Rue Bréa

Kiki de Montparnasse or Kiki, born Alice Ernestine Prin, nicknamed the Queen of Montparnasse, was a model, muse and lover of famous artists, but also a singer, a dancer, a cabaret manager, a painter and a film actress, and she enlivened the Montparnasse district between the two wars (1921-1939). She was successively a brooch-maker, a florist, a bottle washer at "Félix Potain" and a screwer of plane wings. She poses for the painters Amedeo Modigliani and Tsugouharu Foujita, whose "Nu couché à la toile de Jouy" (Reclining Nude with a Jouy Canvas) will be the event of the Salon d'automne of 1922. She adopted his bowl hairstyle, his eyes abundantly highlighted with kohl, his lips painted bright red and the pseudonym Kiki. In 1921, she became the companion and favourite model of Man Ray who found her physique "from head to toe, irreproachable". He introduced her to the Dada artists Tristan Tzara and Francis Picabia and the Surrealists Louis Aragon, André Breton, Paul Éluard, Max Ernst and Philippe Soupault. She also began to draw portraits for the English and American soldiers who frequented the Rotonde. In 1929, Kiki became the mistress of the journalist Henri Broca. Broca founds the magazine "Paris-Montparnasse" in which the first chapters of the book of memories that Kiki is about to publish appear. Kiki was elected "Queen of Montparnasse". In 1936, she opens her own cabaret "L'Oasis" which will become "Chez Kiki". André Laroque, the cabaret's pianist and accordionist, who was a tax official by day, became her new lover. He helps Kiki to get off drugs and types her memories which will sleep 65 years before being published