Exposition

Kiki, Reine de Montparnasse

  • Exhibition of National Interest

    Muse of Man Ray, Mendjisky, Kisling, Foujita and Soutine, immortalized in the famous picture "Le Violon d'Ingres" (1924), Kiki embodied a new image of womanhood: free, audacious, and liberated from social conventions. Singer of cabaret, painter, writer and actress, she shaped her own legend and actively participate at the cultural life of the Roaring Twenties.

    This exposition d'intêret national (Exhibition of National Interest) of the Musée du Pays Châtillonnais – Trésor de Vix, offers an immersive and accessible journey, bringing together photographs, paintings, drawings, archives, and Kiki’s own works.

  • Fille au chapeau - Maurice Mendjisky - Collection Aldona et Wojciech Olejnik

    Des prêts exceptionnels

    Inscrite dans le projet Châtillon-sur-Seine, berceau d’icônes, l’exposition réinscrit l’héritage de Kiki de Montparnasse dans sa ville natale et invite le public à redécouvrir une figure majeure de l’émancipation féminine et de l’histoire culturelle du XXᵉ siècle.

    Des prêts exceptionnels venus du monde entier :

    • Musée Villa La Fleur – Pologne

    • Musée des Années Trente – Boulogne-Billancourt

    • Musée Goya de Castres

    • Écomusée de la Bresse

    • Cinémathèque Française

    et des artistes exceptionnels : Man Ray, Pablo Gargallo, Tsugouharu Foujita, Moïse Kisling, Maurice Mendjisky, Zaliouk et Kiki elle-même.

  • Kiki assise - Man Ray - © MAN RAY 2015 TRUST  ADAGP – 2026, image  Telimage, Paris

    Kiki de Montparnasse

    Born into a modest background in Châtillon-sur-Seine, Alice Ernestine Prin moved to Paris in her adolescence and quickly became a well-known personality in the artistic Montparnasse of the 1920s.

    A muse and model for Kisling, Foujita, Soutine, Mendjisky, Gargallo, and Man Ray, she embodied the creative effervescence of a generation.

    Her immortalization in Le Violon d’Ingres by Man Ray (1924) propelled her to the status of a universal icon of Surrealism.

     

  • Nu (Kiki de Montparnasse) - Maurice Mendjisky - Musée Villa la Fleur en Pologne

    Une muse... et une artiste

    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.

     

     

  • Communiqué de presse

    Le communiqué de presse de Kiki, Reine de Montparnasse : PDF icon communique_de_presse_kiki_reine_de_montparnasse_-_tresor_de_vix.pdf

  • Exhibition of National Interest
  • Des prêts exceptionnels
  • Kiki de Montparnasse
  • Une muse... et une artiste
  • Communiqué de presse

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