A dangerous liaison that lit up the Roaring Twenties

Kiki Man Ray: Art, Love And Rivalry In 1920s Paris Mark Braude

Two Roads £20

★★★★★

The French refer to the Roaring Twenties as the ‘Années Folles’ – the crazy years, a period when Paris fizzed with creative, social and moral mayhem. And no one epitomised this frenzy more than Kiki de Montparnasse (far right), the lover of Man Ray (above right). She was painted by Modigliani and sculpted by Alexander Calder, and was one of the most famous Parisian barflies of the inter-war years.

As Mark Braude highlights in his racy, pacy survey of her escapades, Kiki’s childhood gave no clues to her being a future cultural siren. She was born Alice Ernestine Prin in 1901 and raised by her grandmother in abject poverty but rural contentment in the backwaters of eastern France.

Moving to Paris as a teenager was a harsh awakening. She struggled to earn a living – during the First World War she disinfected the boots of dead soldiers – and was reduced to sleeping in outhouses and fending off flashers. She roamed about the city wearing ‘a man’s hat, an old cape and shoes three sizes too big’. The cultural hothouse of Montparnasse, the quarter that elbowed out Montmartre as a destination for delinquents, provided a haven. ‘The painters adopted me,’ she noted. ‘End of sad times.’ She became a model, painter, singer, memoirist and confidante to the avant-garde, a dizzying itinerary even for a woman with her oomph. She caught Man Ray’s eye in 1921 by dancing a jig on a cafe table and, having accepted an invitation to pose for his camera, rolled into his bed on the second shoot.

They made a dubious match. Kiki was a figure of unfettered allure and extraordi

nary resilience. Her almond-shaped eyes and candy-twist lips gave her an almost celestial appeal, amplified and underpinned by an unwavering confidence. Man Ray was the squat son of a Brooklyn tailor who ‘talked from the side of his mouth, like some hardboiled detective’. However, he also possessed a reputation for creating a cool kind of chaos with his Dadaist pictures.

Man Ray’s photographs of Kiki – like the cheeky Le Violon D’Ingres – became a sensation and she was soon drawing crowds performing saucy cabaret songs in a voice one audience member likened to that of a vegetable hawker. But trouble brewed: Man Ray resented her fame and she drank and got into brawls (she was once arrested for smacking a policeman with her make-up case).

In Braude’s snappy prose, their dangerous romance plays out like a Netflix series. Familiar territory is given a dynamic reframing as the action cuts from makeshift studios to seedy hotel rooms to prison cells, like a whistle-stop sequence of drone shots.

While the couple’s doomed eight-year love affair remains the engine of the book, Montparnasse is as much of a character. The quarter, Braude explains, ‘clarified class and cultural boundaries by letting people, especially middleclass Parisians, experiment with breaking the rules so that they could ultimately be reminded that most of them were not rule breakers’. But Kiki and Man Ray disrupted everything they touched. Not least each other.