Marie Laurencin
An unapologetic painter of femme sensibilities coming from--but not bound to--the Cubist movement of the Parisian avante-garde
The pale and willowy female figures from the canvasses of today’s gif are the work of Marie Laurencin, one of the few women Cubists and a member of the Section d’Or of Paris, a group of artists—painters, sculptors, poets and writers—who gathered in the Parisian suburbs from 1911 to about 1914 and brought Cubism to the attention of the general public for the first time. Romantically linked to fellow Salon d’Or member poet Guillaume Apollinaire and considered to be his muse, Laurencin was an important figure of the Parisian avant-garde in her own right. In addition to the Section d’Or Cubists, her social and artistic reach also encompassed the Montmartre-based Cubists of Pablo Picasso’s inner circle, and the salon of the influential American expatriate and lesbian writer Natalie Clifford Barney.
Born in 1883 in Paris to an unmarried domestic servant, Marie’s education was financed by her father, a fiscal administrator. When she was 18, Marie studied porcelain painting in the Parisian suburban commune of Sèvres, but upon returning to Paris to study at Académie Humbert, she changed her focus to oil painting, studying alongside Georges Braque. Her first solo exhibition was in 1907, and like Braque her work showed influences of Fauvism. Her works in the Salon des Indépendants in 1910 were displayed alongside those of Picasso and Jean Metzinger, increasing her public exposure and displaying an evolving Cubist-influenced style.
In this same period, Laurencin attended salons held by the wealthy heiress Barney who was heavily influenced by the ancient Greek poet Sappho and strove to create a space centered on female inspiration and relationships, both of the intellectual and the sexual variety. Barney was a key figure in the Parisian lesbian scene—the “sapphists”—and she eschewed monogamy in her unabashed, exclusively-female intimate relationships. She likely provided a role model for Laurencin as the younger woman was developing her own self-identity. In any event, Laurencin almost certainly had affairs with members of both sexes at least towards the end of her pre-war time in Paris. The artwork she was producing at the time reflected this, containing queer-coded gestures for those that knew to look for them.
In 1913 Laurencin ended her relationship with Apollinaire and had started to distance herself from the Cubists, perhaps becoming disillusioned with the group after her breakup with one of its central figures, or perhaps as a means to assert more artistic independence. About the split, she would say in an interview about a decade later that “As long as I was influenced by great men, I could do nothing.” Taking her work in a new aesthetic direction, her colors became more muted and her compositions became increasingly centered on idealized, intimate and female-centric spaces. The Elegant Ball is a striking representation of this evolution in style. Certainly a classical subject of countless canvasses, a musical party en plein air, Laurencin has added her own sapphist spin to it. Two dancing women locked in an embrace are depicted with sinuous lines, their short, diaphanous dresses blending each into the other as they sway and flow and blend into the dreamy, terraced and more angular represented courtyard. One dancer’s hat is a curious fur-trimmed object in suggestive form. A third woman in headscarf decorated with a pale blue ribbon sits cross-legged, her lower body barely distinguished from her cross-hatched seat and strums a stringed instrument with long, elegant fingers. All three figures look back enigmatically at the viewer with their large, dark eyes. The composition’s dark, bold, confident line-work is balanced with soft coloration: skin tones of glowing, creamy whites (much like the porcelain Marie had painted during her artistic education), soft browns and bursts delicate pink, while darker greens are used for shading and foliage. A pale pink curtain billows almost unnoticed at the edge of the canvas, a symbol suggesting a secret world and a distinctly female intimate physical attribute—a symbol that Laurencin would return to paint frequently. So too would this gentle, feminine color palette dominate Laurencin’s oeuvre for the next several decades of her life.
In 1914, she hastily married German-born Francophile, artist and aristocrat Baron Otto von Waëtjen and was thereupon legally classified by the French government as German due to a law that transferred a husband’s citizenship to the wife in the case of foreign marriages. In what must have seemed like a particularly ominous start to a romantic union, World War I broke out during the couple’s honeymoon. Labeled enemy nationals, Laurencin and her husband were forced to leave her beloved Paris—the epicenter of her art and social connections—to find refuge in Spain. Her sense of isolation away from her home and her feelings of suffocation tied to a husband who apparently tried to stifle her independent spirit in her role as “wife” can be seen in her 1917 composition The Prisoner II: separated from the outside world, the subject is held back and partially covered by gauzy curtains in a crosshatched pattern that might just as well be metal bars that would try to keep her trapped within.
After the war ended, Laruencin immediately started divorce proceedings and initiated the process to reinstate her French citizenship. By 1921, she was once again in Paris, announcing her return with a flurry of new work and exhibitions. Her popularity led to an engagement as a set and costume designer for the Ballets Russe. She became a fixture in the sapphist salons and cabarets of the city, and her work became more overtly homoerotic. Although she would occasionally paint portraits of men, they never featured in her enchanted worlds; instead the ladies of her canvasses frolicked with deer (a traditional symbol for women) or horses or dogs. Birds too are common elements in her work, both a thematic stand-in for romantic love and also a way to represent Laurencin’s romantic partner, fashion designer Nicole Groult; Laurencin had once written a poem to Groult wherein her eyes, lips and breasts are all likened to birds.
Regardless of its queer subtext, her work sold well to the primarily male-dominated art market. Laurencin’s dreamy, poetic compositions contained women conventionally attractive to collectors of the era. Surely, this was a reflection of her own tastes and attractions as well, these strong and dark-eyed beauties that filled her canvasses. She once said that in her use of color “I hate thin, light-haired women without eyebrows. Long ago, I decided that I would only paint brunettes.” And indeed, she did favor dark-haired beauties in her work, although in her later years she created some stunning portraits of blonde women as well.
Her return to Paris was a time of great output for the artist, resulting in some of her most fantastical and accomplished paintings and more lucrative commissions. In 1923, she caught the attention of fashion designer Coco Chanel, who requested that Laurencin paint her portrait. Although Chanel dismissed the finished piece as too melancholy and refused to pay for it, Laruencin held on to the piece, which eventually found its way to the Musée de l'Orangerie.
With the economic depression of the 1930’s, she was obligated to augment her income by teaching art at a private school. Remaining in Paris during the Second World War she briefly expressed support for the Nazi collaborators of the Vichy regime, although by the end of the war she apparently had had a change of heart. Indeed, Laurencin did not stray long from Paris for the rest of her life and remained a fixture of the French art world. In 1949, the French government made her an officer of the Légion d’Honneur in recognition for her contributions to national culture. She lived for many years with her housekeeper Suzanne Moreau, whom she adopted as her child several years before her death, a step designed to guarantee that Moreau would have familial and inheritance rights in a time before gay marriage. She continued to paint, exploring the themes of femininity until her death in 1956.
While her contributions passed out of favor in the decades following her death, collectors finding her oeuvre too saccharine and themes perhaps too gentle in the post-modernist era of bold colors and strong contrasts, there has been a revival of interest in Laurencin’s art and life somewhat recently. A Japanese collector Masahiro Takano was enamored by the poetic sensuality found in Laurencin’s work, and spent years collecting her canvasses. In 1983, the Musée Marie Laurencin opened in Nagano, Japan with over 600 of her works, becoming at the time the only museum in the world focused on one female artist (the museum closed in 2011 and reopened in Tokyo in 2017) and likely helped to reignite a renewed look at her importance. In 2011, Karl Lagerfeld based his spring/summer haute couture collection for Chanel on her portfolio. And more recently, several museums and galleries have held or are currently holding exhibits of Laurencin within just the last few years with a refocusing on how her queer roots have influenced her decidedly female-focused body of work. As she once said in a 1952 interview with Time magazine, “Why should I paint dead fish, onions and beer glasses? Girls are so much prettier.”
The Nation: "The Misunderstood Art of Marie Laurencin" by Hannah Stamler, 8/8/24
Pallant House Gallery, Perspectives: “‘No mere Fauvette’ - The art of Marie Laurencin,” 2/9/21
Art UK:"Marie Laurencin: the avant-gardist who painted Coco Chanel" by Lydia Figes, 2/27/20
I was not aware of her art. Tres bon. Lovely women.
Cool stuff. 🖖