Kiki, Reine de Montparnasse

Kiki performed as a singer and a dancer in famous parisian cabarets such as the Jockey, the Boeuf sur le Toit or the Concert Mayol. She even opened her own cabaret called Babel Chez Kiki. She was also a painter, a writer and an actor. Her memoirs (Souvenirs, 1929), prefaced by Ernest Hemningway, reflects her full awareness of her role in the cultural production of the Roaring twenties. Crowned “Queen of Montparnasse,” she embodied a new female visibility in which bodily freedom, artistic assertion, and social transgression redefined women’s place in the public sphere. Kiki represents a new way of portraying women : free, modern, and liberated from social and moral constraints.