Alice Prin
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Kiki de Montparnasse, or just Kiki, was the stage name for Alice Ernestine Prin (1901 – 1953), a nightclub singer, actress, model, and painter. She flourished in, and helped define, the liberated culture of Paris in the 1920s. Her biographers, Billy Kluver and Julie Martin, called her "one of the century's first truly independent women."
Biography and art
Born in Chatillon-sur-Seine, Côte d'Or, Burgundy, France on October 2, 1901. An illegitimate child, she was raised in abject poverty by her grandmother. At age 12 she was sent to Paris to be educated and by age 14 she was posing nude for sculptors.
Kiki became a fixture in the Montparnasse social scene and a popular artists' model, posing for dozens of artists, including Chaim Soutine, Tsuguharu Foujita, Francis Picabia, Jean Cocteau, Alexander Calder, Per Krogh, Hermine David, Palbo Gargallo, Mayo, and Tono Salazar.
Moise Kisling painted a portrait titled, Nu assis, one of his best known.
Man Ray, who was her companion for most of the 1920s, made hundreds of portaits of her. She is the subject of some of his best known images, including Le Violon d'Ingres and Noire et blanche.
She had roles in nine films, including Fernand Leger's famous Ballet mécanique.
A capable painter in her own right, in 1927 Paris' Galerie au Sacre du Printemps held a sold-out exhibition of Kiki's paintings. Her drawings and paintings comprise portraits and dreamy landscapes composed in a light, slightly uneven expressionist style that is a reflection of her easy-going manner and boundless optimism.
Ernest Hemingway and Tsuguharu Foujita provided the introduction for her 1929 memoirs. The book was published the following year in New York City by Black Manikin Press but banned by the United States government. Kiki's Memoirs remained barred in the United States as late as the 1970s when it was still held in the section for banned books in the New York Public Library. Finally, in 1996, her book was translated into English and published.
Kiki's music hall performances in black hose and garters included crowd-pleasing raunchy songs, which were both uninhibited yet inoffensive. For a few years in the 1930s, she owned a Montparnasse cabaret called the Oasis, which she renamed Chez Kiki.
The symbol of bohemian and creative Paris, at age 28 she was declared Queen of Montparnasse.
Even during difficult times, she maintained her positive attitude saying, All I need is an onion, a bit of bread, and a bottle of red (wine); and I will always find somebody to offer me that.
When she died, a large crowd of artists and fans attended her funeral. Foujita said that with Kiki, they buried forever the glorious days of Montparnasse.
Long after her death, Kiki remains the embodiment of the outspokenness, audacity, and creativity that marked this period of Montparnasse. A daylily is named in her honor, Kiki De Montparnasse.
Books about Kiki
- Kiki's Memoirs (translation by Samuel Putnam) - Kiki (1996)
- Kiki: Reine de la Montparnasse - Lou Mollgaard (In French - 1988)
- Kiki's Paris - Kluver and Martin (1996)fr:Alice Prin