Kiki Man Ray by Mark Braude

Author:Mark Braude [Braude, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781324006022
Publisher: Norton
Published: 2022-06-29T00:00:00+00:00

16

KIKI WITH AFRICAN MASK

Early 1926. There are three of them in the room: Kiki, Man Ray, and George Sakier, recently hired as junior art director for Vogue, whose French edition had launched six years earlier. Sakier’s family had lived near the Radnitzkys in Brooklyn. He used to play tennis with Man Ray’s youngest sister, Elsie. He’d moved to Paris not long after Man Ray, longing to become a great painter or designer.

They have no directive to peg the image to any specific cultural event, nor to display any clothing from one of the magazine’s advertisers. They’re free to experiment. Sakier has brought a mask of polished wood, as tall as a human head but half the width. Skilled carvers of the Baule peoples of the Ivory Coast make similar-looking masks to praise a specific woman’s beauty or dancing skill, or as a commission to honor a particular woman. Dancers donned such masks for performances, but only if the mask’s “double,” the woman portrayed, was present to witness the masquerade. Maybe Sakier’s mask is an original imported from the Ivory Coast, at that time a French colony. More likely it was produced with the tourist trade in mind, an inexpensive mass-made replica of some original piece or newly created to mimic the style of Baule portraits masks. (The mask they used for the photo has been lost for decades.)

For a fashion editor, photographer, and model to come up with the idea of presenting a European woman as modern and alluring through her interaction with some aspect of African culture is hardly a radical move by this time in Paris. Industrial capitalism has led people astray, and Western civilization is in decline, goes the local logic, and white modern artists must look far beyond their homes for vital inspiration. There are so many precedents from which Man Ray, Kiki, and Sakier may be drawing: Paul Gauguin’s fever dreams of Brittany and Tahiti; Rousseau’s jungle scenes (conjured by a man who never left France); Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon. Critics, collectors, and other artists in their circle have started to amass collections of African objects. The influential dealer and critic Paul Guillaume writes in his magazine, Les arts de Paris, about “The Discovery and Appreciation of Primitive Negro Sculpture,” which in his view has revitalized the spirit of European art, until then “menaced by extinction.”

But if primitivism is by 1926 a well-worn concept, Kiki, Man Ray, and Sakier are taking it into a new realm. Rather than providing the fodder for a painting or an object, they’re channeling such thinking into a photograph, a recording of reality, if staged as a Surrealist juxtaposition: “civilized” white woman and “primitive” Black mask.

To the three of them, the mask may be no more than a piece of useful ephemera to offer up to the camera’s insatiable eye. Maybe they see it as a flea market find, no different from an obscure jazz record discovered at the back of a crate, or a Eugène Atget print of a desolate

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