Marie Laurencin
(1885 - 1956) |
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Art Work
| Name: |
Marie Laurencin |
| Gender: |
Female |
| Place of Birth: |
Paris, France |
| Nationality: |
French |
| Birth: |
1885 |
| Death: |
1956 |
| Website: |
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| Past Auctions: |
Click Here |
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Quick Facts
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| Fine Art Profession(s): |
Painter
Printmaker
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Biography
Marie Laurencin is one of the few women artists to have a museum dedicated to her, in Tateshima, Japan. She was born in Paris, the illegitimate daughter of a Creole seamstress. After training as a porcelain painter, Laurencin studied fine art at the Academie Humbert, where she met Georges Braque, who introduced her to Picasso's Bateau Lavoir circle of Cubists.
Laurencin pictured her central role in this group, both as an artist and the muse of the poet Guilaume Apollinaire, in two paintings of 1908, one a portrait group of eight figures, Apollinaire and his Friends or Country Reunion (Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris), the other, Croup of Artists Les Invites (The Cone Collection, Baltimore Museum of Art). The latter portrays Picasso. Laurencin, Apollinaire and Picasso's mistress, Fernande Olivier. It encapsulates the style which made Laurencin famous. Unlike her detailed, dark, richly colored early paintings (a fine example, Portrait of the Artist's Mother of c.igo6, is in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford) Les Invites is a pared-down arrangement of curving lines, simplified forms and flat, masklike faces. It was bought by the influential collector Gertrude Stein. In the same year Laurencin was given a solo exhibition at the Galerie Berthe Weill, Paris and many others followed.
There has been controversy over Laurencin's role in this important epoch in modern art. She asserted that her work, mainly portraits of women painted in a restricted palette of rose pink, pale blue and soft grey, as in the Tate Collection Portraits (1915), was an expression of her femininity. She designed for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes and for the couturier Paul Poiret, and her work was shown at the Exposition des Arts De'coratifs in Paris in 1925. But, as Bridget Elliott and Jo-Ann Wallace have discussed in their survey of women in modernism (London and New York 1994), the 'feminine' decorative qualities of Laurencin's work have meant her relegation to the lower ranks of twentieth century artists. In fact, both her work, and her persistent claim to be both a woman and a leading modern, were groundbreaking. |
Samples of Work
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