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Tutta
Advanced Member
Germany
32401 Posts
Member since 19/02/2010 |
 Posted - 28/04/2017 : 23:39:04
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Kiki de Montparnasse
Created by: Catel Muller & Jose-Luis Bocquet
Published by: Casterman / Carlsen Verlag (Germany)
Released: 03/2007 - 09/2011 Germany
Format: Paperback (17,8 x 24,5 cm) - Monochrome
Genre: Art, Biography, Social Issues
Country of origin: France / Belgium
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Cover:
Hardcover / 416 pages
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Kiki de Montparnasse
My wife, after reading Kiki de Montparnasse for something near a half hour,
stopped and asked me: “Is this for real? Did men really just go up to women
and offer them a few bucks to flash their boobs?” I assured her that it was
and that it’s the same today and it’s not a big thing and everybody does it. I
was not very convincing. Probably because I was as surprised as her. I knew
the early twentieth century in Europe(1) was a rambunctious time—what with
the swift ideological, artistic, and moral paradigm hops that were occurring
quickly enough to pile up on each other’s shoulders. But I wouldn’t have
suspected the streets of Paris would basically be a live-action Girls Gone Wild.
(1) And in America too, as it so happens.
Deep down I guess I still unknowingly held onto the mythology that our
forebears were a quaint and unimaginative bunch(2). For that reason
(probably among others), biography proves its usefulness once more. We are
again reminded that the world is bigger than we thought and expression of
the human spirit is wide and diverse. Kiki de Montparnasse is good at arguing
this reminder because Kiki de Montparnasse, in all likelihood, is not very much like us at all.
(2) Clearly though, they were more imaginative than me. I would have never thought of walking up to
a stranger and offering a pittance for a brief show of public nudity. Strange world.
In Catel and Bocquet’s biography of Alice Prin, better known as Kiki(3), the
reader is rushed through fifty-two tumultuous, extravagant years of a
woman’s life. Kiki is one of those figures whose existence is simultaneously
extraordinary and clichéd. Extraordinary because she lives in that larger-
than-life manner that can’t possibly seem to sustain itself. Clichéd because
it doesn’t. Like so many of those who burn brightly enough to catch the eye
of the everyman, Kiki flares out, smouldering and spent.
(3) At least better-known in some circles—perhaps in France or in the art world or by biographers of Man Ray.
I had never actually heard of the woman. Which actually fits the story told fairly well.
Kiki’s life incorporates what amounts to a who’s who of the early-century
French arts movements. Picasso, Cocteau, Man Ray, and piles of painters,
writers, dadaists, and more. Kiki, for all her faults and failures, was famous
for a time in her small but powerful corner of the world. She modeled for
many of the best of her generation and inspired others through her own
creative endeavors—through singing, painting, writing, and sex. Kiki’s output
among these lights was voracious, swallowing up as much as it produced.
She tortured the hearts of men even as she led them to new artistic
discoveries. She was, to use an American turn of phrase that would post-date
her by a couple decades, something else.
The publisher’s description that graces the book’s cover is bizarre. After
describing Kiki in terse encyclopedic summary (model in Montparnasse in the ‘20s,
partner to Man Ray, painted by Kisling, Foujita, et al), it embellishes grandly:
“she is the first emancipated woman of the 20th century” and ironically goes on
to cite her sexual, emotional, and whole-persona liberties. The irony, of course,
is that Catel and Brocquet demonstrate so much the opposite of this over the course
of their treatment of her life that one wonders if the publishers were being merely playful
or if they truly misunderstood the work before them.
The trailhead of Kiki’s life is the abject poverty into which she’s born.
Nearly an orphan and raised by a grandmother, she comes to live with her
mother in her young teens. Necessity and expediency lead her to sell her
body for display, as a model to sculptors and painters at times and as a
cheap thrill for randy men at others. As told in Kiki there is nothing noble in
her modeling at first, no transcendent love of the arts. She only wants to get
paid and initially embarks on a life of nude modeling at the command of her
basest needs: for hunger, for shelter—and eventually, to support growing coke and alcohol habits.
At no time does Catel and Brocquet’s Kiki ever approach anything resembling
emancipation—save perhaps in her death in the final pages of the book. She
is bound by her poverty, enslaved to her addictions, held captive by her
reputation, fettered in her fear of losing that reputation, imprisoned by her
desires, and subjugated by her emotional needs. Kiki de Montparnasse, if
read as written, presents almost a cautionary tale, a non-fictional catalogue
of how not to live if you wish to lead a happy life. Kiki’s abundant lack of
abiding joy may be the surest evidence that she did not, in fact, live the
kind of emancipation this book’s publishers seem to daydream into the work.
In its most realistic sense, Kiki plays as tragedy. The reader keeps hoping
things will finally work out for the woman, but while there are certainly
some high points, everything winds down through a series of soft crescendos.
By tale’s end (and it’s no secret that Alice Prin dies in 1953), I liked Kiki
enough that I mourned her along with the small few who gathered at her funeral.
Catel and Bocquet do an admirable job breathing life into a dead-and-gone celebrity,
fleshing out her flesh and selling her as a model of the more exuberant kind of twentieth-century
woman—a woman as much bound by her circumstances and personality as any of us. A slave, a whore, a human.
A spark, a light, a life.
Kiki de Montparnasse: A Graphic Biography
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Alice Prin
Wiki: Alice Prin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Prin
Tagesspiegel -
http://www.tagesspiegel.de/kultur/comics/comic-biografie-die-muse-vom-montparnasse/5926258.html
The Guardian -
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/mar/19/kiki-montparnasse-bocquet-catel-review
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+IN HOC SIGNO VINCES+
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Edited by - Tutta on 29/04/2017 00:03:20
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Tutta
Advanced Member
Germany
32401 Posts
Member since 19/02/2010 |
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izivko
Advanced Member
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Germany
12530 Posts
Member since 25/07/2003 |
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Tutta
Advanced Member
Germany
32401 Posts
Member since 19/02/2010 |
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izivko
Advanced Member
Germany
12530 Posts
Member since 25/07/2003 |
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Tutta
Advanced Member
Germany
32401 Posts
Member since 19/02/2010 |
Posted - 07/05/2017 : 00:18:50
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| Naravno da smo normalni! Zabrinuo bi se, da je drugačije. |
+IN HOC SIGNO VINCES+
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Edited by - Tutta on 07/05/2017 00:54:31 |
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etmgosa
Senior Member
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1731 Posts
Member since 15/07/2002 |
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Tutta
Advanced Member
Germany
32401 Posts
Member since 19/02/2010 |
Posted - 13/05/2017 : 12:23:37
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etmgosa,
pogledaj kako topice postavljaš. Za q su. Uzimaš svakakve naslove, samo da kažeš ovaj valja, ovaj ne valja.
Za takve stvari ima se topic "procitao i (ne-) preporucujem". Ja malo više infomacija pokupim prije nego što topic otvorim.
U 80% slušajeva, strip mi je u rukama, tj. moj je, kupio ga, pročitao i izvagao, vrijedili imati svoj topic ili ne.
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+IN HOC SIGNO VINCES+
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etmgosa
Senior Member
1731 Posts
Member since 15/07/2002 |
Posted - 13/05/2017 : 17:53:08
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quote:
Originally posted by Tutta
etmgosa,
pogledaj kako topice postavljaš. Za q su. Uzimaš svakakve naslove, samo da kažeš ovaj valja, ovaj ne valja.
Za takve stvari ima se topic "procitao i (ne-) preporucujem". Ja malo više infomacija pokupim prije nego što topic otvorim.
U 80% slušajeva, strip mi je u rukama, tj. moj je, kupio ga, pročitao i izvagao, vrijedili imati svoj topic ili ne.
A ja bas imam utisak da ti redom s interneta postavljas po forumu, bez da si citao te stripove.
Tvoje topice obavezno preskacem jer istu informaciju mogu pronaci i kod izdavaca.  |
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Kiki de Montparnasse
