Raspail, held in the building’s ground-floor antique shop. (Two years later Kiki would pose for Krohg, who titled the painting The Model Kiki.) Their show failed to make a mark in the press or with the public beyond their few square blocks. We don’t know how many paintings were sold, if any. Yet it was important as the first known instance of Kiki showing her work publicly. The show gave way to a raucous block party that night. Man Ray, still off filming, wasn’t there.
A few months later, in late November, Man Ray screened Emak Bakia at the Théâtre du Vieux Colombier, an art house theater in the sixth arrondissement. A jazz band accompanied his film (or cinépoeme, as he’d advertised it) for a mildly enthused audience of about fifty, including Kiki and the Wheelers.
The film opens with a self-portrait, Man Ray in profile cranking the works of a movie camera while a woman’s eye is reflected in the mechanism. It ends with a woman sleeping, though jarringly so because she has wide-open eyes painted in makeup onto her closed eyelids, which suddenly open to reveal her actual eyes, opened just long enough so that when paired with her sharp-toothed grin she’s recognizable as Kiki. She glances to one side, brings her gaze back to center, and returns to her closed-lids-with-false-eyes masquerade, a visual evocation of the Surrealist séances and their exploration of the slippery line between wake and slumber. Man Ray said he’d gotten the idea for Kiki’s “double awakening” from her “penchant for excessive makeup.”
Seeking American affirmation for his film, he and Kiki traveled to New York in February 1927 to screen Emak Bakia at Manhattan’s Guild Theater, Man Ray’s first time back in six years. His family came to the screening. His five-year-old niece reported being disturbed by the images.
The group went postscreening to the family house on Kosciuszko Street. In pictures from the evening, Kiki, surrounded by Man Ray’s relations, looks to be enjoying herself immensely, despite (or thanks to) the language barrier. In one photo she sits on Max’s lap. And Minnie appreciated how chivalrously her son acted in Kiki’s presence. Later they popped around the corner to Quincy Street, where Man Ray’s sister Do lived with her husband, Israel, and their children. Sister-in-law Lena, wife of Man Ray’s soft-spoken brother Sam, called to tell them she was getting dinner ready for everyone but had misplaced her soup ladle and asked could Do bring one over. They all walked up DeKalb Avenue, Kiki leading the way, waving the silver ladle in her hand, conducting as the group sang the Marseillaise. She pulled up her skirts to jump over a fire hydrant, which the kids loved, passing a bemused policeman.
Leaving Man Ray in New York, where he would continue promoting Emak Bakia and show some paintings and photographs at the Daniel Gallery, Kiki returned to France, having received favorable reviews from his family. Emak Bakia fared less well. The New Republic’s critic called it boring, “gone straight to hell with good intentions.”
Shortly after returning to Paris, Kiki secured her first solo show, at the Au Sacre du Printemps gallery near the Saint-Sulpice church. A rumpled Polish musician and writer, Jan Sliwinski, ran the boxy storefront space, which also sold books, musical instruments, and sheet music. He had named it for his hero Stravinsky’s seminal work.
Sliwinski had likely attended Kiki’s show with Krohg, enjoyed her work, and approached her about a solo showing. It’s also possible their mutual friend Tzara suggested Kiki to Sliwinski as a worthy candidate for an exhibition.
“Paintings by KiKi, Alice Prin” read the flyer, listing the twenty-seven canvases to go on display, starting March 25, 1927. Kiki titled each one as prosaically as possible. Woman Doing Her Hair; The Chickens’ Meal; Child with Bananas; Sailors; 2 Nude Women and 2 Men; A Cow Between 2 Women; The Street Vendor. She wrote no artist’s statement. The paintings were hung in cheap-looking, mismatched frames.
Desnos penned an introduction for the gallery catalog, titling it “Life of Kiki: To Man Ray.” He opened the piece by asking Kiki the one question that, in all her years of being looked at, no one else had asked.
You have, my dear Kiki such beautiful eyes, that the world you see through them must be beautiful. What do you see?
In an age of irony, and at the center of a community of artists who wore their sense of detachment like a badge, Kiki with her paintings outdid them all for provocation. She went for the heart. Nothing in her pictures is pale, little is shaded. They are suffused with sadness, but only because they try so hard to deny there is such a thing as sadness altogether. Which makes them, in their own way, dangerous. By fighting against sadness, Kiki’s paintings take on a madcap quality, blatant in their desire for peace and happiness and blue skies. She presents the most dangerous idea of all: tenderness. She wants to evoke genuine sentiment, without any hedges, or guile, or winking asides. Her paintings ask, with no sense of embarrassment: isn’t the world such a beautiful place?
“The habitués of the Quarter” packed in for opening night, according to the Paris Tribune. “They came in a steady stream, and the little gallery seethed with excited comments. It was, so far as we know, the most successful vernissage of the year. Those who came to smile remained to buy, and before the night was over, a large number of the canvases were decorated with little white sold cards.” Kiki charmed one of the night’s notable guests, the minister of the interior, Albert Sarrault, a radical socialist and art collector. “You’re a good guy, but you’re out of place with all those stupid ministers,” she told him. “Come and live with us, and you can pose for me.” A reporter overheard talk of sending the pictures to Berlin for another showing.
By the end of the exhibit’s run—March 25 to April 9—every familiar face in the neighborhood had passed through, along with even more strangers. The British journalist Sisley Huddleston described the show as “the sensation not only of Montparnasse but tout Paris.” And Kiki sold all twenty-seven works. Henri-Pierre Roché likely bought some of them. The influential Viennese collector Frederick “Fritz” Wolff-Knize reportedly bought one, too. And two works had already been sold prior to showing and were on loan: the portrait of La Tarare, owned by its subject, and La Charrette (The Cart), owned by Théodore Fraenkel, the physician and artist who’d written to testify about Kiki’s nerves for her trial. She may have given it to him as a gift in return for his help.
Aside from a few quibbles, Kiki got good reviews. Janet Flanner wrote that the show left her with an “impression of simplicity, faith, and tenderness.” One of the city’s weekly arts and culture guides deemed Kiki’s colors undeniably beautiful, capable of evoking meadows after rainfall, even though, as the critic wrote, they looked as though they’d been applied with about as much care as a baby sticking alphabet letters into a book. Huddleston, even while deciding that Kiki’s skill must have come thanks to mentorship by the men in her life rather than from some internal gift, praised her “simple amusing paintings” as being “worth as much as many of the paintings of professional artists who sophisticatedly pretended to react against sophistication.”
At the time, the major artist with whom Kiki’s style and coloring most closely aligned, Henri Matisse, was still struggling to sell paintings. The boldness of his vision was still too raw for most tastes. Kiki’s paintings have much the same boldness, with less of their skillfulness. It is worth considering if some of Kiki’s buyers may have been partially driven by more than the beauty of the paintings. Some may also have been receptive to her subject matter, the work and pleasures of the field and the table, of special appeal to urbanites sharing in the enduring French romance with its countryside, the place to escape everything wrong with industrial capitalism. Some buyers might also have valued these pictures as the closest thing they could get to documents of Kiki’s performances. Seeking some way to pin down this increasingly public personality, they might have been thinking ahead, betting that these pictures by Kiki would one day be worth a great deal of money.
There’s a photo from the show’s opening night of Kiki posing for a Montparnasse-based photographer. Standing in front of one of her canvases, she wears a fur-trimmed coat, and while she smiles in so many pictures, her smile here is enormous. Likely meant to accompany a newspaper item, it was taken by André Kertesz, who’d moved to Paris in 1925, one among several Hungarian artists drawn to the Quarter after war’s end. He titled his print of the photo “The Famous Model Kiki.” At the time working freelance for magazines, still a long way from establishing himself as one of the century’s great photographers, Kertesz was also starting to gain recognition in Paris thanks to his own first solo show. It closed at Au Sacre du Printemps three days before Kiki’s opened.
Along with Kertesz’s exhibit, the other solo show at the gallery bookending Kiki’s showcased yet another Paris-based photographer on her way to becoming a major modern artist, Berenice Abbott. She’d modeled for Man Ray several times in New York, including for one of his earliest Dada photographs, Portmanteau, in 1920, standing nude behind a mannequin designed to obscure only Abbott’s face, head, shoulders, and arms. In 1923, after she’d moved to Paris, Man Ray had hired her as a studio assistant, paying meager wages (25 francs a day, equivalent to $1.50) while she worked, in her words, “like a dog,” handling everything from mixing chemicals to developing negatives and making proofs, enlarging or cropping as needed, while honing her own craft. Like Man Ray, and Stieglitz before them, Abbott in her own work would do much to advance the idea that the photographer’s ability to conceive of an arresting image was as paramount as her technical mastery.
Lately Abbott had secured financial backing from Peggy Guggenheim, infuriating Man Ray, who continued to think of her as his protégée. He’d barred her from shooting Guggenheim after the latter requested her portrait be done by Abbott rather than by him, which led her to strike out on her own. Abbott’s show at Au Sacre du Printemps featured portraits of some of the same people he’d photographed (Barnes, Cocteau, Joyce) and got press notices he found enraging.
Man Ray would eventually get to show some of his work at Au Sacre du Printemps, too. But he did so a full year after Kiki, Abbott, and Kertesz, and only as part of a group exhibit, alongside major artists Hans Arp, Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, Georges Malkine, André Masson, Francis Picabia, and Yves Tanguy.
Kiki made no mention of the Au Sacre du Printemps show in any of her writing. We can only speculate about what she wanted out of it, and how she felt about its success. Was it her bid to join the Montparnasse crowd of painters, declaring herself more than a cabaret performer but an artist worthy of the same kind of admiration and critique given to Vassilieff, or Kisling, or Man Ray? Or did it have nothing at all to do with how she saw herself in relation to Man Ray, or anyone else in her orbit? Maybe she wanted only to express herself, to reveal herself to her friends and strangers in a way she couldn’t do through any other means, to communicate the joy she felt for living at that particular time in that particular place.
Clearly moving out of one space dominated by Man Ray and into another shared with someone who was neither mentor nor rival energized her in some way. It might simply have been that in those summer months of 1926 she finally had the time and space to process everything she’d seen and learned over the past few years—and to process the traumas of the repeated abandonments to which she’d been subjected. Maybe, like just about everyone she knew, she was looking for another way to earn her living. There was a lot money being spent around Paris on art just then, as the art market was starting to boom.
Man Ray described Kiki’s works in his memoir as “naïve but boldly brushed in, the drawing heightened by strong pencil lines, the colors bright and fresh . . . rural scenes with peasants, circus scenes and strong men at fairs, portraits of painters and girl friends.” He noted how when artists stopped by the studio, she would occasionally paint their portraits, and that some would buy them from her. He was meanwhile proud of her being the “main attraction” at the Jockey with her “naughty French songs,” and acknowledged that she’d made “some interesting snapshots” with his camera that he’d enlarged.
But he stopped well short of acknowledging her as anything close to an artistic peer. He denigrated her practice, claiming (without any supporting evidence) that she’d turned to painting only as a way to fight off boredom and because he’d offered to buy everything she made. His diminishing Kiki as an artist cannot be attributed solely to his misogyny; he considered photographer Germaine Krull, for instance, as a colleague and equal.
He described Kiki’s show as though it were something that had merely happened to her: “An exhibition was arranged for Kiki at a local gallery.” And while he wrote that “all Montparnasse turned out for the opening—it was a great success, both artistically and financially—most of the pictures were sold,” he failed to mention that Kiki’s reach stretched well beyond the neighborhood crowd or that in truth she sold not “most of” but all the pictures on display.
He hadn’t been there to see it, in any case. He returned to Paris from New York in late April 1927, after her run had ended. Still, the event clearly held some significance for him. He was likely prouder—and more envious of Kiki’s skill—than he let on. Discovered among his papers after his death were clipped reviews for the show. And among the collection of his negatives he stored for decades in cigar boxes were several photographs documenting Kiki’s paintings.
Whether or not Kiki’s paintings merit standing alongside the canonical artists from that time and place, they make clear that by the summer of 1926, she was starting to see herself as more than a model and singer. She’d been formulating her own ideas about what constituted an effective image, her own ways of seeing and representing the world, which must also have influenced how she tried to shape herself into becoming the images she helped other artists to produce.
Unlike with Man Ray, we have no abundance of words to quote about how Kiki felt about her own art making, about what aims she had when producing her pictures, what they might have meant to her, what she hoped they might mean to others. In all her autobiographical writing, she devoted only a single sentence to her paintings, a tidbit about Cocteau, in which she said that she painted his portrait from memory, that “a few people thought it wasn’t bad,” and that it was sold to someone in London.
Whatever thoughts Kiki had about those two seasons alone in Paris, free to make and show her paintings, she kept them to herself.