Kiki Man Ray

'Exuberantly entertaining' NYT Book Review
'Mark Braude's writing and subject make this book irresistible, as was Kiki
herself.' Jim Jarmusch
'A delightful, marvelously readable, meticulously-researched romp of a book,
Kiki Man Ray brings to life not just the kaleidoscopically talented Kiki
herself, but the endlessly fascinating Montparnasse milieu over which she
reigned.' Whitney Scharer, author of THE AGE OF LIGHT

Though many have never heard her name, Alice Prin - Kiki de Montparnasse - was
the icon of 1920s Paris. She captivated as a ground-breaking nightclub
performer, wrote a bestselling memoir, sold out exhibitions of her paintings,
and shared drinks and ideas with the likes of Pablo Picasso, Peggy Guggenheim,
and Marcel Duchamp. She also shepherded along the career of a then-unknown
American photographer: Man Ray.

Following Kiki in the years between 1921 and 1929, when she lived and worked
with Man Ray, Kiki Man Ray charts their complicated entanglement and reveals
how Man Ray - always the unabashed careerist - went on to become one of the
most famous photographers of the twentieth century, enjoying wealth and
prestige, while Kiki's legacy was lost.

But this isn't a story of an overbearing male genius and his defeated muse.
During the 1920s it was Kiki, not Man Ray, who was the brighter of the two
rising stars and a powerful figure among the close-knit community of models,
painters, writers and café wastrels who made their homes in gritty
Montparnasse. Following the couple as they created art, struggled for power
and competed for fame, Kiki Man Ray illuminates for the first time Kiki's
seminal influence on the culture of 1920s Paris, and challenges ideas about
artists and muses, and the lines separating the two.

'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