What do you think these paintings have in common?

They're all portraits of women, you might ask. Yes, but not just any woman!
This is Kiki de Montparnasse, the favorite model of the painters of the Roaring Twenties. Arriving in Paris at a very young age, Alice Prin worked at various jobs to earn a living: bottle washer, airplane wing screwer...

It was at La Rotonde, a meeting place for artists between the two world wars, that she met the painters for whom she modelled.

But what's less well known is that she too was an artist, a true jack-of-all-trades. As a painter, she painted portraits of La Rotonde customers, often British and American soldiers, and exhibited her work on several occasions.

A singer in small cabarets, she even had her own establishment, "Chez Kiki". As an actress, she appeared in Man Ray's film "L'étoile de mer", and tried her luck on the other side of the Atlantic.

Married to journalist Henri Broca, whose magazine she supported financially, she also wrote her "Souvenirs"... which were long censored in the United States.

The first portrait is by Van Dongen (1922-1924), the second by Gwozdecki (1920), the third by Kisling (1924).

The last painting, "Nu couché à la toile de Jouy" (1922), is by the Japanese painter Foujita, inspired by Manet's "Olympia".

With her boyish haircut, pronounced make-up and cigarette lips, Kiki de Montparnasse perfectly embodies the woman of the Roaring Twenties, whose beauty each artist reinterprets with his or her own style and sensibility.

What's your favorite painting?

More difficult to recognize, Kiki de Montparnasse also lends her harmonious silhouette to Man Ray's photograph "Le violon d'Ingres"