Kiki de Montparnasse : the graphic biography
(Comic)

Alice Ernestine Prin, often known as Kiki de Montparnasse, was a French artist model, nightclub singer, actress, memoirist, and painter. At age 12, 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. She flourished in, and helped define, the liberated culture of Paris in the early 1920's. 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. 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 sedate manner and boundless optimism.