KIKI THE QUEEN OF MONTPARNASSE

Bea invites you to meet the Parisian idol and icon of the Roaring Twenties! Indeed, with Kiki we enter the sizzling, dazzling world of Les Années Folles (the Crazy Years), a time in the history of Paris, in the history of art, literature, poetry, and music, during which artistic creativity reached a zenith, never to be reached again.

“Les Années Folles de Paris” exuded the joy and life that was much needed after the first world War. The heart-beat of this boiling, exacerbated, exuberant atmosphere was Montparnasse and all its cafés and bars, on the Left Bank of Paris, and Kiki was its Queen!

This free, outspoken, luscious, vivacious woman would tell racy jokes in her legendary high-pitched voice, flirt with every spicy handsome man she fancied, flashed her breasts for three or five francs in order to buy food, but never prostituted herself. All the painters, sculptors and photographers, famous and infamous, fought to have her as a model!  She became THE model of Montparnasse.

But Kiki was not born Kiki, nor a queen. She was born Alice Prin in 1901, in the French province of Burgundy, into terrible poverty. Bea will tell you Kiki’s life story, with loads of archival photographs, savory anecdotes, as she was also a singer in clubs and bistros.

She died in 1953. At her funeral, the Japanese artist Foujita said that, “when they buried KIKI, they also buried the golden years of Montparnasse.”

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Members $150

Non-Members $250

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