Marie Laurencin

Marie Laurencin was born to a single mother of Creole origin who raised her according to the customs of the petty bourgeoisie. Nevertheless, she chose to devote herself to art and enrolled at the Manufacture de Sèvres in 1902, where she learned porcelain painting. While continuing to appreciate and practice the decorative arts, she also studied painting, taking private classes at the Académie Humbert in Paris in 1904. There she met Francis Picabia as well as Georges Braque, who introduced her to Pablo Picasso and the members of his circle. The young woman frequented the Bateau-Lavoir and had a romantic relationship with Guillaume Apollinaire from 1907 to 1912 (see her Apollinaire et ses amis. Une réunion à la campagne, oil on canvas, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris, 1909).

Although her works place her at the margins of the Cubists, she participated regularly in their exhibitions. Her work was shown with theirs at the Salon des Indépendants; she exhibited with the Section d’or at the Galerie La Boétie in 1912 and participated that same year in decorating the “maison cubiste” of Duchamp-Villon and André Mare, which was presented at the Salon d’Automne. In June 1914, she married the Francophile German painter Otto von Wätjen and, when war was declared, had to flee to Spain. Traveling between Madrid and Barcelona, she collaborated with Francis Picabia on the journal 391. After spending time in Düsseldorf, she returned to Paris alone in 1921. A period of great success then began for her. Having been represented since 1913 by the art dealer Paul Rosenberg in Paris and by Alfred Flechtheim in Berlin, she showed regularly, sold many works, and received numerous commissions.

Many figures during the interwar period had their portraits painted by Laurencin, and these works included Portrait de la baronne Gourgeaud à la mantille noire (MNAM, Paris, 1923) and Portrait de Mademoiselle Chanel (Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris, 1923).

Marie Laurencin’s work was initially influenced by Matisse’s line and Le Douanier Rousseau’s sincerity.
When she then became connected to cubism, she borrowed its simplification of forms and abandonment of contours, offering flattened figures in a space almost without perspective, as shown by Apollinaire et ses amis. Starting with this painting, however, she appeared a bit withdrawn from the group, and her work between the two World Wars only confirms this impression. Her paintings, which essentially represent teenaged girls, women, and children, are indeed marked by a grace that was considered very feminine by critics of the period, something the painter did not deny. With pastel shades and delicate features, she proposed an idealized figure of femininity, like her contemporary Jacqueline Marval, with whom she had shared her first exhibition at the gallery of Berthe Weill (1865-1951) in 1908.

However, these paintings of women are not simply a depiction of a timeless golden age: they are a certain image of the liberated woman of the 1920s.

Lesbian connotations are not absent from her work, especially her paintings of Nicole Groult (1887-1967), Paul Poiret’s sister, with whom the artist had an intimate relationship during her exile in Spain, as seen in Femmes à la colombe. Marie Laurencin et Nicole Groult (à la colombe) (Paris, MNAM, 1919).

In addition to painting, the artist also worked in engraving and decorative arts. During her lifetime, she produced over 300 engravings and illustrated numerous books. In 1923, she designed the costumes and the set for Les Biches by Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes, with a book by her friend Jean Cocteau, and did several other projects for the stage through the late 1920s. Starting in 1933, she also taught at the Académie of the 16th arrondissement in Paris, founded by master engraver Jean Émile Laboureur. However, her productions of the 1930s and 1940s are sometimes repetitive. Since the 1990s, there has been renewed interest in her work, especially thanks to her success in Japan, which sees her interwar work as possessing a grace that is not only feminine but very French. In 1983, a Marie Laurencin museum was founded in Tateshina.

— Marie Gispert, Contemporary art history professor at Grenoble University, formerly at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, and writer.
The text appeared in Antoinette Fouque, Mireille Calle-Gruber et Béatrice Didier (dir.), Le Dictionnaire universel des créatrices, éditions des femmes-Antoinette Fouque, 2013