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Alice Ernestine Prin (October 2, 1901 – April 29, 1953), better known as Kiki de Montparnasse, was a French artists' model, nightclub singer, actress, memoirist, painter. She flourished in, and helped define, the 1920s liberated culture of Paris. In 1989, biographers Billy Klüver and Julie Martin called her "one of the century's first truly independent women."[1]
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Contents
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Early life
Alice Prin was born in Châtillon-sur-Seine, Côte d'Or. An illegitimate child, she was raised in abject poverty by her grandmother. At age twelve, she was sent to live with her mother in Paris in order to find work. She first worked in shops and bakeries but by the age of fourteen, she was posing nude for sculptors, which created discord with her mother.
Fame begins
(public-domain photograph by Hay Kranen)
Kiki became a fixture in the Montparnasse social scene and a popular artists' model, posing for dozens of artists, including Chaim Soutine, Julian Mandel, Tsuguharu Foujita, Francis Picabia, Jean Cocteau, Arno Breker, Alexander Calder, Per Krohg, Hermine David, Pablo Gargallo, Mayo, and Tono Salazar. Moise Kisling painted a portrait of Kiki titled Nu assis, one of his best known.
Her companion for most of the 1920s was Man Ray, who made hundreds of portraits of her. She is the subject of some of his best-known images including the notable surrealist image Le violon d'Ingres[2] and Noire et blanche.[3]
She appeared in nine short and often experimental films, including Fernand Léger's Ballet mécanique without any credit.
Artwork
and autobiography
A painter in her own right, in 1927 Kiki had a sold-out exhibition of her paintings at the Galerie au Sacre du Printemps in Paris. Signing her work with her chosen single name, she usually noted the year. Her drawings and paintings comprise portraits, self-portraits, social activities, fanciful animals, and dreamy landscapes composed in a light, slightly uneven, expressionist style that is a reflection of her easy-going manner and boundless optimism.[4]
Her autobiography was published in 1929 as Kiki's Memoirs, with Ernest Hemingway and Tsuguharu Foujita providing the introduction. In 1930 the book was translated by Samuel Putnam and published in New York City by Black Manikin Press, but it was immediately banned by the United States government. Kiki's Memoirs remained banned in the United States through the late 1970s, when it was still held in the section for banned books in the New York Public Library. Her autobiography finally saw republication in 1996.[citation needed]
Kiki's music hall performances in black hose and garters included crowd-pleasing risqué songs, which were uninhibited, yet inoffensive. For a few years during the 1930s, she owned a Montparnasse cabaret, which she named Chez Kiki.[citation needed]
The symbol of bohemian and creative Paris, at age of twenty-eight she was declared the 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." She left Paris to avoid the occupying German army during World War Two, which entered the city in June 1940, and she never returned as a resident.[citation needed]
Death and legacy
Kiki died in 1953 in Sanary-sur-Mer, France at the age of fifty-one, apparently of complications of alcoholism or drug dependence. A large crowd of artists and fans attended her Paris funeral and followed the procession to her interment in the Cimetière du Montparnasse. Her tomb identifies her as "Kiki, 1901-1953, singer, actress, painter, Queen of Montparnasse." Tsuguharu Foujita has said that, with Kiki, the glorious days of Montparnasse were buried forever.
Long after her death, Kiki remains the embodiment of the outspokenness, audacity and creativity that marked that period of life in Montparnasse. In her honor, a daylily has been named Kiki de Montparnasse.
Filmography
- 1923 : L'Inhumaine de Marcel L'Herbier
- 1923 : Le Retour à la raison de Man Ray, court métrage
- 1923 : Ballet mécanique de Fernand Léger, court métrage
- 1923 : Entr'acte de René Clair, court métrage
- 1923 : La Galerie des monstres de Jaque Catelain
- 1926 : Emak Bakia de Man Ray, court métrage
- 1928 : L'Étoile de mer de Man Ray
- 1928 : Paris express / Souvenirs de Paris de Pierre Prévert et Marcel Duhamel, court métrage
- 1930 : Le Capitaine jaune de Anders Wilhelm Sandberg
- 1933 : Cette vieille canaille de Anatol Litvak
Notes
- ^ Billy Klüver and Julie Martin, Kiki's Paris, Abrams, 1989
- ^ Le violon d'Ingres, Getty Museum
- ^ Noire et blanche, Getty Museum
- ^ "Kiki of Montparnasse", Zabrieski Gallery
Further reading
- Kiki de Montparnasse (2007); by Catel & Bocquet (in French) Bruxelles: Casterman
- Kiki of Montparnasse (1968); by Frederick Kohner (a novel) London: Cassell ISBN 0-304-93242-6
- Kiki: Reine de Montparnasse (1988); by Lou Mollgaard (in French) Paris: Laffont
- Kiki's Memoirs (1996) translation by Samuel Putnam (original ed. pub by J. Corti, Paris)
- Kiki's Paris (1989); by Klüver and Martin. (French translation - Paris: Flammarion)
- Kiki's Memoirs (2006) translation by N. Semoniff (in Russian)
- Kiki's Memoirs (2009) [Recuerdos recobrados] translation by José Pazó Espinosa (in Spanish - pub. by Nocturna)
External links
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