Fernand Léger
Fernand Léger photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1936
Born	(1881-02-04)February 4, 1881 Argentan, Orne, France
Died	August 17, 1955(1955-08-17) (aged 74) Gif-sur-Yvette, France
Nationality	French
Field	Painting, printmaking and film maker
Movement	Tubism, Cubism, Modernism

Joseph Fernand Henri Léger (February 4, 1881 – August 17, 1955) was a French painter, sculptor, and filmmaker. In his early works he created a personal form of Cubism which he gradually modified into a more figurative, populist style. His boldly simplified treatment of modern subject matter has caused him to be regarded as a forerunner of Pop art.

Biography[link]

Léger was born in Argentan, Orne, Basse-Normandie, where his father raised cattle. Fernand Léger initially trained as an architect from 1897–1899 before moving in 1900 to Paris, where he supported himself as an architectural draftsman. After military service in Versailles,Yvelines in 1902–1903, he enrolled at the School of Decorative Arts; he also applied to the École des Beaux-Arts but was rejected. He nevertheless attended the Beaux-Arts as a non-enrolled student, spending what he described as "three empty and useless years" studying with Gérôme and others, while also studying at the Académie Julian.^[1] He began to work seriously as a painter only at the age of 25. At this point his work showed the influence of Impressionism, as seen in Le Jardin de ma mère (My Mother's Garden) of 1905, one of the few paintings from this period that he did not later destroy. A new emphasis on drawing and geometry appeared in Léger's work after he saw the Cézanne retrospective at the Salon d'Automne in 1907.^[2]

In 1909 he moved to Montparnasse and met such leaders of the avant-garde as Archipenko, Lipchitz, Chagall, and Robert Delaunay. His major painting of this period is Nudes in the Forest (1909–10), in which Léger displayed a personal form of Cubism—his critics called it "Tubism" for its emphasis on cylindrical forms—that made no use of the collage technique pioneered by Braque and Picasso.^[3]

In 1910 he joined with several other artists, including Delaunay, Jacques Villon, Henri Le Fauconnier, Albert Gleizes, Francis Picabia, and Marie Laurencin to form an offshoot of the Cubist movement, the Puteaux Group—also called the Section d'Or (The Golden Section). Léger was influenced during this time by Italian Futurism, and his paintings, from then until 1914, became increasingly abstract. Their tubular, conical, and cubed forms are laconically rendered in rough patches of primary colors plus green, black and white, as seen in the series of paintings with the title Contrasting Forms.

Léger's experiences in World War I had a significant effect on his work. Mobilized in August 1914 for service in the French Army, he spent two years at the front in Argonne. He produced many sketches of artillery pieces, airplanes, and fellow soldiers while in the trenches, and painted Soldier with a Pipe (1916) while on furlough. In September 1916 he almost died after a mustard gas attack by the German troops at Verdun. During a period of convalescence in Villepinte he painted The Card Players (1917), a canvas whose robot-like, monstrous figures reflect the ambivalence of his experience of war. As he explained:

...I was stunned by the sight of the breech of a 75 millimeter in the sunlight. It was the magic of light on the white metal. That's all it took for me to forget the abstract art of 1912–1913. The crudeness, variety, humor, and downright perfection of certain men around me, their precise sense of utilitarian reality and its application in the midst of the life-and-death drama we were in ... made me want to paint in slang with all its color and mobility.^[4]

This painting marked the beginning of his "mechanical period", during which the figures and objects he created were characterized by sleekly rendered tubular and machine-like forms. Starting in 1918, he also produced the first paintings in the Disk series, in which disks suggestive of traffic lights figure prominently.^[5] In December 1919 he married Jeanne-Augustine Lohy, and in 1920 he met Le Corbusier, who would remain a lifelong friend.

The "mechanical" works Léger painted in the 1920s, in their formal clarity as well as in their subject matter—the mother and child, the female nude, figures in an ordered landscape—are typical of the postwar "return to order" in the arts, and link him to the tradition of French figurative painting represented by Poussin and Corot.^[6] In his paysages animés (animated landscapes) of 1921, figures and animals exist harmoniously in landscapes made up of streamlined forms. The frontal compositions, firm contours, and smoothly blended colors of these paintings frequently recall the works of Henri Rousseau, an artist Léger greatly admired and whom he had met in 1909.

They also share traits with the work of Le Corbusier and Amédée Ozenfant who together had founded Purism, a style intended as a rational, mathematically based corrective to the impulsiveness of cubism. Combining the classical with the modern, Léger's Nude on a Red Background (1927) depicts a monumental, expressionless woman, machinelike in form and color. His still life compositions from this period are dominated by stable, interlocking rectangular formations in vertical and horizontal orientation. The Siphon of 1924, a still life based on an advertisement in the popular press for the aperitif Campari, represents the high-water mark of the Purist aesthetic in Léger's work.^[7] Its balanced composition and fluted shapes suggestive of classical columns are brought together with a quasi-cinematic close-up of a hand holding a bottle.

As an enthusiast of the modern, Léger was greatly attracted to cinema, and for a time he considered giving up painting for filmmaking.^[8] In 1923–24 he designed the set for the laboratory scene in Marcel L'Herbier's L'Inhumaine (The Inhuman One). In 1924, in collaboration with Dudley Murphy, George Antheil, and Man Ray, Léger produced and directed the iconic and Futurism-influenced film, Ballet Mécanique (Mechanical Ballet). Neither abstract nor narrative, it is a series of images of a woman's lips and teeth, close-up shots of ordinary objects, and repeated images of human activities and machines in rhythmic movement.^[9]

In collaboration with Amédée Ozenfant he established a free school where he taught from 1924, with Alexandra Exter and Marie Laurencin. He produced the first of his "mural paintings", influenced by Le Corbusier's theories, in 1925. Intended to be incorporated into polychrome architecture, they are among his most abstract paintings, featuring flat areas of color that appear to advance or recede.^[10]

Starting in 1927, the character of Léger's work gradually changed as organic and irregular forms assumed greater importance.^[11] The figural style that emerged in the 1930s is fully displayed in the Two Sisters of 1935, and in several versions of Adam and Eve.^[12] With characteristic humor, he portrayed Adam in a striped bathing suit, or sporting a tattoo.

In 1931, Leger visited New York City and decorated Nelson Rockefeller's apartment.^[13] In 1935, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City presented an exhibition of his work.

During World War II Léger lived in the United States, where he found inspiration in the novel sight of industrial refuse in the landscape. The shock of juxtaposed natural forms and mechanical elements, the "tons of abandoned machines with flowers cropping up from within, and birds perching on top of them" exemplified what he called the "law of contrast".^[14] His enthusiasm for such contrasts resulted in such works as The Tree in the Ladder of 1943–44, and Romantic Landscape of 1946. A major work of 1944, Three Musicians (Museum of Modern Art, New York), reprises a composition of 1930. A folk-like composition reminiscent of Rousseau, it exploits the law of contrasts in its realistic juxtaposition of the three men and their instruments.

Upon his return to France in 1945, he joined the Communist Party. During this period his work became less abstract, and he produced many monumental figure compositions depicting scenes of popular life featuring acrobats, builders, divers, and country outings. Art historian Charlotta Kotik has written that Leger's "determination to depict the common man, as well as to create for him, was a result of socialist theories widespread among the avant-garde both before and after World War II. However, Léger's social conscience was not that of a fierce Marxist, but of a passionate humanist".^[15] His varied projects included book illustrations, murals, stained-glass windows, mosaics, polychrome ceramic sculptures, and set and costume designs.

After the death of his wife in 1950, Léger married Nadia Khodossevitch in 1952. In his final years he lectured in Bern, designed mosaics and stained-glass windows for the Central University of Venezuela in Caracas, Venezuela, and painted Country Outing, The Camper, and the series The Big Parade. In 1954 he began a project for a mosaic for the São Paulo Opera, which he would not live to finish. Fernand Léger died at his home in 1955 and is buried in Gif-sur-Yvette, Essonne.

Legacy[link]

Stained-glass window at the Central University of Venezuela, c.1950s

Léger wrote in 1945 that "the object in modern painting must become the main character and overthrow the subject. If, in turn, the human form becomes an object, it can considerably liberate possibilities for the modern artist." As he explained in a 1949 essay, by allowing the object to replace the subject, "we were able to consider the human figure as a plastic value, not as a sentimental value. That is why the human figure has remained willfully inexpressive throughout the evolution of my work".^[16] As the first painter to take as his idiom the imagery of the machine age, and to make the objects of consumer society the subjects of his paintings, Léger has been called a progenitor of Pop art.^[17]

He was active as a teacher for many years. Among his pupils were Nadir Afonso, Robert Colescott, Paul Georges, Charlotte Gilbertson, Hananiah Harari, Asger Jorn, Michael Loew, Beverly Pepper, Victor Reinganum, Marcel Mouly, George L. K. Morris, Erik Olson and Charlotte Wankel.

In 1952, a pair of Léger murals was installed in the General Assembly Hall of the United Nations headquarters in New York, New York.^[18]

In 1960, the Musée Fernand Léger was opened in Biot, Alpes-Maritimes,France.

In November 2003, his painting, La femme en rouge et vert sold for $22,407,500 United States dollars. Sales prices of his sculptures have exceeded 8 million dollars.

In August 2008, one of Léger's paintings owned by Wellesley College's Davis Museum, Mother and Child, was reported missing. It is believed to have disappeared some time between April 9, 2007 and November 19, 2007. A $100,000 reward is being offered for information that leads to the safe return of the painting.^[19]

Notes[link]

References[link]

• Buck, Robert T. et al. (1982). Fernand Léger. New York: Abbeville Publishers. ISBN 0-89659-254-5
• Cowling, Elizabeth; Mundy, Jennifer (1990). On Classic Ground: Picasso, Léger, de Chirico and the New Classicism 1910-1930. London: Tate Gallery. ISBN 1-85437-043-X
• Eliel, Carol S. et al. (2001). L'Esprit Nouveau: Purism in Paris, 1918-1925. New York: Harry Abrams, Inc. ISBN 0-8109-6727-8
• Léger, Fernand (2009). F.Léger, Exhibition catalogue. Paris: galerie Malingue. ISBN 2-9518323-4-6
• Néret, Gilles (1993). F. Léger. New York: BDD Illustrated Books. ISBN 0-7924-5848-6

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Fernand Léger

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Fernand Léger

• Artcyclopedia - Links to Léger's works
• Fernand Léger at the Museum of Modern Art
• Artchive - Biography and images of Léger's works
• Ballet Mecanique - Watch Fernand Léger's Short Film
• Paintings by Fernand Léger (public domain in Canada)

Giorgos Kyriakakis (Greek: Γιώργος Κυριακάκης) was born in 1967 in Crete where he took his first music lessons.^[1] He studied Composition and Analysis with Joseph Papadatos and Byzantine music with Lykourgos Angelopoulos at the "Philippos Nakas" Conservatory of Athens. He continued his studies in Composition, Music for the Media, Music of Non-European Cultures with Dimitri Terzakis and in Electroacoustic Composition with Eckhard Roedger at the "Musikhochschule fuer Musik und Theater Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy” Leipzig. He has composed works for children's theatre, for the cinema as well as music for solo instruments, chamber ensembles, choir and orchestra. His compositions have been performed in Greece and abroad. His works have been recorded by FMrecords and ARKYS. He is a member of the “Greek Composers' Union” and the “Deutscher Komponistenverband„. Since 2006 he has been elected as Assistant Professor of Composition and Contemporary Music in the département of Music Art and Science, University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki. He was until 2009 a producer of the Greek broadcast (ERA2). His works are being published by Edition Gravis. He lives and works as a free composer in Berlin.

[edit] Works

1. Tango per “D”, for trumpet & piano

2. Ialemos, for low brass (3 alt horns, trombone, euphonium, tuba)

3. Minimal I & II, for piano

4. Trio, for alto saxophone, piano & e-bass

5. Missing…, for orchestra

6. Chrysalis' Transformations, for brass quintet & piano

7. Tiny Suite, for trumpet, trombone & percussion/1

8. En Chordais (In strings), for string quartet

9. Chalkos Echoon (Clinging Cooper), for chamber ensemble (oboe, clarinet, horn, trumpet, trombone, percussion/1, piano, cello, double bass)

10. St' animera (On the day), for saxophone quartet

11. Ainei Ι, for flute

12. Trisdiathlasis (Refraction), for clarinet, alto saxophone & bassoon

13. Lubato variationen, for mezzo & chamber ensemble (basset horn, trumpet, viola, double bass, percussion/1)

14. Proposis ’93, for low voice, violin, cello & percussion/1

15. Invisible Cities, for chamber ensemble (oboe, clarinet, bass clarinet, bassoon, trumpet, trombone, percussion/1, harpsichord, 2 double basses)

16. Antaion, for trumpet & 4 trombones

17. Kantate über die Hoffnung (Cantata for the Hope), Text: New Testament, for mixed choir & chamber ensemble (flute, oboe, horn, trombone, violin, cello, double bass)

18. Sigana (Smoothly), for clarinet & alto saxophone

19. Prophecies, for soprano, flute, accordion & percussion/1

20. Toccata, for solo key instrument

21. The deception of the Thrush, for orchestra

22. Prologue Note or Summary, Text: G.Skarimbas, for solo voice

23. 16th Reading: Voices, Text: K.P.Kavafis, for voice quartet

24. Enalion pyr (Sea fire), for brass quintet

25. Epestrefe (Return), for oboe, clarinet, alto saxophone & bassoon

26. Oulaloum Ι, Text: G.Skarimbas, 5 plus 1 songs, for middle voice & accordion

27. Black Midnight, for flute, clarinet & alto saxophone

28. Katedioxan (Chased), for 6 low string instruments

29. Round Midnight, for solo cello

30. Ulysses at the River, Text: T.Sinopoulos, for children choir, violin, cello & piano

31. Hydata (Waters), for orchestra

32. Anagram, Text: T.S.Eliot, for mixed choir

33. Mini to Oktovrio (At the Month of October), for narrator, psaltis, baritone, children choir, Byzantine choir & chamber ensemble (flute, clarinet, saz, trumpet, tuba, percussion/2, violin, cello, double bass)

34. Oulaloum II, Text: G.Skarimbas, six songs, for low voice & e-guitar

35. Persephone, Text: K.Chatzinakis, five songs for children choir & orchestra

36. Seven Summaries, for any two melodic instruments

37. Love Vesper, for accordion & piano

38. Schema, for accordion

39. Schema II, for saxophone

40. Ode β', for string orchestra

41. Eti deomai sou (Still praying), Text: G.Skarimbas, for middle voice and key instrument

42. North-South-North, for wind orchestra

43. Oinos Tritos (Wine the 3rd), concerto for alto saxophone & string orchestra

44. Orneon Roc, for violin & guitar

45. Schema III, for trombone

46. …and so she went!, for students' chamber ensemble (flute, clarinet, alto saxophone, small percussion/1, piano)

47. Isabelle in the Garden, for recorder and accordion

48. Five Finger Exercises, Text: T.S.Eliot, for any voice and any instrument

49. Schema IV, for recorder

50. Lygisma (Bending), for bassoon & piano

51. Schema V, for violin

52. Schema VI, for clarinet

53. Missa Contemplativa, for middle voice, flute, baritone saxophone & harpsichord

54. Jose en Avlida, for violin, accordion, piano & double bass

55. Zibib, like three bagatelles, for saxophone quartet

56. Schema VII, for piccolo

57. Engomia (Laments), for children choir & brass quintet

58. Strophe one, for any instrument

59. Apokopos, Text: Bergadis, for tenor & chamber orchestra (flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, trumpet, trombone, tuba, string quintet)

60. Lithino (Made of Stone), three pieces for guitar

61. Helidonisma (Swallow Song), for 8 violins

62. Schema VIII, for tuba

63. Bienhereuse Emilie, six hymns for st.Emilie de Vialar, for children choir & continuo

64. Logismos (Thought), for flute & piano

65. Klotho, concerto for piano & string orchestra with percussion/1

66. Unwinable Nazar, a musical fairy tale, for narrator & saxophone quartet

67. Antigiaerma, for oboe quartet

68. Ouden menei (Nothing remains), for baritone saxophone & tape or percussion

69. Trois Satiens, for two pianos

70. Ode θ΄, for string orchestra

71. Beast West, for bass flute & accordion

72. Pillow stories, for any two instruments

73. Chronos Toutos (These Time), for saxophone quartet

74. Enois, for mezzo, bassoon, piano & percussion

75. Strophe, for string quartet

76. En los barcos, concertino for violin, piano & orchestra

77. Nollendorfstrasse variations, for any two string instruments

78. Sixth hour, for wind quintet

79. Mauricios' nichtingale, for string orchestra

80. Mitos, for clarinet, cello & piano

81. Six aegean games, for two melodic instruments

82. Gloria, for seven voices a cappella

83. Salve Regina, for seven voices a cappella

84. Semicolon, for accordeon & saxophone quartet

85. Os ech' (As it is), for cretan lyre & accordeon

Stage Music[link]

O.Paz: Rapatsinis΄ Garden (Zakynthos, 1999)

Euripides: Eleni (Athens, 2000)

W.Shakespear: The Taming of the Screw (Athens, 2001)

G.Kyriakakis: Ballet Mechanique usw (Athens, 2003)

F.Rizal, K.Engel: Batu Melingkar Api (Berlin, 2009)

K.Engel: From Distant Times and Places (Berlin, 2009)

Miriam Sachs: Hades (Berlin 2010)

Miriam Sachs: Die Gewalt der Musik (Mondepulciano/Berlin 2011)

Film Music[link]

Ballet Mechanique (1997)

A Moment In and Out of Time (2009)

References[link]

External links[link]

• kyriakakis.de
• [1] Edition Gravis
• eem.org.gr
• ARKYS
• University of Macedonia
• Lilian Voudouri Music Library

Dudley Murphy (July 10, 1897 – February 22, 1968) was an American film director. Murphy was born on July 10, 1897 in Winchester, Massachusetts. He began making films in the early 1920s after working as a journalist.^[1]

In his first short film, Soul of the Cypress (1921), a variation on the Orpheus myth, the film's protagonist falls in love with a dryad (a wood nymph whose soul dwells in an ancient tree) and throws himself into the sea to become immortal and spend eternity with her. Murphy's then-wife Chase Harringdine played the dryad. Murphy followed this with Danse Macabre (1922) featuring Adolph Bolm, Olin Howland, and Ruth Page. Both of these early films are in the DVD collection Unseen Cinema issued in October 2005 (see link below).

Murphy's eighth film, Ballet mécanique, which he co-directed with the French artist Fernand Léger, premiered on 24 September 1924 at the Internationale Ausstellung neuer Theatertechnik (International Exposition for New Theater Technique) in Vienna. Considered one of the masterpieces of early experimental filmmaking, Ballet mécanique also included creative input from Man Ray and Ezra Pound, and was presented at the exposition by Frederick Kiesler. The film was scheduled to be screened with George Antheil's masterpiece of the same name. However, the music ran close to 30 minutes, while the film was 17 minutes long. In 2000, Paul Lehrman produced a married print of the film.^[2]

In her book Dudley Murphy: Hollywood Wild Card, film historian Susan Delson argues persuasively that Murphy was the film's driving force but that Léger was more successful at promoting the film as his own creation. Ballet mécanique, with the George Antheil music originally written for the film, was included in the DVD collection Unseen Cinema released in October 2005.

In addition to Ballet mécanique, Murphy is best remembered for St. Louis Blues (1929) with Bessie Smith, Black and Tan Fantasy (1929) with Duke Ellington and His Orchestra, Confessions of a Co-Ed (1931), The Sport Parade (1932) with Joel McCrea, and The Emperor Jones (1933), starring Paul Robeson.

In 1932, Murphy helped introduce the Mexican artist David Alfaro Siqueiros to prominent people in the Los Angeles community. To show his gratitude, Siqueiros painted a mural on a wall in Murphy's Pacific Palisades home. The only intact mural by Siqueiros in the United States, Portrait of Mexico Today was gifted anonymously to the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in 1999.

From the late 1940s through the 1960s Murphy and his fourth wife, Virginia, owned and operated Holiday House, an exclusive Malibu hotel designed by Richard Neutra and favored by the Hollywood elite.

References[link]

Bibliography[link]

James Donald, "Jazz Modernism and Film Art: Dudley Murphy and Ballet mécanique in Modernism/modernity 16:1 (January 2009), pages 25–49

External links[link]

• Dudley Murphy at the Internet Movie Database
• Dudley Murphy biography by Susan Delson
• Unseen Cinema official website
• Dudley Murphy kneeling down behind Peggy Wood

Alice Prin (Kiki), c. 1920, painted by Gustaw Gwozdecki (1880–1935)

Alice Ernestine Prin (2 October 1901 – 29 April 1953), nicknamed Queen of Montparnasse, and often known as Kiki de Montparnasse, was a French artist model, nightclub singer, actress, memoirist, and painter. She flourished in, and helped define, the liberated culture of Paris in the early 1920s.

Early life[link]

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.

Kiki de Montparnasse, a 1928 bronze by Pablo Gargallo (1881–1934) – Musée de Louvre
(public-domain photograph by Hay Kranen)

Notoriety begins[link]

Adopting a single name, "Kiki", she became a fixture in the Montparnasse social scene and a popular artist model, posing for dozens of artists, including Chaim Soutine, "Julian Mandel" (a pseudonym), Tsuguharu Foujita, 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.

Her companion for most of the 1920s was Man Ray, who made hundreds of portraits of her. She is the subject of some of his best-known images, including the notable surrealist image Le violon d'Ingres^[1] and Noire et blanche.^[2]

She appeared in nine short and often experimental films, including Fernand Léger's Ballet mécanique without any credit.

Artwork and autobiography[link]

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.^[3]

Her autobiography was published in 1929 as Kiki's Memoirs, with Ernest Hemingway and Tsuguharu Foujita providing introductions.^[4] 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. 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 of the fact 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.^{[citation needed]}

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 a Montparnasse cabaret, which she named Chez Kiki.^{[citation needed]}

A symbol of bohemian and creative Paris, at 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."

She left Paris to avoid the occupying German army during World War Two, which entered the city in June 1940. Nazi officials had a reputation for intolerance toward the art and artists associated with Montparnasse that extended to all embracing its liberal lifestyle. Although some of the Nazi leaders secretly collected the new art flourishing in Paris, it was suppressed where ever they exerted control. Hitler is said to have hoped that his military would burn Paris to the ground. She never returned as a resident.^{[citation needed]}

Death and legacy[link]

Prin died in 1953 in Sanary-sur-Mer, France at the age of fifty-one, apparently of complications of alcoholism or drug dependence. A large crowd of artists and fans attended her Paris funeral and followed the procession to her interment in the Cimetière du Montparnasse. Her tomb identifies her as "Kiki, 1901–1953, singer, actress, painter, Queen of Montparnasse."^[5] Tsuguharu Foujita has said that, with Kiki, the glorious days of Montparnasse were buried forever.

Long after her death, Prin remains the embodiment of the outspokenness, audacity, and creativity that marked that period of life in Montparnasse. In 1989, biographers Billy Klüver and Julie Martin called her "one of the century's first truly independent women."^[6] In her honor, a daylily has been named Kiki de Montparnasse.

Prin, at age thirty-four, is the central figure with the distinctive nose and 1920s haircut in the Sava Sumanovic painting, By the Grove (1935)

Kiki was featured in a 3 page obituary in Life Magazine in the June 29, 1953 edition.

Filmography[link]

• 1923 : L'Inhumaine by Marcel L'Herbier
• 1923 : Le Retour à la Raison by Man Ray, short film
• 1923 : Ballet Mécanique by Fernand Léger, short film
• 1923 : Entr'acte by René Clair, short film
• 1923 : La Galerie des Monstres by Jaque Catelain
• 1926 : Emak-Bakia by Man Ray, short film
• 1928 : L'Étoile de mer by Man Ray
• 1928 : Paris express or Souvenirs de Paris by Pierre Prévert et Marcel Duhamel, short film
• 1930 : Le Capitaine jaune by Anders Wilhelm Sandberg
• 1933 : Cette vieille canaille by Anatol Litvak

Notes[link]

Further reading[link]

• Kiki de Montparnasse (2007); by Catel & Bocquet (in French) Bruxelles: Casterman
• Kiki of Montparnasse (1968); by Frederick Kohner (a novel) London: Cassell ISBN 978-0-304-93242-9
• Kiki: Reine de Montparnasse (1988); by Lou Mollgaard (in French) Paris: Laffont
• Kiki's Memoirs (1996) translation by Samuel Putnam (original ed. pub by J. Corti, Paris)
• Kiki's Paris (1989); by Klüver and Martin. (French translation – Paris: Flammarion)
• Kiki's Memoirs, 1930 (2006) translation by N. Semoniff (in Russian – published by Salamandra P.V.V., 2011)
• Kiki Souvenirs, 1929 (2005) translation by N. Semoniff (in Russian – published by Salamandra P.V.V., 2011)
• Kiki's Memoirs (2009) [Recuerdos recobrados] translation by José Pazó Espinosa (in Spanish – published by Nocturna)

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Alice Prin

• Kiki of Montparnasse at the Internet Movie Database
• Kiki de Montparnasse – Selected Works