In some ways, Alice Ernestine Prin, known to her friends and posterity as Kiki de Montparnasse, was born at precisely the right moment (1901) and place: never before or since might this child of the century’s magnetic character have been so vital or vividly realized. She was the model, lover, or taliswoman—sometimes all three—of the interwar Parisian avant-garde. “For about ten years,” Ernest Hemingway observed, “she was about as close as people get nowadays to being a Queen but that, of course, is very different from being a lady.” In other respects, Kiki’s timing could hardly have been worse. No matter how bright her 20s legend, she faded into drug-addled, toothless oblivion and died at 51.
Conjuring “personality” is the biographer’s supreme challenge. This is doubly so in Kiki’s case, for her personality was her achievement. The cultural historian Mark Braude asks in the prologue to Kiki Man Ray: Art, Love, and Rivalry in 1920s Paris: “How did it happen that this young woman should be the one to capture the spirit of [the] age like no one else, and by doing nothing more than making a performance of herself?” Until Kiki Man Ray, I supposed you simply had to be there.
