Kiki de Montparnasse. The Queen of 1920s Paris

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Black-and-white portrait of Kiki de Montparnasse resting at a cafe table, with Paris street backdrop and title text.

There's a photograph taken in 1924 that sold at Christie's in 2022 for 12.4 million dollars, making it the most expensive photograph ever sold at auction. It shows a woman from behind, nude to the waist, with the f-holes of a violin painted onto her back. The woman is Kiki de Montparnasse. Most of the headlines called her Man Ray's muse. That's accurate, but it's also about half the story.

Kiki de Montparnasse, born Alice Ernestine Prin in 1901, was a model, painter, cabaret singer, actress, and memoirist. She was crowned Queen of Montparnasse by the artists she moved among, and by most accounts she was as much the centre of that world as any of the men who painted her. She died at 51, largely forgotten. It's worth knowing who she actually was.

From Burgundy to the streets of Paris

Alice Prin was born in Chatillon-sur-Seine in Burgundy in 1901 into a poor family. Her mother eventually sent her to Paris at age 12, where she attended school for a single year before leaving to take on a series of menial jobs to help support the family. It was a hard start.

In 1917, to supplement her meagre earnings, she began modelling for a sculptor. Her mother disowned her for it, considering it an inappropriate source of income. Homeless and poverty-stricken, she drifted to Montparnasse, the bohemian district on the Left Bank that had become the unofficial home of Paris's artistic community. There she befriended the painter Chaim Soutine, who introduced her to a wider circle that included Maurice Utrillo, Jean Cocteau, Modigliani, and others. She was, by all accounts, immediately at home.

Around 1918 she began a relationship with the artist Maurice Mendjisky, who is often credited with giving her the nickname Kiki. It stuck. From that point on, Alice Prin effectively ceased to exist. Kiki de Montparnasse was who she became.

The model at the centre of an era

Throughout the 1920s Kiki modelled for nearly all the leading avant-garde artists working in Paris. The list is remarkable: Alexander Calder, Francis Picabia, Chaim Soutine, Foujita, Kisling, Cocteau, and Modigliani, among many others. As Artnet News noted in their coverage of Mark Braude's biography, she was a model to a slew of major artists, but the biography argues she was in many ways the centre of the Parisian avant-garde rather than simply a peripheral figure within it.

*Foujita and Kiki (with a portrait of Kiki by Foujita hanging on the wall), detail of a photograph taken by Marc Vaux, circa 1920*

Foujita, the Japanese-French painter, considered her his favourite model. His 1922 painting of her, Nu couche a la toile, was exhibited at the Salon d'Automne at the Grand Palais and sold for 8,000 francs, a significant sum at the time. He reportedly shared some of the proceeds with Kiki.

Kiki in all her splendor, on May 3, 1929 at the charity ball of the Friendly Aid of Artists.

What made her different from other models of the period wasn't just her looks. It was her personality. She was funny, outrageous, completely herself. She sang bawdy songs at the cafes and bars of Montparnasse, held court at La Rotonde and Le Select, and had the kind of presence that people built their evenings around. At a legendary party in Montparnasse, she was formally crowned Queen of Montparnasse, a title that recognised her not just as a model but as an equal participant in the creative life of the neighbourhood.

Man Ray and Le Violon d'Ingres

In 1921 Kiki met the American photographer and painter Man Ray, born Emmanuel Radnitzky in Philadelphia, shortly after he arrived in Paris. They moved in together and began a relationship that lasted most of the decade. As Literary Hub's coverage of Braude's biography makes clear, when they created Le Violon d'Ingres in 1924, Kiki and Man Ray had been living together for three years, and at that point she was arguably the bigger star of the two. Man Ray had failed to sell a single work at his own Parisian debut.

Le Violon d'Ingres is one of the most recognised photographs of the 20th century. It shows Kiki from behind, nude to the waist, wearing a turban, with two f-holes painted onto the print of the photograph to make her body resemble a violin. The title references a French idiom, 'violon d'Ingres', meaning a hobby or pastime, a nod to the neoclassical painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, who played the violin as a sideline to his painting career. As the Smithsonian reported when the print sold at Christie's in 2022, no other photograph has proven to have the lasting power and playful eroticism that defines the Surrealists of the 1920s.

The image first appeared in Andre Breton's Surrealist magazine Litterature in June 1924. It's beautiful and unsettling in equal measure. Man Ray made dozens of photographs of Kiki over the course of their relationship, often nude, always recognisably her. She was also the star of his experimental film L'Etoile de mer, shot mostly through a glass filter that blurs and distorts, though her presence comes through regardless.

More than a muse: painter, performer, writer

One of the frustrating things about how Kiki tends to be remembered is the word 'muse'. It reduces her to a passive role in someone else's creative process. The reality is more complicated.

In 1927 Kiki held her own exhibition of paintings in Paris, and it sold out. Her work, mostly romanticised portraits and scenes from her Burgundy childhood, had a simple, bright, dreamy quality. Man Ray apparently dismissed her painting as a hobby. Given that her show sold out and his debut didn't, this says more about him than about her.

Two years later, not yet 30, she published her memoirs. Ernest Hemingway wrote the introduction. The book was a bestseller. Even though it was banned in the United States.

She was also a serious cabaret performer whose songs were, as Artnet described it, the pulse of Paris in those years. This was an ephemeral art, one that doesn't leave behind paintings or photographs, which is part of why her reputation has faded while Man Ray's has only grown. But those who were there consistently described her as a force in her own right.

I had found my true calling. The painters had taken me in; my sadness was over. I still often went hungry, but laughter made me forget all that. (Memories , 1929, Kiki)

The end and the forgetting

Kiki and Man Ray separated in 1929. The decade that had made her ended, and the years that followed were harder. She struggled with drug addiction, and the bohemian world she'd thrived in scattered as Paris changed around her. She died in 1953 at the age of 51.

The forgetting that followed is a familiar story for women of her era. The paintings and photographs she appeared in survive in major museums. Her own work, her performances, her personality, the thing that made all those artists want to paint her in the first place, is harder to recover. Cultural historian Mark Braude's biography, Kiki Man Ray: Art, Love, and Rivalry in 1920s Paris, is the most serious recent attempt to put her back at the centre of her own story rather than the margins of someone else's.

For r/RetroTease, Kiki represents something important: the idea that the person in front of the camera or canvas is never just a subject. The best nude photography and art has always been a collaboration, even when history doesn't record it that way.