Alice Ernestine Prin (2 October 1901 – 29 April 1953), nicknamed the Queen of Montparnasse and often known as Kiki de Montparnasse, was a French model, chanteuse, actress, memoirist and painter during the Jazz Age. She flourished in, and helped define, the liberated culture of Paris in the so-called Années folles ("crazy years" in French). She became one of the most famous models of the 20th century and in the history of avant-garde art. Early life Born as an illegitimate child in Châtillon-sur-Seine, Côte d'Or, Alice Prin had "a wretched childhood that could only lead to laughter or despair". She was raised in abject poverty by her grandmother. At age twelve, she was sent by train to live with her mother, a linotypist, in Paris in order to help earn an income for her family. Harsh, degrading jobs followed, and she worked in printing shops, shoe factories and bakeries. During this time, she began her lifelong joy of decorating herself. She "would crumble a petal from her mother's fake geraniums to give color to her cheeks and was fired from a nasty job at a bakery because she darkened her eyebrows with burnt matchsticks". By the age of fourteen, Prin's "large and splendid body" had garnered the artistic and sexual attention of various Parisian denizens, and she began surreptitiously posing nude for sculptors. "It bothered me a little to take off my clothes," Prin wrote her in her memoirs, but "it was the custom". Her decision to become a nude model created discord with her mother. One day, her mother unexpectedly intruded into an artist's studio in a rage, denounced Prin as a shameless prostitute, and disowned her forever. Now without money or a roof over her head, the teenage Kiki determined to make her living exclusively by posing for artists. As a beautiful dark-haired French girl, she soon found herself in popular demand. At the time, she had scant pubic hair and, when posing, she occasionally would draw on fake hair with a piece of charcoal. As her fame grew, she became a local celebrity who symbolized the Montparnasse quarter's nonconformity and its rejection of the social norms of the . Modeling career Adopting a single name, "Kiki", Prin became a fixture of the Montparnasse social scene and a popular model, posing for dozens of artists, including Sanyu, Chaïm Soutine, Julien Mandel, Tsuguharu Foujita, Constant Detré, Francis Picabia, Jean