The Private Scrapbook
Kiki
Queen of Montparnasse
1901 — 1953
Sixty-three photographs and documents from the private archive of Richard Triberg. Published here for the first time. The full story of the woman the cafés of Paris crowned Queen — not the cabaret girl of the postcards, but the muse, the painter, the memoirist, and the friend of every painter who mattered.
Muse
to Man Ray, Foujita, Soutine
Author
Souvenirs, 1929 — preface by Hemingway
Painter
exhibited boulevard Montparnasse
Singer
Le Jockey, Le Boœuf sur le Toit
Bonus · Included with the Scrapbook
The Bronze
Three-dimensional sculpture, after Man Ray
Every numbered scrapbook ships with a hand-cast bronze relief of Kiki — modeled directly from Noire et Blanche, 1926. Sculpted in the Paris studio. Authenticated edition certificate enclosed.
Chapter One
I · The Muse
Montparnasse, 1921. Man Ray finds his subject.
Before she was a dancer, she was an image. Kiki posed for Man Ray in the studio at rue Campagne-Première — the great photographs that would become Le Violon d’Ingres, Noire et Blanche, the back as a violin, the face beside the African mask. She was not the model; she was the photograph itself.
Chapter Two
II · The Painter
Kiki at the easel. Modigliani at the door.
She painted. She sold her work on the boulevard. She drank with Modigliani at La Rotonde and sat for him in the small hours when the studios were empty. The men who painted her also taught her to paint, and what she produced in oil is held now in private collections from Paris to Geneva.
Chapter Three
III · The Author
Souvenirs de Kiki, 1929. Preface by Ernest Hemingway.
In 1929 she published her memoirs. Hemingway wrote the preface. Picasso called her work a record of a Paris that would never come again. She wrote in the voice of a woman who had loved Foujita, who had been painted by Soutine, who had sung at Le Jockey and walked home alone at dawn.
Chapter Four
IV · The Queen
Queen of Montparnasse. 1901 — 1953.
They crowned her Queen of Montparnasse in 1929 at a ball at the Café du Dôme. She was twenty-eight. When she died in 1953 the funeral procession ran the length of the Boulevard du Montparnasse, and the cortege carried her past every café in which she had ever sat. She was their muse. She was their painter. She was their queen.
Acquire
The Scrapbook
Hand-bound · Limited Edition · 63 plates
Cloth-bound in midnight buckram, gold-stamped, slip-cased. Each volume individually numbered. Foreword by Richard Triberg from the original Paris archive. Available exclusively to NVAI counterparties under DDNDA.
Pricing on application · Concierge: Bernard