Archive, Bibliography, Documentaries

Where Kiki de Montparnasse spent her last years before passing in 1953.

Alice Ernestine Prin (1901–1953), so-called Kiki de Montparnasse, the Queen of Montparnasse, a French model, chanteuse, actress, 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.

Hemingway once wrote that she “dominated the era of Montparnasse more than Queen Victoria ever dominated the Victorian era.” When she died, the Japanese-French painter Tsuguharu Foujita proclaimed that, with her, the glorious days of Montparnasse were buried forever. Kiki de Montparnasse, a model, literary muse, nightclub singer, actress, memoirist, and painter who was described as "remarkably good looking" by Peggy Guggenheim in 1928, was indeed a persona with an irresistible magnetism that influenced the trajectory of Paris’s roaring 1920s in a myriad of ways.