Kiki de Montparnasse

Alice Prin was born in Châtillon-sur-Seine, Côte d'Or, Burgundy, France. 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. By age fourteen, she was posing nude for sculptors, which created discord with her mother.

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. Man Ray, her companion for most of the 1920s, made hundreds of portraits of her. She is the subject of some of his best-known images, including Le violon d'Ingres and Noire et blanche. She appears in nine short and often experimental films, including Fernand Léger's Ballet mécanique without any credit.

Alice Prin (Kiki), ca. 1920, by Gustaw Gwozdecki (1880-1935)

A painter in her own right, in 1927 Kiki had a sold-out exhibition of her paintings at Galerie au Sacre du Printemps in Paris. Signing her artwork 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.

PHOTO (R): Kiki de Montparnasse, 1928,
by Pablo Gargallo (1881 - 1934).
Bronze, Musée de Louvre.

Ernest Hemingway and Tsuguharu Foujita provided the introduction for her 1929 memoirs. Entitled "Kiki's Memoirs", it was published the following year in New York City by Black Manikin Press, but 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. Finally, in 1996, her autobiography was translated into English and published.[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.

The symbol of bohemian and creative Paris, at age of twenty-eight 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." 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.

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 Montparnasse. In her honor, a daylily has been named Kiki de Montparnasse.

color photograph of Kiki by Julian Mandel, c. 1920

all I need is
an onion,
a bit of bread,
and bottle of
red wine;
and I will
always find
somebody
to offer
me that.

~Kiki