Kiki's Paris: Artists and Lovers 1900-1930

New York, New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc, 1994. Hardcover. VG-/VG (shelf-wear to cloth boards. spine ends crinkled. corners rubbed. speckled foxing to textblock edges w/ faint remnants to pg edges. dustjacket has scuffs, scratches; approx 4inch closed tear to front; foxing/staining to spine). black cloth boards w/ debossed printing. 264 pp.; 700+ bw figures. glossy pictorial dustjacket w/ dark purple/red printing. Explores the artistic scene centered in Montparnasse in the early twentieth century, which drew painters, sculptors, authors, and others, such as Matisse, Modigliani, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Man Ray, Picasso, and Fernand Leger and particularly Kiki (de Monparnasse; born Alice Prin), the muse of many artists. Marcel Duchamp called it "the first really international colony of artists we ever had." The promise of personal freedom and self-fulfillment brought a generation of artists, writers and pleasure-seekers to the quarter-mile area on the Left Bank known as Montparnasse between 1900 and 1930. And at the center of that life was Kiki, known as the queen of the artists' quarter, who has come to symbolize everything Montparnasse had to offer. The artists, writers and composers who were there--Apollinaire, Léger, Mirò, Cocteau, Joyce, Modigliani, Brancusi Pound, Satie, Calder, Duchamp, Matisse, Hemingway, Mondrian, Man Ray, Pascin, Picasso, Soutine, Stravinsky, Stein, and countless others--created modern culture as we know it. For this book, the authors have chosen among thousands of photographs, many never before published, and interviewed artists and models who were there, to convey in photographs and text the reality and flavor of our century's greatest experiment in freedom.--From publisher description.