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Lot Essay
I paint what cannot be photographed and I photograph what I do not wish to paint. Man Ray
Although celebrated for his photographic practice, it was in fact painting that first engaged Man Ray, né Emmanuel Radnitsky, a visionary par excellence. In New York City, where he grew up, Man Ray studied architecture, engineering, and mechanical drafting in high school, but ultimately wanted to become a painter. Visiting the Armory Show in 1913 gave him the courage to take on larger and more radical compositions, and he worked for the rest of the decade on his paintings while dreaming of success and of Europe and its avant-garde. After receiving support from his parents and $500 from the collector Fernand Howald, he set sail for France in July of 1921. Once there, Man Ray installed himself in a small room on rue de la Condamine next door to where his friend Marcel Duchamp was living. Thus began his Paris years.
Through Duchamp, Man Ray was introduced to the Dadaists, and although keen to continue painting, he began to photograph the artists and writers that comprised the city’s avant-garde, including André Breton, Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, and Henri Matisse, among countless others. The “excellence of these portraits” came from Man Ray’s “acute understanding of the way that a character resides in the shape of a head and the manner in which the events of a life are engraved on a face,” a sensitivity that underpins his Portrait de Kiki. Painted in 1923, Portrait de Kiki is an eloquent, intimate depiction of Alice Prin, Man Ray’s muse and lover, known and immortalized as Kiki de Montparnasse (R. Penrose, Man Ray, London, 1975, pp. 85 and 87).
Kiki and Man Ray met, one year earlier, in 1922 in Montparnasse, a district in the south of Paris and the heart of the city’s art world. According to Roland Penrose, Man Ray came to Kiki’s aid as she was caught up in a “spirited dispute” with a patron of a café for her refusal to wear a hat (ibid., p. 91). “Kiki,” remembered Man Ray, “looked around in a rage as if trying to find something to throw at the man” (Self Portrait, Boston, 1963, p. 140). He thought she moved “as gracefully as a gazelle” (quoted in M. Braude, Kiki Man Ray: Art, Love, and Rivalry in 1920s Paris, New York, 2022, p.34). Indeed, she was always uninhibited and fierce, working as a performer and modelling for artists including Chaim Soutine, Kees van Dongen, and Léonard-Tsuguharu Foujita, and she was also an artist herself. By July of the following year, the two were residing together on the rue Campagne Première, a now-iconic street where Duchamp, Eugène Atget, Louis Aragon, and Giorgio de Chirico, among many others, all lived and worked. It was here, at their apartment in the Hȏtel Istria, that Man Ray painted Kiki, a striking, almost feline depiction that was completed at the height of their relationship. Describing the painting, Penrose wrote, “Kiki sits demurely dressed in brown against a blue-grey background; flesh tones take on an overall ivory color with no modelling. Her provocative eyes and lips beneath a cloche of black hair are the same color as the background, giving a tender but enigmatic unity between painter, portrait and model” (op. cit., p. 107).
Portrait de Kiki is a rare painted portrait by Man Ray and one of only two executed in this style; the other, Portrait of Rrose Sélavy, which depicts Duchamp dressed in the guise of his alter-ego, was completed contemporaneously and is now lost. In his memoirs Man Ray recounted how Kiki initially refused to be photographed by him: while “a painter could modify the appearance of things,” she felt that a “photograph was too factual” (op. cit., p. 143). Kiki eventually acquiesced and became one of Man Ray’s most famous models, seen in works such as Le Violon d'Ingres, 1924, and Kiki Drinking, 1921. Unlike the many photographs in which she was posed to fulfill Man Ray’s vision, Portrait de Kiki instead presents an ode to Kiki herself. As André Breton noted, a “portrait of a loved one should not be only an image at which one smiles but also an oracle one questions” and indeed the painting reveals a soul inside (“The Visages of The Woman,” 1934 reprinted in Man Ray 1890-1976, exh. cat., Ronny Van de Velde, Antwerp, 1994, n. p.).
After its completion, Portrait de Kiki remained by descent within Man Ray’s family for over eight decades: he gifted the painting to Elsie Ray Siegler, his sister, before it passed to her daughter Naomi Siegler Savage. As a teenager, Savage attended photography classes taught by Berenice Abbot, who herself had once worked as Man Ray’s assistant. Savage later apprenticed with her famous uncle when he was living in Hollywood, California, and he became both a close friend and mentor.
Although celebrated for his photographic practice, it was in fact painting that first engaged Man Ray, né Emmanuel Radnitsky, a visionary par excellence. In New York City, where he grew up, Man Ray studied architecture, engineering, and mechanical drafting in high school, but ultimately wanted to become a painter. Visiting the Armory Show in 1913 gave him the courage to take on larger and more radical compositions, and he worked for the rest of the decade on his paintings while dreaming of success and of Europe and its avant-garde. After receiving support from his parents and $500 from the collector Fernand Howald, he set sail for France in July of 1921. Once there, Man Ray installed himself in a small room on rue de la Condamine next door to where his friend Marcel Duchamp was living. Thus began his Paris years.
Through Duchamp, Man Ray was introduced to the Dadaists, and although keen to continue painting, he began to photograph the artists and writers that comprised the city’s avant-garde, including André Breton, Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, and Henri Matisse, among countless others. The “excellence of these portraits” came from Man Ray’s “acute understanding of the way that a character resides in the shape of a head and the manner in which the events of a life are engraved on a face,” a sensitivity that underpins his Portrait de Kiki. Painted in 1923, Portrait de Kiki is an eloquent, intimate depiction of Alice Prin, Man Ray’s muse and lover, known and immortalized as Kiki de Montparnasse (R. Penrose, Man Ray, London, 1975, pp. 85 and 87).
Kiki and Man Ray met, one year earlier, in 1922 in Montparnasse, a district in the south of Paris and the heart of the city’s art world. According to Roland Penrose, Man Ray came to Kiki’s aid as she was caught up in a “spirited dispute” with a patron of a café for her refusal to wear a hat (ibid., p. 91). “Kiki,” remembered Man Ray, “looked around in a rage as if trying to find something to throw at the man” (Self Portrait, Boston, 1963, p. 140). He thought she moved “as gracefully as a gazelle” (quoted in M. Braude, Kiki Man Ray: Art, Love, and Rivalry in 1920s Paris, New York, 2022, p.34). Indeed, she was always uninhibited and fierce, working as a performer and modelling for artists including Chaim Soutine, Kees van Dongen, and Léonard-Tsuguharu Foujita, and she was also an artist herself. By July of the following year, the two were residing together on the rue Campagne Première, a now-iconic street where Duchamp, Eugène Atget, Louis Aragon, and Giorgio de Chirico, among many others, all lived and worked. It was here, at their apartment in the Hȏtel Istria, that Man Ray painted Kiki, a striking, almost feline depiction that was completed at the height of their relationship. Describing the painting, Penrose wrote, “Kiki sits demurely dressed in brown against a blue-grey background; flesh tones take on an overall ivory color with no modelling. Her provocative eyes and lips beneath a cloche of black hair are the same color as the background, giving a tender but enigmatic unity between painter, portrait and model” (op. cit., p. 107).
Portrait de Kiki is a rare painted portrait by Man Ray and one of only two executed in this style; the other, Portrait of Rrose Sélavy, which depicts Duchamp dressed in the guise of his alter-ego, was completed contemporaneously and is now lost. In his memoirs Man Ray recounted how Kiki initially refused to be photographed by him: while “a painter could modify the appearance of things,” she felt that a “photograph was too factual” (op. cit., p. 143). Kiki eventually acquiesced and became one of Man Ray’s most famous models, seen in works such as Le Violon d'Ingres, 1924, and Kiki Drinking, 1921. Unlike the many photographs in which she was posed to fulfill Man Ray’s vision, Portrait de Kiki instead presents an ode to Kiki herself. As André Breton noted, a “portrait of a loved one should not be only an image at which one smiles but also an oracle one questions” and indeed the painting reveals a soul inside (“The Visages of The Woman,” 1934 reprinted in Man Ray 1890-1976, exh. cat., Ronny Van de Velde, Antwerp, 1994, n. p.).
After its completion, Portrait de Kiki remained by descent within Man Ray’s family for over eight decades: he gifted the painting to Elsie Ray Siegler, his sister, before it passed to her daughter Naomi Siegler Savage. As a teenager, Savage attended photography classes taught by Berenice Abbot, who herself had once worked as Man Ray’s assistant. Savage later apprenticed with her famous uncle when he was living in Hollywood, California, and he became both a close friend and mentor.