After Kiki’s death, Laroque tried finding a publisher for the revised version of her memoirs, which he still had carefully stored in the original envelope from 1938. He connected with André Breton’s agent at one point, but they found no takers for the manuscript.
More than fifty years after Kiki’s death, when a Parisian property changed hands, someone discovered among dozens of cardboard boxes one labeled “Infinitely Precious.”
Inside was an envelope bearing the mark of the French tax bureau and an assertion in bold penciled letters:
de KiKi
Souvenirs
plus photos
Laroque (and Kiki when she was still living) apparently never discovered that three years before Kiki’s death her original memoir had been publicly reissued without her permission.
In 1950 a New York huckster named Samuel Roth published a book titled The Education of a French Model: Kiki’s Memoirs. It was a reproduction of the 1930 Titus edition, reprinted word for word, complete with Hemingway’s introduction. Referencing Titus’s imprint At the Sign of the Black Mannikin, Roth invented his own, At the Sign of the Boar’s Head. This was one among a revolving set of imprint names he used to keep a step ahead of postal inspectors looking to charge him for various obscenity-related infractions. (Titles in Roth’s catalogs around this time: American Aphrodite; Her Candle Burns Hot; I Was Hitler’s Doctor.) He’d been subject to police raids ever since publishing unauthorized excerpts from Joyce’s Ulysses in America in 1927, making him the subject of an international protest.
By the time Roth put out The Education of a French Model, he was a pariah of the New York publishing world, with a few prison stints in his past. He felt safe publishing the book because he knew the authorities had confiscated the original shipment of Kiki’s Memoirs twenty years earlier, meaning her writing never received a proper American copyright. (Hemingway and Titus had, however, made sure that Hemingway’s introduction did receive an American copyright, so its inclusion in the bootlegged version was a bolder risk).
The Education of a French Model’s saucy cover teased that inside “Kiki tells ALL, including an attempt on the virtue of her grandmother by an American soldier.” Savvy readers would have known the words “French Model” promised titillation, with “French” a winking code for any kind of arty erotica. The book did feature a few images of nude women, with no connection to Kiki, though they were captioned as being some of Kiki’s friends.
Roth published a softcover fifty-cent edition of The Education of a French Model in 1955, shortly before being charged with twenty-six counts of obscenity relating to other publications, resulting in a five-year sentence in federal prison. As with the previous edition, the cover illustration looks nothing like Kiki. The jacket copy now adds the false claim that she started posing nude at the age of twelve. And in this edition Roth included an additional ten chapters. They were introduced as having been written by Kiki as the sequel to her original memoirs, though in truth Roth invented them out of nothing. And they’re bizarre. In the new chapters, Kiki contemplates suicide along the Seine before befriending a talking fish, then travels with the fish to New York, more than a quarter-century after her original visit, where she meets Hemingway, the Radio City Rockettes (one of whom marries the talking fish), and Samuel Roth himself.
Roth lived into his eighties. Having arrived on New York’s Lower East Side as a four-year-old Galician immigrant, he sold enough copies of titles like The Education of a French Model over the decades to retire in a comfortable, book-lined apartment on Central Park West.
In 1971 Helen Faden, daughter of Man Ray’s brother Sam, went to Paris to seek out the uncle she’d last seen half a century earlier, when she was a child and he a young man about to sail for Europe for the first time. Faden found Man Ray frail, his back bent from scoliosis, and initially as cold as his cavernous studio. As they talked, seated across from each other uncomfortably on a couch, he made her promise to never tell journalists about “any family history.” She’d brought some pictures of their relatives. What finally drew them together was when she showed him a scratchy print of a photograph, the studio stamp beneath the image announcing in the natty cursive of another era: Goodman, 191 Broadway B’lyn, N.Y.
The photo was of Emmanuel Radnitzky, aged thirteen, standing proudly in his woolen bar mitzvah suit, the bottom half of the suit not of full pants but knickerbockers, his left arm pressed to his hip so that the elbow flares out to best display his prayer shawl, the fringes falling to his thighs, his right hand gripping a siddur, the Jewish book of prayer, or a reasonable stand-in. He wears a defiant look, betrayed somewhat by the mischief around the edges of his dark eyes, his face carefully lit so that its right half is shadowed and its left exposed to the light, perfectly bisected between darkness and light.
Man Ray grabbed the photograph from his niece’s hands and then hugged her tightly, their first touch since the formal handshake with which he’d welcomed her. “This is so nostalgic!” he told her, and said that he would like to keep it. In return he gave her another picture made long before, and also loaded with meaning. A photograph (we don’t know which one) of Kiki.
Closing his chapter on Kiki in his memoir, Self Portrait, Man Ray wrote, “I have resented the death of many friends: not blaming the inhumanity of society so much—in many cases it was mainly the individual’s fault—as feeling that the departure of a being who had been close to me was a sort of evasion, a betrayal.” This is among the least guarded statements about another person Man Ray made in his book, one in which by his own admission he was “the only one in it who is sharp; everyone else is out of focus.”
After Man Ray’s death in November 1976, a photo of his and Juliet’s studio showed a sculpted likeness of Kiki hanging on one wall, presumably crafted by Man Ray. After Juliet’s death in 1991, archivists found, neatly stored among Man Ray’s archives, clippings from Kiki’s 1927 gallery debut and an inscribed copy of the Titus edition of Kiki’s Memoirs.
Man Ray and Juliet Man Ray lie in the Montparnasse cemetery, not far from the grave of Samuel Beckett, with the tombs of Baudelaire, Brancusi, Desnos, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, and other luminaries close by. Man Ray’s grave was vandalized in 2019, motivations unclear, though anti-Semitism is suspected.
Kiki’s grave in the Thiais paupers’ vault was vacated in February 1974. In Châtillon-sur-Seine, a plaque commemorates her life, marking the house in which she was born (actually a reconstructed version of the original structure, destroyed in World War II). The town also boasts the Kiki de Montparnasse performance space and park, which houses a local theater group. And since 2015, at the southern edge of the fourteenth arrondissement in Paris, an area that could generously be called Outer Montparnasse, there is a 112-room retirement home run by the city’s social welfare center: Résidence Alice Prin, dite Kiki de Montparnasse.
“Kiki dominated that era [from 1919 to 1929] of Montparnasse more than Queen Victoria ever dominated the Victorian era.” This according to Hemingway in Kiki’s Memoirs. While he may have been exaggerating the extent of her reach to make his point, it wasn’t by much. Kiki did hold a kind of sovereignty. So long as she could find some way to eat and had a place to sleep, she bowed to no power greater than her own desires.
But Hemingway’s “dominated” is the wrong word for what Kiki did in Montparnasse. Too forceful. “Experienced” hits closer to the mark. For a few years after the First World War, Kiki experienced her time in Montparnasse as intensely as anyone whose life unfolded alongside hers. She paid attention to everyone and everything around her, watching closely, listening carefully, and then tried to communicate some of what she’d learned through her writing, her posing, her acting, her drawing and painting, and through her performing on the cabaret stage.
And as she experienced her era and channeled that experience into her art, Kiki shared drinks and cigarettes and ideas with many of the people who would shape how their century saw and thought and spoke: Modigliani, Stein, Picasso, Barnes, Matisse, Guggenheim, Calder, Duchamp, Breton, Cocteau, Flanner, Hemingway. And Man Ray, whose emergence as a modern artist must be understood as intimately linked to her own.
Kiki didn’t dominate any of these people. But she did influence them, as they influenced her. Evolving in concert with them, watching them become who they were, challenging them and joking with them, working with them and through them, Kiki, too, played her role in shaping the cultural history of the past hundred years.
Kiki as much as anyone in her circle anticipated our moment by embracing the Wildean idea of treating her life as an ongoing work of art, and by going further than Oscar Wilde himself in turning her daily problems and pleasures and those of her friends into an interconnected and ongoing story to be consumed across several media. With her confessional writing, her paintings and drawings, her performances on stages and screens and in coverage by the mass press, in her audio recordings, and in posing for so many portraits, Kiki, without knowing it, helped to invent the idea that you could present several heightened and more colorful versions of yourself as a single, coherent piece of entertainment. She presented herself how she wanted, when she wanted, and in whatever forum she felt like. Kiki was a reality star for surreal times. She didn’t dominate an era. She created her own era, on her own schedule.
Kiki undoubtedly functioned as Man Ray’s muse in a traditional sense. She inspired his work through her physical presence, her erotic charms, her joyfulness, and her mental quickness, and because through their mutual attraction and romantic engagement, she let him escape for short bursts of time from the jail of himself. Though Man Ray was not a great photographer of Paris, he was the greatest photographer of one particular parisienne, by way of Châtillon-sur-Seine. But if Kiki functioned as a muse to Man Ray, could it also have been because he saw her as a rival, someone who sparked his creativity chiefly by provoking professional jealousy? Perhaps Man Ray, despite his dismissive statements to the contrary, did in truth recognize that Kiki’s experiments, in their various forms, were as unexpected and innovative as any of his. And that while he often spoke of the need for total liberty in his art, he on some level recognized that Kiki, because she was less concerned with money and reputation, was the artist among the two of them who was truly free.
Perhaps Man Ray in some way served as one of Kiki’s muses as well. Perhaps the “drama” of their relationship, as she put it, helped fuel her desire to create new art. Perhaps watching what he did behind cameras and in the studio and darkroom, seeing how he told his stories through the manipulation of light, shadow, form, and movement, informed how Kiki thought about her painting, performing, and writing.
The traces of Kiki that have accrued over the past century don’t amount to much. That she was a woman partly accounts for her relative erasure from the history of modern art. But she also remains underappreciated because so little of her creative output ever existed as products to be bought or sold. Aside from a few dozen paintings, her short book in its original and revised forms, some film performances adding up to less than an hour of footage, a few vinyl recordings amounting to less than half an hour, and the representations of her likeness by other artists, all we have to go on are memories and speculations. Kiki’s best work was her most ephemeral.
A perfectly timed pause that makes everyone in a nightclub go still in uneasy anticipation isn’t something you can trademark and bottle. You can’t sell a dance at auction. You can’t sell a pose.
You can, however, sell a photographer’s recording of a pose. In 2017 Christie’s Paris sold a print of the 1926 work Noire et blanche, attributed to Man Ray, showing an unnamed young woman with closed eyes holding a mask from the Ivory Coast, for more than $3 million, the highest price ever paid at auction for an early twentieth-century photograph.