Nu Couché au coussin Bleu, is one of the finest examples of reclining nudes by Modigliani, according to the Wikipedia article on the artist. It was painted in 1916, an earlier example of the "classic" Modigliani composition for a reclining nude sold at Christie's in 2015.
Whilst Modigliani worked in his Parisian studio producing his Art, all through 1916, and the preceding two years, the horrors of mechanized warfare in the war with Germany continued, and not far distant from the French capital city.
Meanwhile, in Zurich, in neutral Switzerland, and in New York, in the neutral United States of America, groups of artists, poets and writers came up with a group identity under the banner of DADA, that expressed a total rejection of the political and cultural forces that had led to this continuing slaughter. According to the Wikipedia article:
Dada was an informal international movement, with participants in Europe and North America. The beginnings of Dada correspond to the outbreak of World War I. For many participants, the movement was a protest against the bourgeois nationalist and colonialist interests, which many Dadaists believed were the root cause of the war, and against the cultural and intellectual conformity—in art and more broadly in society—that corresponded to the war.
Many Dadaists believed that the 'reason' and 'logic' of bourgeois capitalist society had led people into war. They expressed their rejection of that ideology in artistic expression that appeared to reject logic and embrace chaos and irrationality.
For example, George Grosz later recalled that his Dadaist art was intended as a protest "against this world of mutual destruction."
According to Hans Richter Dada was not art: it was "anti-art." Dada represented the opposite of everything which art stood for. Where art was concerned with traditional aesthetics, Dada ignored aesthetics. If art was to appeal to sensibilities, Dada was intended to offend.
As Hugo Ball expressed it, "For us, art is not an end in itself ... but it is an opportunity for the true perception and criticism of the times we live in."
A reviewer from the American Art News stated at the time that "Dada philosophy is the sickest, most paralyzing and most destructive thing that has ever originated from the brain of man." Art historians have described Dada as being, in large part, a "reaction to what many of these artists saw as nothing more than an insane spectacle of collective homicide."
The Smithsonian Magazine on-line has A Brief History of Dada using the defaced image of the Mona Lisa by Marcel Duchamp as a banner image. The text underneath this image says: In 1919 Marcel Duchamp pencilled a moustache and goatee on a print of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa and inscribed the work "L.H.O.O.Q." Spelled out in French these letters form a risqué pun: Elle a chaude au cul, or "She has hot pants."
This is NOT an accurate translation (see: down below). This "brief history" includes other, and more reliable, information on the Dada international art movement, and succinctly set out in a few paragraphs:
In Paris, after trying his hand at Impressionism and Cubism, Marcel Duchamp rejected all painting because it was made for the eye, not the mind.
“In 1913 I had the happy idea to fasten a bicycle wheel to a kitchen stool and watch it turn,” he later wrote, describing the construction he called Bicycle Wheel, a precursor of both kinetic and conceptual art.In 1916, German writer Hugo Ball, who had taken refuge from the war in neutral Switzerland, reflected on the state of contemporary art: “The image of the human form is gradually disappearing from the painting of these times and all objects appear only in fragments....The next step is for poetry to decide to do away with language.”
That same year, Ball recited just such a poem on the stage of the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, a nightspot (named for the 18th-century French philosopher and satirist) that he, Emmy Hennings (a singer and poet he would later marry) and a few expatriate pals had opened as a gathering place for artists and writers. The poem began: “gadji beri bimba / glandridi lauli lonni cadori....” It was utter nonsense, of course, aimed at a public that seemed all too complacent about a senseless war. Politicians of all stripes had proclaimed the war a noble cause—whether it was to defend Germany’s high culture, France’s Enlightenment or Britain’s empire. Ball wanted to shock anyone, he wrote, who regarded “all this civilized carnage as a triumph of European intelligence.” One Cabaret Voltaire performer, Romanian artist Tristan Tzara, described its nightly shows as “explosions of elective imbecility.”
It got its name, according to Richard Huelsenbeck, a German artist living in Zurich, when he and Ball came upon the word in a French-German dictionary. To Ball, it fit. “Dada is ‘yes, yes’ in Rumanian, ‘rocking horse’ and ‘hobby horse’ in French,” he noted in his diary. “For Germans it is a sign of foolish naiveté, joy in procreation, and preoccupation with the baby carriage.” Tzara, who later claimed that he had coined the term, quickly used it on posters, put out the first Dada journal and wrote one of the first of many Dada manifestos.
She is hot in the arse!
L.H.O.O.Q. (French pronunciation: [ɛl aʃ o o ky]) is a work of art by Marcel Duchamp. First conceived in 1919, the work is one of what Duchamp referred to as readymades, or more specifically a rectified ready-made. In L.H.O.O.Q. the objet trouvé ("found object") is a cheap postcard reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci's early 16th-century painting Mona Lisa onto which Duchamp drew a moustache and beard in pencil and appended the title.
The Mona Lisa as "clickbait"?
L.H.O.O.Q.
The name of the piece, L.H.O.O.Q., is a pun; the letters pronounced in French sound like "Elle a chaud au cul", "She is hot in the arse", or "She has a hot ass"; "avoir chaud au cul" is a vulgar expression implying that a woman has sexual restlessness. In a late interview Duchamp gives a loose translation of L.H.O.O.Q. as "there is fire down below".
"Babbling" and DADA
Another theory concerning the origin of the term DADA for this art movement is the idea that, as others have noted, that "da"-"da" suggests the first words of a child, evoking a childishness and absurdity that appealed to the group. Still others speculate that the word might have been chosen to evoke a similar meaning (or no meaning at all) in any language, reflecting the movement's internationalism.
What is termed "babbling" is a stage in child development and a state in language acquisition during which an infant appears to be experimenting with uttering articulate sounds, but does not yet produce any recognizable words. Babbling begins shortly after birth and progresses through several stages as the infant's repertoire of sounds expands and vocalizations become more speech-like. Infants typically begin to produce recognizable words when they are around 12 months of age, though babbling may continue for some time afterward. Babbling can be seen as a precursor to language development or simply as vocal experimentation.
DADA or MAMA?
In the context of "babble" and babbling, it may well be that "da" "da" is uttered by baby before "ma" "ma". "Da" "da", or "pa" "pa", is a sounding made, perhaps in baby's recognition of the first other. Mama is sounded later, because mama is not yet distinguishable from the entire and nurturing environment. Papa is the first interruption, an anti-environment!
NOT the MOMMA!
Dinosaurs is an American family sitcom comedy television series that was originally broadcast on ABC from April 26, 1991, to October 19, 1994. The show, about a family of anthropomorphic dinosaurs (portrayed by puppets), was produced by Michael Jacobs Productions and Jim Henson Television in association with Walt Disney Television and distributed by Buena Vista International, Inc. The characters were designed by Henson team member Kirk Thatcher.
In linguistics, mama and papa are considered a special case of false cognates. In many languages of the world, sequences of sounds similar to /mama/ and /papa/ mean "mother" and "father", usually but not always in that order. This is thought to be a coincidence resulting from the process of early language acquisition.
These terms use speech sounds that are among the easiest to produce: bilabials like /m/, /p/, and /b/, and the open vowel /a/. They are, therefore, often among the first word-like sounds made by babbling babies (babble words), and parents tend to associate the first sound babies make with themselves and to employ them subsequently as part of their baby-talk lexicon. Thus, there is no need to ascribe to common ancestry the similarities of !Kung ba, Aramaic abba, Mandarin Chinese bàba, and Persian baba (all "father"); or Navajo amá, Mandarin Chinese māma, Swahili mama, Quechua mama, and Polish mama (all "mother"). For the same reason, some scientists believe that 'mama' and 'papa' were among the first words that humans spoke. However, there is nothing of motherhood or fatherhood inherent in the sounds.
The linguist Roman Jakobson hypothesized that the nasal sound in "mama" comes from the nasal murmur that babies produce when breastfeeding:
Often the sucking activities of a child are accompanied by a slight nasal murmur, the only phonation which can be produced when the lips are pressed to mother’s breast or to the feeding bottle and the mouth full. Later, this phonatory reaction to nursing is reproduced as an anticipatory signal at the mere sight of food and finally as a manifestation of a desire to eat, or more generally, as an expression of discontent and impatient longing for missing food or absent nurser, and any ungranted wish. When the mouth is free from nutrition, the nasal murmur may be supplied with an oral, particularly labial release; it may also obtain an optional vocalic support.
— Roman Jakobson, Why 'Mama' and 'Papa'?
Patriarchy and anti-art
Two photographs from 1920. The first shows the opening of the first Dada exhibition in Berlin. The second shows a group photograph of Dada artists in Paris. Only two women acknowledged in the documentation of the exhibition in Berlin, and only one woman, the poet Celine Arnauld, in the photo taken in Paris.
It may well be true that Dada sought to attack, expose and to tear down the established orders of culture and politics in a "bourgeois" Europe-centred world, but this did not include the power relations embedded in a patriarchal society. And the fact of capitalism too, is avoided, to the extent that capitalism requires patriarchy to ensure the provision of surplus value to the owners of the means of production from the billions of hours of un-waged women's work.
Grand opening of the first Dada exhibition: International Dada Fair, Berlin, 5 June 1920. The central figure hanging from the ceiling was an effigy of a German officer with a pig's head. From left to right: Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch (sitting), Otto Burchard, Johannes Baader, Wieland Herzfelde, Margarete Herzfelde, Dr. Oz (Otto Schmalhausen), George Grosz and John Heartfield.
Dada artists, group photograph, 1920, Paris. From left to right, Back row: Louis Aragon, Theodore Fraenkel, Paul Eluard, Clément Pansaers, Emmanuel Fay (cut off). Second row: Paul Dermée, Philippe Soupault, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes. Front row: Tristan Tzara (with monocle), Celine Arnauld, Francis Picabia, André Breton.
Values?
When it comes to the human value of women's contribution to modern thinking, perception and understanding of our world, this too remains embedded in the commodification of their productions, at least that's the case in the current art market.
There is a Sotheby's archived webpage with an article headlined “The Problem of Woman”: Female Surrealists and their Unique Brand of Mystery, by Siân Folley (Nov 3, 2014). She writes:
NEW YORK - “The problem of woman,” André Breton wrote in 1929, “is the most marvelous and disturbing problem in all the world.”
You could be forgiven for thinking that there were no female Surrealists of note. Not one of André Breton’s highly choreographed promotional group photographs includes a woman, for instance. And yet, as Whitney Chadwick asserts in her pioneering study Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement, “no artistic movement since the Nineteenth Century has celebrated the idea of Woman as passionately as did Surrealism, and no group or movement has ever defined such a revolutionary role for her” (Whitney Chadwick, Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement, New York, 1985, inside front cover). In most cases, however, the stories of these strong revolutionary women have been lost in the retelling, and the women of Surrealism were often dismissed as adored muses first, artists second. Indeed, as Chadwick remarks: “we know more about Kiki of Montparnasse and Nadja than we do of Lee Miller and Valentine Hugo”!
NADJA
When it comes to misogyny and patriarchy you can't beat Breton, the so-called "Pope of Surrealism", and his second novel Nadja points to some of the most disturbing misogynistic "clickbait" material of the modern era.
Nadja (1928), the second book published by André Breton, is one of the iconic works of the French surrealist movement. It begins with the question "Who am I?"
It is based on Breton's actual interactions with a young woman, Nadja (actually Léona Camile Ghislaine Delacourt 1902–1941), over the course of ten days, and is presumed to be a semi-autobiographical description of his relationship with a mad patient of Pierre Janet. The book's non-linear structure is grounded in reality by references to other Paris surrealists such as Louis Aragon and 44 photographs. The article André Breton, Nadja - Writing with images, by James Elkins is very informative on this project. Elkins writes:
In the introduction to the 1963 edition Breton says that he intended his photographs to have an “anti-literary” purpose, meaning that he wanted them “d’éliminer toute description.” This is unevenly true of the photographs in the book, because the lack of extended explanation or ekphrasis makes the photographs mysterious; but it is also effectively true of the content and structure of each individual photograph, because it appears Breton did not look closely enough at his photographs to notice the many possibilities for “signals” in their details or compositions.
Toward the end of Nadja, speaking of the book’s composition, he says he went back “to look at several of the places” he had mentioned in the narrative, in order “to provide a photographic image of them taken at the special angle from which I myself had looked at them” (pp. 151-2). This is the first a reader hears about the photographs; in the rest of the book the captions tell readers what passage they illustrate, and nothing in the book refers to the illustrations as photographs rather than as direct representations of places.
The last sentence of the book runs:
"Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or will not be at all."
"Hysteria" as "clickbait"?
Salvador Dali - The Phenomenon of Ecstasy (1933) is a photo collage depicting the faces of “hysterical” women in the grip of what looks more like erotic pleasure than pain.
Anna Souter writes in an Artsy article on the The Dark Side of Surrealism That Exploited Women’s “Hysteria” (Jan 18 2019). She writes:
Although the term “hysteria” isn’t used in medical diagnoses today, it was once applied to an astonishingly wide range of mental and physical symptoms, primarily in women. Even the disorder’s name is strongly gendered: “hysteria” is derived from the ancient Greek word for “uterus”; medical texts of that period attributed the affliction to a displaced, or “wandering,” womb.
Hysteria has a long history in medicine, surfacing in different cultures at different times. Its study was widely popularized in the late 19th century, especially in France, where the neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot set up a clinic for hysterics at La Salpêtrière hospital in Paris. Although little known today, Charcot’s experiments with young “hysterical” women became a touchstone both for Sigmund Freud’s early work and, later, for the founding principles of the Surrealist movement.
Hysteria was considered to be a highly complex condition: It was generally thought of as a mental disorder accompanied by physical symptoms such as fits. Historian Lisa Appignanesi writes in her 2007 book Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors that in Charcot’s France, the term “described a sexualized madness full of contradictions, one which could play all feminine parts and take on a dizzying variety of symptoms, though none of them had any real detectable base in the body.” (Charcot admitted that men also suffered from hysteria, but he argued that these cases were generally caused by traumatic accidents, rather than by a gendered predisposition.)
Charcot’s research was made famous through the ailing individuals who lived at La Salpêtrière and whose symptoms were displayed and analyzed in sessions open to members of the public. Charcot became a celebrity doctor, turning his semi-staged diagnostic sessions into spectacles for (masculine) public consumption. The methods of diagnosis and treatment at La Salpêtrière were all highly visual, creating a sort of theater of hysteria, in which the often young and pretty “hysterics” acted out their symptoms as if by rote.
One of Charcot’s innovations was to set up a photography studio at La Salpêtrière in order to document the physical symptoms of his patients, such as the dramatic and beautiful Augustine. These images were then widely disseminated in Paul Regnard and Désiré Bourneville’s Iconographie Photographique de La Salpêtrière (1876–80), an influential book of medical photography. Presented as a scientifically accurate visual document, the book had a twofold effect: For male readers, it provided a visual record of the attractive and often scantily clad hysterics, while for some female consumers, it became a manual of hysteria and its symptoms to be mimicked, reinforcing the stereotypes associated with the condition.
In the photographs, the camera takes the position of a detached voyeur, with the subjects only looking at the lens and engaging directly with the image-making when they are photographed in their “normal” or “sane” moments. When engaged in the throes of a hysterical attack, the women are apparently oblivious of the camera’s presence, revealing parts of their body that Victorian decency would otherwise hide from view.
In a photograph depicting the arc de cercle, or the “arch of hysteria,” which was believed to show the anguish of the condition—and which Louise Bourgeois would later famously subvert in bronze with a masculine form—the woman contorts her body so that she is resting on her feet and shoulders. Her head is hidden, but her shapely legs and feet are almost completely revealed. The relative distance of the camera and the profiling of the subject suggest that this photograph is taken to give the impression of scientific “truth,” but also simultaneously to place the viewer at a voyeuristic remove, for both scientific study and visual titillation.
Freud was a student of Charcot, and achieved renown for his Studies in Hysteria (1893–95). Charcot’s hysterics, Freud’s work, and the Salpêtrière photographs together provided a wealth of cultural materials to inform the work of Surrealist artists. In 1928, French writers André Breton and Louis Aragon published an article in the journal La Révolution Surréaliste that contained photographs of Salpêtrière hysteric Augustine and expressed the desire “to celebrate here the quinquagenary of hysteria, the greatest poetic discovery of the end of the nineteenth century.” Breton and Aragon continue, praising “youthful hysterics” and the “delightful” Augustine. “Hysteria is not a pathological phenomenon and can be considered in every respect a supreme means of expression,” they conclude. An excerpt from Breton’s novel Nadja, published that year, appears in the same issue of La Révolution Surréaliste. In this book, Breton famously wrote “Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or it will not be,” suggesting that the throes of a hysterical attack happen in a state of sexualized, uninhibited passion.
Breton’s advocation of the “convulsive” was taken as a guiding principle for Surrealist art. Espousing the madness and “paranoiac” sensibilities he believed were embodied by hysteria, Salvador Dalí took up the visual tropes of the Salpêtrière photographs in a number of his works.
His paintings and drawings—such as Invisible Lion, Horse, Sleeping Woman (1930)—also repeatedly present women arching their bodies in a way that resembles the arc de cercle demonstrated by Charcot’s hysterics.
In one drawing, Poems Secrets Nude with Snail (1967), a female subject with her face partially hidden arches her back to catch the milk from her lactating breasts in her mouth.
With mutilated bodies, exaggerated sexual features, and closed eyes, Dalí’s women are vulnerable to the viewer’s gaze, disempowered by their apparent enslavement to their uncontrollable gendered characteristics.
The fascination with hysteria lasted throughout the key period of the Surrealists’ success. The invitation to the opening event of the 1938 Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme (overseen by Marcel Duchamp) promised visitors a night of l’hysterie.
During the evening, the experimental collaborative exhibition was used as a stage for a performance by the actress Hélène Vanel, trained for the occasion by Dalí and Wolfgang Paalen.
Hélène Vanel at the 1938 Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme, Paris.
She jumped from a pile of pillows, naked and chained, before splashing in a puddle and eventually recreating a hysterical attack on a bed, linking the notion of the submissive female body with mental instability and dependency.
The Surrealists saw hysteria as a state in which poetic expression could run free, at the expense of women who were not given a voice, but instead objectified. Decades later, in 1980, hysteria was finally removed from the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. But for a significant period of time, this now-supposedly-defunct disease of the mind was explained away as a fundamental condition of being female, and exploited by scientists and artists alike.
. . . and "clickbait" today!
Augustine is a 2012 French historical erotic drama film about a love affair between French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot and his patient Louise Augustine Gleizes, who was known as Augustine or A. In reality, there was no sexual relationship between the two. This film by Alice Winocour’s is discuused in an article by Judith Surkis published as Fiction and Film for French Historians (vol. 1-8), and on Fiction and Film for Scholars of France webpage as:
Alice Winocour’s Augustine
She writes: Jean-Martin Charcot’s spectacular studies of hysteria drew crowds to his Tuesday lectures in turn of the century Paris and they remain an enduring subject of fascination today. Vision and visuality were central to how Charcot made sense of the disease and how he made a name for himself.
The photographs taken of his star patients published in the Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière in the 1870s, including those of Alice Winocour’s eponymous film Augustine, are at once disturbing and beautiful. André Brouillet’s 1887 “A Lesson at the Salpêtrière,” featuring the “queen of the hysterics” Maria “Blanche” Wittman captures the gendered dynamics of the institution’s scopophilic regime. A copy of it famously hung in Sigmund Freud’s office.
A scene that appears to recreate Brouillet’s painting features Augustine (played by the pop star Soko) in a white bodice appearing before an audience of men. Charcot (played by Vincent Lindon) presents her as suffering from “ovarian hysteria.” When she is hypnotized before the assembled onlookers, Augustine’s feathered hat quivers (another detail drawn from the records of Charcot’s performances). The attack then worsens and she falls to the floor in an orgasmic delirium. Charcot may have denied the uterine origins of hysteria, but the film intimates here and throughout that there is something unmistakably sexual going on.
The question of hysteria’s relation to sex is indeed foregrounded in Winocour’s film. In a scene at one of Dr. and Mme Charcot’s famous evening gatherings, a young colleague asks the master: “If it’s in the brain, why is their delirium always sexual?” Charcot deliberately asserts: “It’s not part of the disease. It’s just the delirium.” The conversation echoes that overheard by Sigmund Freud when he attended a similar gathering at Charcot’s, during his Paris sojourn in 1885-86. Referring to a case of a married couple in which the husband was impotent, Charcot responded to his student Brouardel: “in such cases, it is always the genital thing” [la chose génitale], always . . . always . . .always.” Freud wondered at the time “‘Well, but if he knows that, why does he never say so?’”[1] For Foucault, of course, such denegation barely masked how the Salpêtrière was “a machinery for incitement.”[2]
1. Sigmund Freud and Philip Rieff, The History of the psychoanalytic movement : and other papers, The Collected papers of Sigmund Freud (New York: Collier Books, 1972), 12.
2. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), 55.
At the end of this article Judith Surkis references Jean-Claude Monod and Jean-Christophe Valtat’s short film from 2003, also titled Augustine. Surkis writes that this film;
foregrounds what is missing from Winocour’s. Filmed in an exquisite black and white that echoes the quality and character of Augustine’s poses in the Iconographie, this film stresses the protocinematic and protopsychoanalytic dimensions of the story. (The film’s opening images of a horse running with the sound of a projector turning suggest Eadweard Muybridge’s contemporaneous photographic sequences).
Augustine - on Vimeo.
The artist's model as "clickbait" - Kiki de Montparnasse
Alice Prin (1901 – 1953), nicknamed the Queen of Montparnasse, and often known as Kiki de Montparnasse, was a French artist's model, literary muse, nightclub singer, actress, memoirist, and painter. She flourished in, and helped define, the liberated culture of Paris in the 1920s. Kiki was featured in a three-page obituary in Life magazine in the 29 June 1953 edition. Long after her death, Prin remains the embodiment of the outspokenness, audacity, and creativity that marked that period of life in Montparnasse. She represents a strong artistic force in her own right as a woman. In 1989, biographers Billy Klüver and Julie Martin called her "one of the century's first truly independent women." In her honour, a daylily has been named Kiki de Montparnasse.
Alice Prin (Kiki de Montparnasse)
Alice Prin was born in Châtillon-sur-Seine, Côte d'Or. An illegitimate child, she was raised in abject poverty by her grandmother. At age twelve, she was sent to live with her mother in Paris in order to find work. She first worked in shops and bakeries, but by the age of fourteen, she was posing nude for sculptors, which created discord with her mother.
Adopting a single name, "Kiki", she became a fixture in the Montparnasse social scene and a popular artist's model, posing for dozens of artists, including Sanyu, Chaim Soutine, Julian Mandel, Tsuguharu Foujita, Constant Detré, Francis Picabia, Jean Cocteau, Arno Breker, Alexander Calder, Per Krohg, Hermine David, Pablo Gargallo, Mayo, and Tono Salazar. Moise Kisling painted a portrait of Kiki titled Nu assis, one of his best known.
Ballet Mécanique
She appeared in nine short and often experimental films, including Fernand Léger's Ballet mécanique without any credit.
A painter in her own right
A painter in her own right, in 1927 Prin had a sold-out exhibition of her paintings at the Galerie au Sacre du Printemps in Paris. Signing her work with her chosen single name, Kiki, she usually noted the year. Her drawings and paintings comprise portraits, self-portraits, social activities, fanciful animals, and dreamy landscapes composed in a light, slightly uneven, expressionist style that is a reflection of her easy-going manner and boundless optimism.
Alice Prin around 1920
KIKI'S MEMOIRES
Her autobiography was published in 1929 as Kiki's Memoirs, with Ernest Hemingway and Tsuguharu Foujita providing introductions. In 1930 the book was translated by Samuel Putnam and published in Manhattan by Black Manikin Press, but it was immediately banned by the United States government.
"clickbait"?
A copy of the first US edition was held in the section for banned books in the New York Public Library through the 1970s. However, the book had been reprinted under the title The Education of a Young Model throughout the 1950s and 1960s (e.g., a 1954 edition by Bridgehead has the Hemingway Introduction and photos and illustrations by Mahlon Blaine).
These editions were mainly put out by Samuel Roth. Taking advantage that the banning of the book meant it did not receive copyright protection in the U.S., Roth put out a series of supposedly copyrighted editions (which were never registered with the Library of Congress) which altered the text and added illustrations – line drawings and photographs – which were not by Prin.
Editions published in and after 1955 include an extra 10 chapters supposedly written by Prin 23 years after the original book, including a visit to New York where she meets with Samuel Roth and Ernest Hemingway; none of this was true. The original autobiography finally saw a new translation and publication in 1996.
Buy Kiki de Montparnasse Women's Sensual Lace Garter Belt. Similar products also available. SALE now on!
More "clickbait"?
Her music hall performances in black hose and garters included crowd-pleasing risqué songs, which were uninhibited, yet inoffensive. For a few years during the 1930s, she owned the Montparnasse cabaret L'Oasis, which was later renamed "Chez Kiki."
A symbol of bohemian and creative Paris and of the possibility of being a woman and finding an artistic place, at the age of twenty-eight she was declared the Queen of Montparnasse. Even during difficult times, she maintained her positive attitude, saying"all I need is an onion, a bit of bread, and a bottle of red [wine]; and I will always find somebody to offer me that."
Enter: Man Ray
In July 1921, Man Ray came from New York to live and work in Paris. He soon settled in the Montparnasse quarter favoured by many artists. Shortly after arriving in Paris, he met and fell in love with Kiki de Montparnasse (Alice Prin). Kiki was Man Ray's companion for most of the 1920s.
She became the subject of some of his most famous photographic images and starred in his experimental films, Le Retour à la Raison and L'Étoile de mer.
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