Marie Laurencin

(French, 1883 - 1956)

“Why should I paint dead fish, onions and beer glasses? Girls are so much prettier.”
— Marie Laurencin

French Expressionist and Cubist painter, printmaker, sculptor, and stage designer Marie Laurencin is known for her airy, ethereal, pastel-colored paintings of elegant, quiet, mysterious, pensive women. During the early twentieth century, she became an important figure in the famous Parisian avant-garde of the early twentieth century, presenting the feminine side of Cubism. Laurencin was the only female artist in the group, and one of the few recognized female Cubist painters. Her approach to abstraction, however, remains her own. Laurencin had relationships with both men and women, and her art reflected her life and her unique brand of queer femme. Most of her works portray a syrupy fantasy realm where girls gently exist in perfume clouds. Her work lies outside the bounds of Cubist norms in her pursuit of a specifically feminine aesthetic with her use of pastel colors and curvilinear forms, which her fellow artists admired. Her queer modernist vision riffed on Cubism’s reduction and geometry and on Fauvism’s hallucinatory colors and wild brushstrokes while truly having independence from these movements, and isn’t easy to situate in any linear stories about the development of modernism. She created a tender, soft-colored, feminine atmosphere, compared to the vivid, arbitrary colors and geometric figures of Picasso's male set of contemporaries. The poet André Salmon said, "There is something of a fairy wand in the brush of Marie Laurencin."

Laurencin was the illegitimate daughter of a small-town French government official, born in Paris in 1883. She was raised mostly by her mother and lived in Paris the vast majority her life. In 1902, at age 19, she studied porcelain painting in Sèvres then returned to Paris, furthering her education at the Académie Humbert in 1904 where she began focusing on oil painting. She submitted to the Salon des Indépendants in 1907, where she met Picasso, who introduced her to the modernist poet, Guillaume Apollinaire. She became a member of Picasso’s circle as well as other Cubist artists’, and was romantically involved with Apollinaire for several years. Many have recognized her as his muse, while he inspired many of her works as well. Laurencin, during their relationship and afterwards, resisted the association of her work to Cubism. Her style at the time had similarities to early Cubist works, with a shallow sense of space and flat planes of color, but she also she drew from the dreamlike imagery of modern poets, including Apollinaire, and the soft colors of Impressionists such as Auguste Renoir. She attended Natalie Barney's famous neo-Sapphic salons, centered on female connection, inspiration, and creativity, and the influence on Laurencin's creative production shows throughout her oeuvre. Around 1912, her mother died, and Laurencin ended things with Apollinaire, as he had acquired a reputation for philandering. Apollinaire didn’t take the split seriously for a year or two, until Laurencin remarried. She married Otto van Wätjen, a German baron and painter, and one of her old classmates from the Académie Humbert whom she said reminded her of her mother. World War I broke out during their honeymoon, however, and they sought asylum in Spain, as Laurencin had lost her French citizenship with the marriage. There, Laurencin became involved with the Dada movement, working alongside Francis Picabia. After Spain, the married couple moved briefly to Düsseldorf. During this period away from Paris, her style and subject matter evolved. Perhaps related to the distance from the pressures of the Parisian avant-garde, Laurencin refined her painting approach and started focusing on the subject matter that would define her career. After the war, she moved more towards personal artistic desires, developing a heavier emphasis on Expressionism, and straying from experimentation with artistic trends like Cubism. She began producing her signature portraits of women and dogs. She explored themes of femininity and what she considered feminine modes of representation until her death. Her new works featured attractive, somewhat indistinctly described women in feminine dress and setting. They lounge or dance through ambiguous spaces, looking enigmatically at the viewer with consistently unusual, large, dark eyes. Laurencin’s ladies have a quiet intimacy, and appear to be playmates or young lovers when there are two or three of them. Between 1918 and 1924, her scenes were sometimes explicitly erotic, though dreamy instead of sleazy. Apollinaire had served in the war, had been injured with a shrapnel in his temple in 1916, never fully recovered, and passed away two years later during the Spanish Flu Pandemic in 1918 at the age of 38, a few months after getting married. Laurencin was depressed and unstable during this period. Two years after the war Laurencin and van Wätjen divorced due to his fondness for drinking, and Laurencin returned to Paris in 1920, marking the beginning of a successful artistic career with several exhibitions of her work in Paris and New York.

Receiving a positive response to her work, Laurencin also started to design sets, props, and costumes for the Ballets Russes, and produced illustrations for several books. Her stardom continued to rise throughout the 1920s and ’30s. She was commissioned for portraits of Coco Chanel, society figure Lady Cunard, and Jean Cocteau, among others. She bought a château with her earnings in the mid-1920s, and at this point, Suzanne Moreau, twenty-two years her junior, came to live with her. Some sources suggest Moreau was hired as a maid, who then grew close to her employer; others suggest she was the daughter of a maid, whose education Laurencin undertook. Whether they had a close, familial-type connection or a romantic one isn’t clear, but it is possible that Moreau was either Laurencin’s long-term girlfriend or adoptive daughter. In any case, she was her primary companion for the rest of her life. Laurencin lived freely in terms of her art and pricing strategies, and in her personal life. The artist’s depictions of women-loving women were popular, and she charged as she felt like it, charging women less than men, or blondes less than brunettes. In this period, she was also involved with a string of creative men and women, moving from lover to lover. It is likely she slept with some of the women she painted, although details of the affairs are lost.

During the economic depression in the 1930s, she found work as an art instructor at a private school, staying artistically active. In 1939, Laurencin had eleven solo exhibitions. In her later years, she continued to paint. In 1954, she legally adopted Moreau, then 49 while Laurencin was 71, making the younger woman the beneficiary of her estate. Laurencin died of a heart attack in 1956 at 72 years of age, and was buried with Apollinaire's love letters and a rose in her hand, wearing a white dress.

Laurencin was a prolific artist with a unique perspective. She created almost two thousand oil paintings, watercolors, three thousand engravings, and numerous theater sets. Japanese collector Masahiro Takano rediscovered and purchased most of her work, founding the Marie Laurencin Museum in Japan in 1983 - the first museum in the world devoted to a single female painter. In the 1970s, when Feminist and Queer Art were making a splash and art historians were making more thorough investigations from these angles, Laurencin was originally excluded from feminist rediscovery as some saw her as promoting a disempowering vision of femininity. Her written works might disappoint those in search of protofeminist heroines. While Laurencin celebrated women with poetry and prose, she also happily reinforced gender expectations. She was intimidated by the genius of men, and adored women since they were innately softer, prettier, and more delicate. Still, her reputation has since continued to grow and her influence is visible across the work of many artists exploring the place of women and gender in modern life. Louise Bourgeois, Laurencin's most famous student, explored female relationships using psychoanalytic ideas. Hannah Wilke and Harmony Hammond used imagery linked with womanhood to study lesbian identity after the civil rights movement. More recently, Karla Black's pastel cosmetics have expanded Laurencin's distinctive color scheme and continued Laurencin’s concept of using aesthetic gratification to advocate for femininity. As we develop more tools to approach queer modernism and feminist art history, and grow towards more inclusive collecting practices and more diversifying academic approaches to feminism, Laurencin’s oeuvre can be appreciated more fully.

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