FILMS
uncredited roles
Man Ray
La Retour à la Raison by Man Ray (1923)
Emak-Bakia by Man Ray (1926)
L'Étoile de mer by Man Ray (1928)
Ballet Mécanique (1924) Dadaist Film
Ballet Mécanique (1923–24) is a Dadaist post-Cubist art film conceived, written, and co-directed by the artist Fernand Léger in collaboration with the filmmaker Dudley Murphy (with cinematographic input from Man Ray
La Galerie des Monstres (1924)
La Capitaine jaune by Anders Wilhelm Sandberg (1931)
L’INHUMAINE – a film by Marcel L’Herbier (1924)
Cette Vieille Canaille by Anatole Litvak (1933)
ARTIST MUSE
Muse to artist from varied art movement
Not confined to one movement
Inspired these men, appears in the following
Amedeo Modigliani
She met him in 1917 at restaurant Chez Rosalie
Modigliani was above all a portraitist. According to Werner Schmalenbach, his need to “take possession of those around him” stemmed from a sort of “primary instinct” inherent in his very nature as an artist. Always departing from painting tradition, his entire oeuvre exudes a classical serenity and harmony that combines with the formal schematisation taken from primitive sculpture and from the influence of Cézanne and Cubism.
Although the present Head of a Woman, painted in oil on paper, is not featured in Joseph Lanthemann’s catalogue raisonné, it can be related to a set of heads dated 1915, which evidence the artist’s shift from sculpture to painting as a result of the influence of Cubist geometry. It may be a portrait of Kiki de Montparnasse, whose identity, as was common practice in Modigliani, is concealed by his use of types: the schematised face, the asymmetrical eyes that
Source - Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum
Maurice Mendjisky
she fell in love with him in 1918
he nicknamed her Kiki
Moise Kisling
In 1897 the Dutch-born painter Kees van Dongen went to live in Paris, where, after a short period under the influence of Impressionism, he became a member of the Montmartre bohemia and one of the leaders of the Fauvist revolution. His Expressionist concerns also brought him into contact with the German artists of the Die Brücke group, in some of whose activities and exhibitions he took part.
After the Great War, Van Dongen moved to the Rive Gauche and became the fashionable painter of Montparnasse society portraits. In the work in the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, the female model, generally identified as Kiki de Montparnasse, conveys the image of a sexually liberated and artistically talented woman that would make her a central figure in Paris art circles. During the 1920s “Kiki, ” the artistic name of Alice Ernestine Prin (1901–1953), was the great muse of Montparnasse, partner of Man Ray, a friend of Ernest Hemingway and the muse of the main artists of the so-called School of Paris, such as Gargallo, Moïse Kisling, Foujita, Soutine, Modigliani and Marc Chagall, as well as Van Dongen
Although it is not certain whether this is in fact a portrait of Kiki, the resemblance to the photographs Man Ray took of her make this hypothesis almost certain. Her modern appearance, sporting the short hair cut that was then in vogue, and casual pose with cigarette between her lips, denoting great self-confidence, are also consonant with the model’s image. As with most of the painter’s works, it is difficult to date. Peter Vergo proposes ascribing it to around 1922 or 1924, when Van Dongen was in closest contact with Kiki’s circle.
In the present work, which is painted with extreme delicacy using heavily saturated watercolour, Van Dongen combines the vibrant colouring of his Fauvist period with the importance he attached to line during his artistic beginnings as an illustrator of La Revue Blanche. The face of the beautiful Kiki, painted in muted tones and schematised to the point of verging on stereotype, stands out amid the sheer fur collar of her dark coat.
Source - Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
Gustaw Gwozdecki
Tsuguharu Foujita
Nu couché à la toile de Jouy (‘Reclining Nude with Toile de Jouy’),1922, a gift from the artist in 1961, was one of Foujita’s first nude paintings using a live model. Loosely basing his composition on Manet’s Olympia and the odalisques of Titian and Ingres, Foujita painted a naked woman with pearl-white skin, looking directly at the spectator, reclining lasciviously on a bed covered with diaphanous white rumpled sheets. But he blended this classical subject, brought up to date with a certain humour, with Japanese tradition (according to the painter, the model with the Oriental features was the celebrated Kiki de Montparnasse). The sensual body with its swelling curves is white as snow, outlined in black ink: “a finely drawn, steady line as if a razor had been drawn very lightly over it.”
Alexander Calder
"She had a wonderful nose that seemed to jut out into space," said Alexander Calder, who portrayed it in a wire sculpture called "Kiki's Nose"
En mai 1929, Calder accueille une équipe de Pathé cinéma, venue le filmer dans son atelier parisien de la rue Cels. Elle tourne la réalisation en direct du premier portrait en fil de fer (loc. inconnue) de Kiki de Montparnasse, qui pose face à l’artiste. La sculpture du Musée est une deuxième version, faite de mémoire un an plus tard.
Kiki (1901-1953), qui venait d’être élue « Reine de Montparnasse », est entrée dans la légende comme modèle de Foujita, Man Ray et Gargallo. Le portrait charge capte le détail physionomique qui donne au visage de Kiki sa singularité : son célèbre nez pointu accordé à sa gouaille de titi parisien, dont Calder se souviendra : « Elle avait un nez merveilleux qui semblait s’élancer dans l’espace »
Source Centre Pompidou
Calder would also join the many artists for whom Kiki de Montparnasse served as celebrated model and muse, evoking her distinctive profile in wire sculptures several times. One of these (its whereabouts unknown) was made when Calder invited Kiki to pose in 1929 while he crafted a wire portrait for a film. The newly discovered silent film, Montparnasse: Where the Muses Hold Sway, a remarkable view of Paris in the 1920s, shows Calder (identified only as “the smart art world’s latest vogue – the telephone wire sculptor”) creating a portrait of Kiki and, in a previously unknown view, with one of his masterworks, Spring (Printemps, 1928), included in the exhibition. The exhibition also includes the sole extant wire portrait of Kiki by Calder, Kiki de Montparnasse II (1930), from the collection of the Centre Pompidou. Another Kiki sculpture, Féminité / Kiki's Nose, made around 1930, its whereabouts now unknown, is seen in the exhibition via a contemporaneous image by photographer Marc Vaux, also from the collection of the Centre Pompidou. Among other celebrities and celebrated events that became subjects of Calder’s wire sculptures were Calvin Coolidge (1927), Helen Wills (1927), Jimmy Durante (1928), John D. Rockefeller (c. 1927), and Lindbergh’s plane in The Arrival of the Bremen or The Spirit of St. Louis (c. 1928). Calder was at Paris’s Le Bourget airport when the record-setting transatlantic flight landed; the sculpture’s title also reflects the first East-West transatlantic flight of the Bremen in 1928.
Source Art Daily
Brassai
Kiki was celebrated among avant-garde artists, who haunted the bars and cabarets of Montparnasse, her Paris neighborhood, in the 1920s. She is pictured here in the full glow of her own professional persona, as an authentic descendant of the ribald heroines of the fifteenth-century poet François Villon. The accordionist, who gazes at her with awe and affection, is unidentified.
Brassaï's photographs are the last great expression of a tradition of picturing Parisian popular culture that included such masters as Edgar Degas and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. By the time this picture was made, that tradition had become tinged with nostalgia for the past, and was soon to be obliterated by the engines of modernity and the business of tourism.
Brassaï's blunt, no-nonsense pictures, such as this one, in which the subject is often fixed by the unapologetic scrutiny of a flash, soon became, and remain, a model of photography's fierce curiosity and proof of the mystery of unvarnished photographic fact—a foundation of what came to be called the documentary tradition.
Source - Moma
Pablo Gargallo
Man Ray
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