Details

ISBN-10: 1324006013
ISBN-13: 9781324006015
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Publish Date: 08/09/2022
Dimensions: 8.30" L, 6.00" W, 1.10" H

Kiki Man Ray: Art, Love, and Rivalry in 1920s Paris

Hardcover

Price: $30.00

Overview

In freewheeling 1920s Paris, Kiki de Montparnasse captivated as a nightclub performer, sold out gallery showings of her paintings, starred in Surrealist films, and shared drinks and ideas with the likes of Jean Cocteau and Marcel Duchamp. Her best-selling memoir–featuring an introduction by Ernest Hemingway–made front-page news in France and was immediately banned in America. All before she turned thirty.

Kiki was once the symbol of bohemian Paris. But if she is remembered today, it is only for posing for several now-celebrated male artists, including Amedeo Modigliani and Alexander Calder, and especially photographer Man Ray. Why has Man Ray’s legacy endured while Kiki has become a footnote?

Kiki and Man Ray met in 1921 during a chance encounter at a café. What followed was an explosive decade-long connection, both professional and romantic, during which the couple grew and experimented as artists, competed for fame, and created many of the shocking images that cemented Man Ray’s reputation as one of the great artists of the modern era. The works they made together, including the Surrealist icons Le Violon d’Ingres and Noire et blanche, now set records at auction.

Charting their volatile relationship, award-winning historian Mark Braude illuminates for the first time Kiki’s seminal influence not only on Man Ray’s art, but on the culture of 1920s Paris and beyond. As provocative and magnetically irresistible as Kiki herself, Kiki Man Ray is the story of an exceptional life that will challenge ideas about artists and muses–and the lines separating the two.

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Reviews
Kiki de Montparnasse was more than a muse–she was a vivacious, independent woman whose talent and magnetism helped make Paris the center of the art world in the 1920s. In Mark Braude's riveting cultural history, the Queen of Montparnasse rises again. This is a lively and compassionate tribute to the chanteuse, model, and portraitist who held center stage in her life, and who inspired some of the finest Surrealist art of the twentieth century.–Heather Clark, author of Pulitzer Prize-finalist Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath
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Details

ISBN-10: 1324006013
ISBN-13: 9781324006015
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Publish Date: 08/09/2022
Dimensions: 8.30" L, 6.00" W, 1.10" H
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