Alice Prin

Biography

Alice Ernestine Prin (2 October 1901 – 29 April 1953), nicknamed the Queen of Montparnasse and often known as Kiki de Montparnasse, was a French model, chanteuse, memoirist and painter during the Jazz Age. She flourished in, and helped define, the liberated culture of Paris in the so-called Années folles ("crazy years" in French). She became one of the most famous models of the 20th century and in the history of avant-garde art.

== Early life == Born an illegitimate child in Châtillon-sur-Seine, Côte d'Or, Alice Prin experienced an unpleasant "childhood that could only lead to laughter or despair". Raised in abject poverty by her grandmother, she traveled in 1913 at age twelve by train to live with her mother, a linotypist, to help earn an income for her family. The young Prin endured a series of harsh and degrading jobs. She labored in shoe factories, printing shops, and bakeries. During this unhappy time, she began her lifelong joy of decorating herself. She often crumbled "a petal from her mother's fake geraniums to give color to her cheeks." A bakery fired her after "she darkened her eyebrows with burnt matchsticks". By the age of fourteen, Prin's striking physique garnered the artistic attention of various Parisians. To earn money, she began surreptitiously posing nude for sculptors. "It bothered me a little to take off my clothes," Prin wrote in her memoirs, noting the practice reflected prevailing custom. Her nude modeling created discord with her mother. One day, her enraged mother intruded into an artist's studio. She denounced Prin as a shameless prostitute and disowned her forever. In 1917, without money or a roof over her head, the teenage Kiki determined to make her living exclusively by posing for artists. As a beautiful dark-haired girl, she soon found herself in popular demand. At the time, due to her scant pubic hair, she occasionally drew fake hair with pieces of charcoal. As her fame grew, she became a local celebrity who symbolized the Montparnasse quarter's nonconformity and its rejection of the social norms of the petite bourgeoisie.

== Career ==

=== Modeling ===

Adopting a single name, "Kiki", Prin became a fixture of the Montparnasse social scene and a popular model, posing for dozens of artists, including Sanyu, Chaïm Soutine, Julien Mandel, Tsuguharu Foujita, Constant Detré, Francis Picabia, Jean Cocteau, Arno Breker, Alexander Calder, Per Krohg, Hermine David, Pablo Gargallo and Tono Salazar. Moïse Kisling painted a portrait of Kiki titled Nu assis, one of his best known. In his 1976 book Memoirs of Montparnasse, Canadian poet John Glassco recalled that:

Her maquillage was a work of art in itself ...her mouth painted a deep scarlet that emphasized the sly erotic humor of its contours. Her face was beautiful from every angle, but I liked it best in full profile, when it had the lineal purity of a stuffed salmon.

=== Man Ray === In Autumn 1921, Prin met the American visual artist Man Ray, and the two soon entered into a stormy eight-year relationship. She lived with Man Ray in his studio on rue Campagne-Première until 1929 during which time he made hundreds of portraits of her. She became his muse at the time and the subject of some of his best-known images, including the surrealist image Le Violon d'Ingres (Ingres' Violin) and Noire et blanche (Black and White).

During their turbulent relationship, Man Ray labored obsessively on Prin's visual image. He "took her many steps beyond the primitive charcoal eyebrow-pencil she used for makeup as a teenager." Every night before going out together, he "meticulously applied her cosmetics and assisted in the choice of her clothes, creating a visual style that is as much a part of his oeuvre as any of his signed paintings". Her makeup often varied in "the color, thickness, and angle according to his mood. Her heavy eyelids, next, might be done in copper one day and royal blue another, or else in silver and jade."