Alice Ernestine Prin (2 October 1901 – 29 April 1953), nicknamed
Queen of Montparnasse, and often known as
Kiki de Montparnasse, was a French artist model,nightclub singer, actress, memoirist, and painter. She flourished in, and helped define, the liberated culture of Paris in the early 1920s.
Kiki's art
Man Ray
Her companion for most of the 1920s was Man Ray, who made hundreds of portraits of her. She is the subject of some of his best-known images, including the notable surrealist image Le violon d'Ingres and Noire et blanche.
"1929" Book Of Erotic Photo's And Poetry
It's 1929 and avant-garde magazine Varits has a cash crisis. To the rescue, Man Ray and his muse, Kiki de Montparnasse. John Baxter lifts the lid on one of bohemian Paris's better-kept secrets:
'It is said,' Jacqueline Goddard conceded to me circumspectly, 'that Man Ray started with pornography. And I have seen recently a photograph of Kiki's mouth on Man Ray's private parts.'
Beyond this detail the last survivor of Man Ray's models from the 1920s - and the one who perhaps knew him best - was not prepared to go.
1929 was originally clandestinely published in Brussels in 1929 in an edition of 215 and intended for private circulation.
Copies of the very controversial book, were siezed at the border by French Authorities so very few exist today.