Kiki de Montparnasse

Kiki de Montparnasse (born October 2, 1901, Châtillon-sur-Seine, France—died March 23, 1953, Paris) was a French cabaret performer, painter, and artists’ muse who acquired her nickname for being a fixture in the bohemian circles of the Montparnasse neighbourhood in Paris. She modeled for numerous artists such as Amedeo Modigliani, Man Ray, and Alexander Calder.

Prin was born to a young single mother in a small town in the Burgundy région of France, though she was raised there by her grandmother when her mother left for Paris. At age 12 Prin went to Paris, where her mother took her in and sent her to school. Prin attended school for one year before leaving to work a series of menial jobs over the next few years. In 1917, to supplement her meagre earnings, she modeled for a sculptor. Disowned by her mother for what her mother deemed an inappropriate source of income, Prin was homeless and poverty-stricken. Living on the streets, she discovered Montparnasse and soon befriended artist Chaim Soutine, who in turn introduced her to a wider network of artists, including Maurice Utrillo, Jean Cocteau, Moïse Kisling, Fujita Tsuguji, and Modigliani. About 1918 she began an affair with artist Maurice Mendjisky, who is often credited with having nicknamed her Kiki. Mendjisky painted a number of portraits of Kiki. Throughout the 1920s she would play muse to nearly all the leading male avant-garde artists.

In 1921 Kiki met Man Ray, for whom she modeled and with whom she began an intense love affair that would last until 1929. She also appeared in his film Le Retour à la raison (“The Return to Reason”) in 1923, an experience that may have inspired her to try her hand at a film career. Though she traveled to the United States to pursue that possibility, she did not succeed abroad and returned to Paris and to Man Ray. In Paris she worked on her own paintings, continued to model, played roles in several avant-garde films (e.g., Ballet mécanique, 1924 [directed by Fernand Léger]; and Emak Bakia, 1926, and L’Étoile de mer, 1928 [both directed by Man Ray]) and began to perform a cabaret act at Le Jockey Club in Montparnasse. The most-famous image of Kiki is a Surrealist photograph made in 1924 by Man Ray. Le Violon d’Ingres shows Kiki’s bare back with f-holes painted in black onto the print to suggest her body as a musical instrument. André Breton published the image in the final issue of his literary journal Littérature (June 1924). Two years later Man Ray created Noire et Blanche (“Black and White”), another image that captured the Surrealist imagination, that one of Kiki holding a dark African mask next to her pale face.

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In 1927 a highly successful first exhibition of Kiki’s own paintings was held at a gallery in Paris. Two years later, at the young age of 28, she published her memoirs, for which Ernest Hemingway wrote an introduction. The memoir, which offers extensive personal insight into the bohemian culture of 1920s Montparnasse, was translated and published in English in 1930 but because of some salacious content was banned in the United States. (It was first made available in the U.S. in 1996.) Kiki continued to appear in films and perform in cabaret acts in Montparnasse and even created a few recordings of her singing throughout the 1930s and ’40s. She continued also to play muse to photographers, sculptors, and painters despite her noticeable weight gain. She drank and used cocaine excessively, though she tried repeatedly to stop. She was not only arrested for cocaine use (1939 and 1946) but also briefly institutionalized in 1939. Destitute and sickly, she died at age 51.