After a long break, the book club will meet on Thursday, June 8, 2023.
We will discuss our March read “The Unfinished Palazzo: Life, Love and Art in Venice” by Judith
Mackrell https://www.awchamburg.org/activities/activities-calendar/icalrepeat.detail/2023/03/15/2261/243/book-club-cancelled.html and the Kiki Man Ray
biography below. These books complement each other nicely. Many of the personalities and
artists appear in both books. The female protagonists are all notorious but the women who
owned the unfinished palazzo in Venice provide a stark contrast to Kiki, a child of poverty. We
hope you will join us.
This month we will be reading
“Kiki Man Ray: Art, Love, and Rivalry in 1920s Paris” by Mark Braude

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 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. … 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.” (W. W. Norton & Company)
W. W. Norton & Company, 2022, 304 pp