Kiki de Montparnasse: Je Me Drouge

Man Ray, Le Violon D’Ingres, 1924. Kiki is the model.

In the preface to the 1929 book Kiki's Memoirs, Ernest Hemingway wrote, "She dominated the era of Montparnasse more than Queen Victoria ever dominated the Victorian era." He was describing the woman known Kiki de Montparnasse, a muse, chanteuse, painter, actress, and cultural icon like no other. 

Born Alice Prin in 1901 to an impoverished single mother in Paris, she was required to work menial jobs from the age of 12 at places like print shops and shoe factories. Finding joy in self decoration, she "would crumble a petal from her mother's fake geraniums to give color to her cheeks and was fired from a nasty job at a bakery because she darkened her eyebrows with burnt matchsticks." (Source.)

Uninhibited by posing in the nude, she was determined to make a living as an artists' model while still in her teens, which caused her mother to turn her out of the house. The proprietress of Rosalie's restaurant in the Montparnasse district of Paris took pity on the young Alice, and often fed her. Rosalie's or La Rotonde may be the place where Modigliani, one of dozens of artists who painted or sculpted portraits of Kiki, paid his bill by slipping Futurist painter Gino Severini a chunk of hashish. (Source: Modigliani: A Life by Meryle Secrest, p. 106). 

In 1921, Kiki began an eight-year affair and artistic collaboration with the photographer Man Ray, during which time he influenced her style and took hundreds of portraits of her, including the iconic surrealist image Le Violon d'Ingres (Ingres' Violin) and Noire et blanche (Black and White). She also acted in experimental films shot by Man Ray. 

With a distinctive pointed-nose profile, Kiki also possessed "an extraordinary complexion which you could put makeup on in any form, and she did, too," said Lee Miller, Man Ray's subsequent collaborator and lover. "She was absolutely a gazelle," Miller said. (Source: Kiki Man Ray by Mark Braude, p. 229). "She had the short bobbed hair and unconventional look and really an energy, I think that people just really competed to capture," her biographer Mark Braude told The Octavian. "The bob and that whole fringe cut became ubiquitous by the end of the '20s. But when she started in 1921, 1922, that was actually a dangerous thing." (Kind of reminds me of when Tokin' Woman Patti Smith invented the shag haircut on herself and soon everyone copied her style.)

Kees van Dongen, Portrait of a Woman with a Cigarette

(Kiki de Montparnasse) ca. 1922-1924,

JE CONNAIS LA DROUGE

In Kiki's memoir, illustrated with her portraits and her own drawings, she tells of her introduction to cocaine while still a teenager (and a virgin). In a chapter titled, "Je Connais La Drogue" (I Know Drugs) she writes: 

"A sculptor for whom I pose entrusts me with an errand to run on the Champs-Élysées. I have to deliver a statuette to a gentleman of high importance. But he warns me that I must not be frightened by what I will see and above all, if I see money lying around not to worry about it."

Opening the door at the address where she is sent is a man of 40 years who "has the face of a bon vivant and a nose as if he had a bad cold!" He takes her on a tour of the apartment where, "Before letting me into another, darker room, he demands that I undress and put on a beautiful Chinese dress, white silk socks and golden slippers. In this room, all the wonders are gathered: the most beautiful collections of butterflies, lace, carpets, shawls. It's enough to give you a stiff neck. I want to see it all at once! It's magical."

She then writes, "I had noticed that from time to time he opened a pretty gold box from which he took, with a very small gold shovel, a pinch of white powder that he put in his nose; immediately afterwards he became very eloquent and I listened to him open-mouthed! 

"I took advantage of a moment when his back was turned to take a pinch of it myself and sniffed it. A while later, I felt very light; I was no longer thinking about anything. Life seemed beautiful... beautiful!"

Kiki tried her hand at painting, and had a sold-out exhibition in 1927 of works painted in "a slightly uneven, expressionist style that is a reflection of her carefree manner and boundless optimism." She also began singing at cabarets, mostly French street songs. Edith Piaf "felt intimidated by Kiki's brilliance, and that she was lucky to no longer have her as a true competitor by the time she was making her own way on Parisian stages in the second half of the 1930s." (Braude, p.  237.)

PHOTO OF KIKI: Paul Balassa, 1930.

JE ME DROUGE

As Kiki turned thirty-three, still in debt and without steady employment, her mother and a lover died, leaving her "terribly depressed." She adds, "Especially since I now weigh eighty kilos (175 pounds). For a singer, that lacks aesthetics! I drink, it makes me cheerful, but it makes me fatter. I stay seated as much as possible, but when I have to sing and I cross the room, I feel the pairs of eyes on my rump." 

Though she deprives herself of food, she does not lose weight, until she stays with a cabaret owner Jeanne Duc in Saint-Tropez. 

"Her cabaret was full every night, we drank hard, and adventures galore!" Kiki writes of her engagement there. She continued: "The problem was that Jeanne thought I was too fat. She started by giving me diet pills, then rationed my bread and even my liquids. With that, a few kilometers of forced march in the full sun, the dip in salt water, the dancing from ten to five in the morning, I melted before my eyes! 

"But since alcohol was forbidden to me, as much to sustain me as to forget the events still too present in my mind, I took narcotics." Elsewhere, she reportedly called drugs "treats to caress the soul." 

In a later chapter in her book, titled "Je Me Drouge" (I Drug Myself), she wrote, "At first, I thought it was wonderful! I often had great big blues and although I avoided thinking about the past as much as possible, it was often present to my eyes. So, a pinch of powder... and I felt lighter, no more worries, no more troubles, I didn't even see that I was fat anymore. I became the cheerful girl of the good days again." She goes on to lament the rigors of working at cabarets. "In the profession of singer, number one entertainer of cabaret, it's not always rosy. There are days when you want to have fun, but there are others when you would prefer to be quietly at home."

Le marché aux soieries à Paris,
Kiki de Montparnasse, 1932

In 1930, famed Random House editor Bennett Cerf ordered 150 copies of an English-language translation of Kiki's Memoirs. However, US Customs officials confiscated the books upon their arrival in New York, tipped off about alleged "obscenities" within. An unscrupulous publisher brought out a pirated version of Kiki's book and also James Joyce's Ulysses, robbing both authors of the proceeds she would have received from their own writing. 

A period of drug detoxification and a stable relationship with André Laroque, a minor tax official and accordion player, lead her to publish an updated version of her memoirs in 1938. Therein she writes of drugs, "That's the last thing to do! We know how it begins, but we never know where we stop; besides, ordinarily we never stop unless, as for me, something comes to upset your life; so if this something, I should say this someone, is really very strong, stronger than drugs, you can survive! Without that..."

But by the fall of 1939, with Laroque conscripted into the French army, Kiki was back on cocaine. Many of the clubs where she sang were being shut down due to the war, and she was arrested for possession of intoxicants that winter. She was kept in the psychiatric ward of a Paris hospital and "avoided a prison sentence, in a then-typical handling of minor drug cases, as drug addiction was considered an illness." By 1948 she had lost all of her beautiful teeth, and was living with Laroque and his new girlfriend, who had taken her in. (Braude). Sadly, Kiki died in 1953 after collapsing outside her flat in Montparnasse at the age of fifty-one, apparently due to complications of alcoholism or drug dependance. 

Daylily 'Kiki De Montparnasse'

KIKI'S LEGACY 

In 1989, biographers Billy Klüver and Julie Martin called Kiki "one of the century's first truly independent women." 

On May 14, 2022, Le Violon d'Ingres sold for $12.4 million, setting a record as the most expensive photograph ever sold at auction. 

A daylily featuring "a cream pink blend with dark purple eyezone and green throat" has been named for her, as has a funky, high-end lingerie brand whose Instagram page intersperses Man Ray portraits of Kiki with product shots.

CODA: Twitter/X flagged my post about this article as "sensitive content." I was perplexed about why until I realized it must have been the Violin D'Ingress photo I used to illustrate it, one hundred years after the iconic photo was taken. Pretty sure they missed the point that Man Ray and his model/performer were trying to make.