Few women have so dominated — and, if you will, embodied — their time and place as the voluptuous Alice Prin, better known to 20th Century art and literature as the fabled (not to mention ribald) Kiki de Montparnasse.
“For about 10 years,” Ernest Hemingway wrote in 1930, “she was about as close as people get nowadays to being a Queen.”
Her realm was Paris, in most particular that Left Bank quarter of artists and writers known as Montparnasse, and those years were that intoxicating and liberating epoch known as the 1920s.
Gone in the early ’50s
She left this life in 1953, but now Kiki is back. There’s no particular occasion, really, save that this is the 75th anniversary of her first one-woman show as a self-taught painter.
This month, Harry N. Abrams is republishing Billy Kluver’s and Julie Martin’s wonderful picture book about Kiki, her famous friends and Montparnasse titled “Kiki’s Paris: Artists and Lovers 1900-1930,” and New York’s Zabriskie Gallery is showing an exhibition of Kiki’s paintings — along with an extraordinary assemblage of portrait paintings and photographs of Kiki by such Left Bank luminaries as her longtime lover, Man Ray; Gaston Paris; and Brassai.
One of the Man Ray images is the unforgettable 1924 “Violon d’Ingres,” in which he transformed a nude Kiki into a musical instrument.
“Kiki’s Memoirs,” a book banned by U.S. Customs in 1930, was more recently republished by the Ecco Press.
“I went to Paris,” she noted in one passage, written just after being released from jail for hitting a policeman. “A few evenings later, I was singing a song at the Jockey Club, a song that became rather popular on account of me — `Les Filles de Camaret.’ And of course I had to run around to see my dear old Dome, and Daddy Chambon, who said to me, `Ah! There you are, you big girl, you!’ And he didn’t forget to give me a good slap on the rump! And I saw Ernest again, looking more like a first-communion lad and friendlier than ever, and I wondered if he was still a virgin.”
Ahead of her time
Kiki was the most celebrated artist’s model in Paris in a period when the artists there included Amedeo Modigliani, Pablo Picasso, Andre Derain and Francis Picabia. She was a cabaret star who sweetly sang the most outrageously dirty songs imaginable. She was an avant-garde movie actress who starred in nine films, including Fernand Leger’s “Ballet Mecanique” and Jacques Catelain’s “Galerie des Monstres.”
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She was actually elected “Queen of Montparnasse” at a 1929 fundraiser for poor artists. A photograph taken of her there with a rose in her mouth was made into a postcard that swiftly sold 100,000 copies. She utterly transfixed what Gertrude Stein called “The Lost Generation.”
“I don’t think anybody can be like her,” Kluver said. “She was a true original.”
Choosing her own path
Born of Burgundian peasant stock, she was taken out of school at age 13 by her mother, who tried to put her to work as an apprentice linotypist. Kiki instead moved to Paris and — avoiding the all-too-common fate at the time of becoming a prostitute — became a model.
“She was famous before she met Man Ray,” Martin said. “He saw a good thing and latched onto it.”
A striking aspect of the Zabriskie show is that Kiki seems an entirely different woman in every image — painfully beautiful in one, exotic in another, cow-like in another. Her appeal went far beyond physical attractions.
“Women like that you can always argue whether they’re beautiful or not,” said Kluver. “They are extraordinarily intelligent and have an appreciation of other people. They can look you over and decide immediately who you are.”
“She was one of the first independent women,” Martin said. “She could sit around a cafe table and entertain people for hours. She was very amusing, quite charming, quite generous, quite vivacious — and lively. I’m sure she was up for anything.”
The Twenties ended, replaced by global depression and the rise of fascism.
“She really had to go to work then,” Martin said. “She worked in cabarets and boites. The night life of Paris is very hard on people. It’s not easy to be a performer.”
A fast departure
She was only 52 when she died. The diagnosis was dropsy, or edema.
“She came back from a weekend in the country with friends and collapsed on the street right in front of her apartment, and then died a few days later,” Martin said. “Very Parisian.”
New York’s Anthology Film Archives was screening some of Kiki’s films earlier this month, but I think it’s more than time for an entire movie about her. Juliette Binoche is getting to an age — and state of plumpness — where she’d be perfect. Please, no Julia Roberts.