Category talk:Alice Prin

Spurious Photographs

French postcards purporting to be of Alice Prin (Kiki) have been circulating the internet for years and have wound up here on Wikipedia. Anyone familiar with the subject knows they are not her. Kiki posed nude quite often in the 1920s, for photographer Man Ray and painters such as Foujita, Soutine, Pascin and Kisling. She even did a few "artistic" porn shots with Ray collectively entitled "The Four Seasons". But there is no evidence she ever sat for commercial erotica. Her portraits and nudes show a fleshy woman with broad shoulders, pear-shaped breasts and very big hips, to say nothing of her distinctive facial features. (Her epic angular nose was practically her trademark - Alexander Calder made a wire sculpture of it). Google images for "Man Ray Kiki" with safe search off, and compare.

The only feasible time that necessity might have driven Kiki to do anonymous softcore was a period of some months in 1918, after her mother kicked her out and before she hooked up with her first lover, painter Maurice Mendjizky; but the visual documentation is against this. Mendjizky's portrait of Kiki at age 18 (1919), Ray's earliest photos of her (1921), and a self-portrait sketched in a letter to Tristan Tzara prove she did not adopt her signature sleek bobbed hair until after March 1922, the year Foujita's painting "Nude with a Jouy Fabric" made both the artist and Kiki famous throughout France. So she could not have posed for the attributed postcards before then. And she would not have afterwards, because she was a star of the Montparnasse art scene - and well knew it.

Also note that the Wiki article for postcard photographer Julian Mandel is unsourced and Kiki does not appear in the text (though she has a link below). With no reliable provenance linking the postcards with Kiki, I believe they should be removed. TheBawbb (talk)