Death: 23 March 1953 ( age 52 )
Astrology: Libra
Nationality: French
Residence: Paris
Occupation: artist’s model, performer, actress, and painter
Lovers: Man Ray, Style Signature: black garconne bob , pearly white skin,
Famous for: Violon d'Ingres, Muse and model of Man Ray, Queen of Montparnasse
MAN RAY - His Lover and Muse
MAN RAY AND KIKI - AFFAIR AND COLLABORATION
Iconic images in Surrealism
Together they created his most famous works Le violon d'Ingres and Noire et blanche.
Her collaborations with Man produced some of Surrealism's most iconic images, including Noire et blanche and Le Violon d'Ingres
From 1921 to 1929,
MAN RAY'S NOTORIOUS EROTIC BOOK, 'entirely representative of the surrealist book' and 'extremely rare'
43 MAN RAY & Louis ARAGON & Benjamin PÉRET 1929 [Éditions de la revue Variété | Brussels 1929]
1929 is a rare compilation of erotic poems by the French surrealist writers Benjamin Péret and Louis Aragon, punctuated by four sexually explicit and little-known tipped-in photographs taken by Man Ray. The book was published anonymously in 1929 in an edition of 215, most of which were seized by French customs and destroyed for their subversive content.
Famous erotic book illustrated with 4 photolithographs of a pornographic nature by Man Ray putting on a performance with Kiki, the inescapable Montparnasse muse of the Roaring Twenties.
Famous erotic book illustrated with 4 photolithographs of a pornographic nature by Man Ray putting on a performance with Kiki, the inescapable Montparnasse muse of the Roaring Twenties. Each of these photographs is accompanied with erotic poems by Benjamin Péret for the first semester and Louis Aragon for the second. Very rare copy of this scandalous pornographic-poetic booklet produced by the Belgian magazine Variété by Paul-Gustave Van Hecke and almost the entire print of which was seized and destroyed by French customs. Indeed, this libertine «almanac» divided into two semesters and four seasons, remains today one of the most licentious surrealist productions. Even more than the Bourgeois society, it is the surrealist aesthetic itself that is mangled here. The four photographs taken by Man Ray at the request of Aragon and Péret to illustrate their crude poems are indeed very «far from the veiled eroticism dear to Breton» (cf. L’Enfer de la Bibliothèque. Eros au secret, Bibliothèque Nationale de France). On one of the photographs, «the woman is clearly identifiable: it is Kiki from Montparnasse, Man Ray’s occasional lover and muse. Her lips, with makeup to form the shape of Cupid’s bow, tightly grip a penis that, judging by the angle of the shot, is probably that of the photographer. [...] Many books by surrealist artists are the product of a pornographic imagination, but never in such a scandalous and crude manner as in this publication. (Parr and Badger, The Photobook : A History Volume II, p. 138). Light, minor foxing on the boards. Very rare copy.
Underground publication of erotic poetry written by Louis Aragon and Benjamin Péret, along with 4 pornographic images by Man Ray. 4 season represented
Printed in Belgium, 215 copies were seized by French Customs and banned.
The photograph “Black and White” refers to two masks: one black, of African origin, and another represented by the pale face of the model Kiki de Montparnasse. It is an example of artistic photography produced by Man Ray, which draws attention to African art. Used to the puns and games of Dada, the photographer also plays with the image and the title, because the image is "read" as "white and black", but the title is "black and white". The photograph first appeared in Vogue magazine, named Nacre's Face and Ebony Mask. In 1928 it was published in the magazine Variétés, with the current title.
THE EMBLEMATIC IMAGE OF SURREALISM PHOTOGRAPHY
VIOLON D'INGRES BY MAN RAY
Man Ray was an admirer of the paintings of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and made a series of photographs, inspired by Ingres's languorous nudes, of the model Kiki in a turban. Painting the f-holes of a stringed instrument onto the photographic print and then rephotographing the print, Man Ray altered what was originally a classical nude. He also added the title Le Violon d'Ingres, a French idiom that means "hobby." The transformation of Kiki's body into a musical instrument with the crude addition of a few brushstrokes makes this a humorous image, but her armless form is also disturbing to contemplate. The title seems to suggest that, while playing the violin was Ingres's hobby, toying with Kiki was a pastime of Man Ray. The picture maintains a tension between objectification and appreciation of the female form.
Dource - J.Paul Getty Museum
Man Ray was inspired by paintings by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, leading painter of the Neoclassical movement
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
Artist Muse
Julien Mandel - Photographer
HER PAINTINGS
THE BOOK
Kiki's Souvenir / Kiki's Memoirs published in 1929 autobiography by Alice Prin
Translated from the French by Samuel Putnam
published in Manhattan by Black Manikin Press
intro by hemingway
The memoirs were first published in English in 1930, but due to their sometimes explicit content, were banned in the United States until the 1970s.
A copy of the first US edition (1930) was held in the section for banned books in the New York Public Library through the 1970s.
A new edition, edited by Billy Klüver
Hemingway writes
“This is the only book I have ever written an introduction for, and God help me, the only one I ever will… It is written by a woman who, as far as I know, never had a Room of Her Own… you have a book here written by a woman who was never a lady at any time. For about ten years she was about as close as people get nowadays to being a Queen but that, of course, is very different from being a lady.”
Souvenirs retrouvés ( published 2005)
by kiki
1929. Paris s'amuse... avant la crise. Une petite fille de rien du tout est élue Reine de Montparnasse. Man Ray publie d'elle des photos coquines et Ernest Hemingway rédige une préface pour l'édition américaine de ses Souvenirs. Kiki, vingt-huit ans, a déjà connu Modigliani et Soutine, Desnos et Kisling... La censure américaine ne supportera pas le style leste de ses histoires et le livre entrera dans la légende, interdit comme Ulysse de Joyce. Et pourtant le texte de 1929 nous semble bien édulcoré, très en deçà de l'extraordinaire version définitive rédigée neuf ans plus tard et disparue depuis soixante-cinq ans. Le manuscrit gisait au milieu de milliers de cartons avec, sur une petite étiquette de bristol, cette simple mention : " infiniment précieux ". Voici enfin les Souvenirs retrouvés de Kiki de Montparnasse, dans une version intégrale au style inégalable et que l'on n'est pas prêt désormais d'oublier. N'ayant rien à prouver, niquiconque à ménager, Kiki se livre sans fard et sans arrière-pensée.
THE LATER YEARS
THE COMIC
Kiki de Montparnasse Author : Catel Muller & Jose-Luis Bocquet
BOOKS
Kiki's Paris: Artists and Lovers 1900-1930
Author : Billy Kluver & Julie Martin
A portrait of Montparnasse in the first decades of the century, this attractive book of some 650 black-and-white photos uses, as a focal point, the artist, artist's model, singer, dancer and actress Kiki (born Alice Ernestine Prin). Proclaimed ``Queen of Montparnasse'' in 1929 by the newspaper Paris-Montparnasse , she was outrageous, charming, beautiful, talented--and so is the Paris that emerges. We see the cafes--Dome, Rotonde, Coupole, etc.--where notable artists Matisse, Modigliani, Picasso, Man Ray, Stein, Leger, Cocteau, Brancusi, Soutine and hundreds of others hung out, the studios in which they worked, the parties they went to, the vacations they took and the galleries where they exhibited. The text, deliberately understated, takes a back seat to the photos, offering introduction, explanation and anecdote. Kluver, president of Experiments in Art and Technology, and Martin, a staff member at the the same foundation, have assembled a lavish, information-packed look at the people and places of an important, exciting era in art history.
Kiki de Montparnasse: Paris in the 1920s
Author : Xavier Girard
From humble origins, Kiki de Montparnasse became the muse of the most important artists of the Roaring Twenties. Many revolutionary artists of the early twentieth century flourished on Paris's Left Bank, and Kiki, the Queen of Montparnasse, was the thread connecting them. Every image tells a fascinating story in this lavishly illustrated volume. Xavier Girard, former curator of the Matisse Museum, reveals the artistic, social, and historical events that created and surrounded the incredible artistic flowering of the mythical Montparnasse neighborhood after World War I. An oversize luxury edition in a slipcase.
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