Month: August 2024

Marie Laurencin. Part 3.

Marie Laurencin – a photograph by Granger (1913)

Marie Laurencin left Spain and returned to Düsseldorf via Switzerland in 1919. She was very unhappy with her life.  She was depressed and felt unstable with her marriage failing.   Laurençin filed for a divorce from her husband telling friends that the reason for the marital split was because her husband had become an alcoholic. In 1921 Laurençin returned to Paris, knowing that her marriage was finished and she divorced von Wätjen.   However, despite the divorce, they remained on good terms, and Marie kept in touch with van Wätjen’s until his death in 1942.

The Spanish Dancers by Marie Laurencin (1921)

Now having returned to the French capital Marie realised that she had been greatly affected by her separation from Paris which she looked upon as the unrivalled centre of artistic creativity. After her return, she developed a new style of painting which is reflected in her 1921 work, The Spanish Dancers.   Gone are the muted colours and the geometric patterns she had inherited from Cubism and these are replaced by light tones and undulating compositions. Once again, we note the coming together of the feminine world and the animal world, which became her favourite theme.  In the work we see three young women spinning around a small bounding dog, in front of a large grey horse. Marie has portrayed herself kneeling in the foreground wearing a pink tutu, which happens to be the only warm tone in the painting. Her hands are entwined with those of the young woman on the right, who is wearing a light grey dress with a light blue headscarf.  The woman on the left, wearing a light blue dress, is executing a dance step whilst holding a hat in place on her head.  Her eyes lead almost seamlessly into the large almond-shaped eye of the horse. The animals would appear to be the dancers’ confidantes in this strange setting.

Femme aux tulipes by Marie Laurencin (1936)

Now back in Paris, Paul Rosenberg began to act as Marie Laurencin’s dealer which afforded her enhanced financial security and he also provided her with sound business advice.  Unfortunately, she did not always take Rosenberg’s advice and he was horrified to find that Marie often gave her work as a gift to those she liked. She also set higher prices for work which she found dull and often discounted some of her favourite works.  Curiously she often charged men double what she asked of women, and even charged brunettes more than blondes and furthermore she had a reputation for painting only children whom she liked.

Jeunesse by Marie Laurencin (c.1946)

In her private life, while Marie Laurençin had a succession of male lovers, she also had close female friendships and lesbian relationships. She became part of the female expatriate community in Paris that searched for both artistic and sexual liberation. Lesbianism, for many of these women, was a crucial element of their resistance to bourgeois social conventions.

Gertrude Stein at 27 rue de Fleurus with her portrait by Picasso on the wall, May 1930

Now, based in the French capital, Marie was alone.  The first American who befriended her and bought her paintings was Gertrude Stein, an American novelist, poet, playwright, and art collector who had been born in Pennsylvania.  She had moved to Paris in 1903 and made France her home for the remainder of her life. She hosted a Paris salon, where the leading figures of modernism in literature and art, such as Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson and Henri Matisse, would meet for conversation and inspiration.  Laurençin soon became part of the Stein salon on rue de Fleurus.  Marie remained in contact with Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas until Stein’s death in 1946 and continued to see Toklas until her own death.

Portrait of Coco Chanel by Marie Laurencin (1923)

Laurencin held an exhibition of her work in 1921 at the Rosenberg Gallery in Paris. She had now built up her reputation as a talented portraitist, especially of celebrities, one of whom was Coco Chanel.  The commission to paint Chanel’s portrait came about in the autumn of 1923 when Marie Laurencin was working for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes which was established in Paris, Monte-Carlo and London, and Marie was designing the costumes and sets for the ballet Les Biches [The Does]. At the same time, Coco Chanel was creating the costumes for the same company’s Le Train Bleu [The Blue Train] operetta .   At that time, Coco Chanel was both very rich and famous, and she commissioned Marie Laurencin to paint her portrait.  This was one of Laurencin’s early portrait commissions. Laurencin depicted Chanel face-on, seated in a relaxed, somewhat dreamy pose, with her head resting on her right arm. She appears relaxed and her eyes and mouth, neutral and expressionless, suggest that she is daydreaming or preoccupied by her thoughts. Marie Laurencin’s painting style was to incorporate animals in her works and here she depicts a white poodle sitting on the Coco Chanel’s knees. It is unclear where Chanel’s flesh ends and her dress begins; her pale outfit is accented with dark black and blue scarves, while the seat behind her is a textured pink and blue. On the right-hand side of the painting, we can see another dog leaping upwards towards a turtle dove which appears to be descending from the sky towards Coco Chanel, like the dove of the Holy Spirit, and thus Laurencin’s symbolising it as a sort of freedom. The colour palette is of a soft harmony of the colours – green, blue and pink, which is reinforced by the long black line of the scarf draped around the model’s neck.  The finished painting was so like Laurencin’s earlier works but did it capture the likeness of Coco Chanel.  The sitter did not think so and the artist did not deny it, but claimed that physical likeness was unimportant.  Chanel refused to pay for it and Laurencin was so annoyed by Chanel’s attitude that she refused to execute a second portrait and decided to keep the original herself.  Despite Chanel’s rejection of the painting, the success of Laurencin’s approach to portraiture was such that she continued to receive and execute portrait commissions in this style until the 1940s. The painting can now be found at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris.

In 1931, Laurencin was one of the founding members of La Société des femmes artistes modernes, and took part in their annual exhibitions until the outbreak of World War II. During the period from 1932 to 1935, she tutored at the Villa Malakoff, a private art school.  In 1937, which art historians believe was the height of her career, a retrospective of Laurencin’s work was held in conjunction with the Great Exhibition of Independent Art Masters at the Petit Palais, which sought to promote the superiority of the contemporary French artistic school, extended to foreign artists “living or having lived in France for many years”. The year 1937 saw a change in Laurencin’s appearance when she finally acquired glasses, which changed her life considerably as she had been extremely short-sighted since childhood and had had difficulty negotiating staircases since the 1920s.

During World War II, Laurencin remained in Paris painting and working on designs for the ballet, and in 1942 she published Le Carnet des Nuits – a collection of poetry with short memoir pieces in prose.  Although Laurencin will be remembered as an artist and the grace and the elegance of her artworks; she is also the author of a diary, Le Carnet des Nuits, an important witness of her time. It tells of her early years she spent in Bateau-Lavoir.  Her writing is of the same delicate style used for her artworks. 

Head of a Woman by Marie Laurencin (1909)

In later years, Laurencin became withdrawn and increasingly isolated and sadly suffered from periods of depression and other health complaints, albeit, she continued to paint throughout this troubling passage of time. Her main companion was her maid, Suzanne Moreau, who had lived with her since 1925. Whether there was more to the mistress/servant relationship is unclear but it is thought that they were romantically linked.    In 1954, Laurencin made Moreau the beneficiary of her estate. It is thought this came about due to Laurencin’s legal struggle, resolved the following year, with tenants living in the apartment that she owned.

The tomb of Marie Laurencin in Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris.

Laurencin died of a heart attack on June 8th, 1956, aged 72.  She was buried wearing a white dress in Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris, as per her wishes, with Apollinaire’s love letters and a rose in her hand.

The main source of information for the three blogs about Marie Laurencin came from the excellent The Art Story website.

Marie Laurencin Part 2.

Marie Laurencin, Paris (c.1912.)

Marie Laurençin’s paintings dating from around 1910 have a strong flavour of cubism. However, she once again stated that although the experiments of cubism fascinated her, she was adamant that she would never become a cubist painter because she was not capable of it.

Bateau-Lavoir c. 1910

Laurençin spent a lot of time at Picasso’s open studio at the Bateau-Lavoir, (Laundry Boat) building at 13 Rue Ravignan at Place Emile Goudeau in Montmartre in the 18th arrondissement of Paris.  The building was so nicknamed as it was said to resemble the public clothes-washing boats moored on the Seine in the early years of the twentieth century. The ramshakle building was said to strain and groan when it was windy—just like the those laundry boats on the Seine. Here, Laurençin exhibited her work along with a group of artists known as the Bateau-Lavoir, which was the residence and meeting place for a group of outstanding artists and men of literature.  It was here that she met Max Jacob, the French poet, painter, writer, and critic, and André Derain, the French artist, painter, sculptor and co-founder of Fauvism.  She was also introduced to Gertrude Stein, the American novelist, poet, playwright, and art collector to whom she made her first sale in 1908.

Les jeunes filles (Jeune Femmes, The Young Girls) by Marie Laurençin (1911)

In 1911 Laurençin completed her painting entitled The Young Girls.  Marie Laurencin showed The Young Women at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris in 1911, alongside works by other artists painting in a similar style. The exhibition, which gave rise to the term “cubism”, caused a scandal but was also the breakthrough for Cubist art.  This work depicts four pale-skinned dark-eyed women with dark hair, independent of each other and yet overlapping.  They are all wearing  grey robes and stand against an abstracted pastoral backdrop. The female on the left is a violinist, playing music for the figure beside her, who dances. At the centre of the depiction we see a woman seated facing the dancer, but she turns her head to look back at us.  On the right, another woman appears in motion, carrying a bowl of fruit under her right arm and reaching down with her left hand to stroke the nose of a doe. All the limbs of the women have a fluidity which mirrors the drape of their dresses.   Their bodies are outlined with heavy black lines.  Laurençin has experimented with this depiction and artistic style. 

Les Demoiselles d’Avignon by Picasso (1907)

The posture of the four women with their flat, mask-like faces seems to have been influenced by her friend, Picasso’s 1907 painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.  In a way the work can be considered as a suggestion that the four women represent a fertile sphere of feminine creativity.  The presence of the doe is symbolic of femininity and naturalness that was a common theme in Laurencin’s work.  Critics believe the painting alludes to the of lesbian self-fashioning and as a celebration of an independent female realm.  The painting can be viewed at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm.

Portrait de jeune femme by Marie Laurencin

In 1913, Marie Laurençin’s mother died and this sad event coincided with her ending her relationship with Apollinaire, but this ending could have something to do with his reputation as a philanderer.   However, she would remain close to Apollinaire until his death, aged 38, in 1918. Her split from Apollinaire freed Laurencin of his Cubist influence, but at the same time, isolating her. On June 24th 1914, in Paris, Marie married Baron Otto van Wätjen, a German Impressionist and Modern painter whom she had first met as fellow students at the Académie Humbert.  

Marie Laurencin, Cecilia de Madrazo and the Dog, Coco by Marie Laurençin (1915)

In the Tate Britain, London, one can see the 1915 work by Laurençin entitled Marie Laurencin and Cecilia de Madrazo and the Dog, Coco.  Cecilia was an art collector friend of Maria.  Laurençin told a fellow artist that the painting was completed in 1915 while she and her husband were exiled in Madrid.  The girl wearing the hat is Cecilia de Madrazo, a young Spaniard, and the other figure is Marie herself wearing a pink dress with her dog poking up between them.  She had bought the dog from an English sailor at Malaga. Marie Laurencin was staying in Madrid with the Madrazos at the time.  Marie has depicted herself with short hair which covers her ears and forehead.  Although her skin is grey it is sharply in contrast with pink cheeks and lips and black eyes which are focused downwards.  Cecilia is fascinated by the dog.  She stares down at it and pushes a finger towards its very long snout. Cecilia’s skin is almost white, with pink lips and cheeks.  She is wearing a grey dress and has a white hat, with a large blue bow, atop her dark hair. The backdrop, almost without detail, is grey and there is a pink curtain at the right edge of the painting; the colour scheme is very limited, with Laurencin utilising only grey, pink, blue and very small amounts of beige. This painting is representative of Laurencin’s work, which has been both appreciated and criticised for its deliberately feminine aesthetic.  Marie’s palette concentrated on  pastel colours. The two figures depicted add a sense of peace and charm and they own the conventional female virtues of loveliness, sophistication and meekness. Laurencin’s unapologetic embrace of visual pleasure and the way she developed an aesthetic that acclaimed female softness, elegance and sweetness was itself a radical position. Laurencin’s painting has depicted such qualities as part of a creative process in which a masculine form is utterly unnecessary, and in a way it is a presentation of a work in which both artist and subject are female.   

The Fan by Marie Laurencin (1919)

In 1919 Laurencin completed her painting entitled The Fan and this, like the previous work, is part of the Tate Britain, London collection.  The painting was purchased by Gustav Kahnweiler, an art dealer, as a gift for his wife, Elly.  He and his wife amassed a modest art collection focused on Cubist paintings, sculptures, and works on paper. After the couple moved to England in the 1930s to escape Nazi persecution, Gustav and Elly loaned and gifted works from their collection to the Tate.  It is believed that the woman in the oval frame is Laurencin herself but the identity of the other woman is unknown.  The fan, which was a symbol of vanity, was one of Laurencin’s favourite accessories. The painting depicts a pink shelf that holds two images of women, one in a rectangular frame and the other in a round frame, against a pink and grey background. The portrait to the left, in the larger, rectangular frame, shows a woman and a dog in greyscale, accentuated by a pale blue ribbon, hat and curtains.  Next to it is an oval frame at the centre of the painting depicting a woman reputed to be Marie Laurencin herself, though it is unclear if this is a portrait or indeed a mirror. The lower right corner of the painting is dominated by the folds of a fan, painted in grey and white, that is cut off at the canvas’s edge.  Laurencin has cleverly depicted the fan in a position that could be seen as being held by someone who is staring at the two frames on the shelf.  The two portraits in the frames on the shelf are positioned such that the figures appear to look out towards us but also towards the person holding the fan.  There is an air of mystery about the depiction and the identities of the figures.  Some believe that the woman in the rectangular frame is Nicole Groult, a dressmaker with whom Laurencin is likely to have had a romantic relationship.

Dona Tadea Arias de Enriquez by Goya (1793)

Once married to Otto van Wätjen, Laurencin automatically lost her French citizenship and so took up German citizenship. She and her husband moved to neutral Spain at the beginning of the First World War in order to avoid France’s anti-German sentiment.  Here, Laurencin became involved with the Dada movement, editing the art and literary magazine 391, a Dada-affiliated arts and literary magazine created by Francis Picabia.  She also spent time looking closely at the work of Francisco Goya, whose dignified, dark-eyed women captivated her.

Simultaneous Windows on the City by Robert Delaunay (1912)

During this period in Spain she became great friends with Sonia Delaunay and Robert Delaunay, who had similarly left France to avoid the War.   Robert was an artist of the School of Paris movement, who, with his wife Sonia Delaunay and others, co-founded the Orphism art movement, noted for its use of strong colours and geometric shapes.

……to be continued.

Marie Laurencin. Part 1.

Marie Laurencin photographed by Man Ray (c.1925)

My blog today features the life and artwork of the nineteenth century French painter, Marie Laurencin.  She played an important role in the bringing out the female and lesbian identity in early-20th century modern art movements which at the time was dominated by men.  Her depictions were mainly of females, including many self-portraits but also many also accompanied by animals.  She prided herself with her choice of subjects famously stating:

“…Why should I paint dead fish, onions and beer glasses?  Girls are much prettier…”

Le Bal élégant, La Danse à la campagne by Marie Laurencin (1913)

From early in life, Laurencin was predominantly interested in worlds in which women moved independently and peacefully, creating self-portraits and scenes featuring animals and women which were striking in their thematic consistency. Her fame came through her association with Cubism and she exhibited her work with the Section d’Or, (“Golden Section”), which was also known as Groupe de Puteaux or Puteaux Group, a collective of painters, sculptors, poets and critics associated with Cubism and Orphism.  Her work was also exhibited in America at the Armory Show, but later in her life she fought against her art being compartmentalised in a specific art movement.  She concentrated on her own aesthetic, favouring escapist imagery in pastel hues, that was at once decorative and radical in its embrace of feminine images.

Tête pensive by Marie Laurencin

Marie Laurencin was born in Paris on October 31st, 1883, and lived in an apartment with her mother, Pauline Mélanie Laurencin, a seamstress. Laurencin was an illegitimate child but did not have the courage to question her mother about her absent father.  However, when she was twenty-one-years-old her mother disclosed that her father was the politician Alfred Toulet. Marie Laurencin’s achievements at school were limited although she w an avid reader and enjoyed sketching.  He failings at school precluded her from becoming a teacher, a profession favoured by her mother.   As a teenager, Marie found life difficult and this was presumably due to her classroom failings.  She became introverted and began to paint self-portraits which she carried on doing for most of her life.  After leaving school she studied the art of porcelain painting at the École de Sèvres with the flower painter Madeleine Lemaire.  In 1903 when she was twenty, she enrolled at the Académie Humbert where she worked on drawing, painting and printmaking. 

Self-portrait by Marie Laurencin (1904)

She completed one of early self-portraits in 1904 whilst studying at Académie Humbert.  Laurencin depicts herself wearing a white painter’s smock and her hair is tucked behind her face.  She stares out at us with calm confidence and yet serious expression and yet she has a piercing questioning stare. The palette Laurençin has used is dominated by browns, whites and pinks and she has cleverly used colour to model her face, with pinks shaping the sides of the nose and the eyelids and browns and greys indicating shadows around her cheeks.  Her lips, at the centre of the canvas, are red and full.  It was this love of self-portraiture throughout her artistic career that indicated her interest in depicting herself as the subject of her work which ties in closely to her concentration on female independence and self-fashioning. Laurencin always depicted herself as both an independent artist and as a modern woman.  The painting is part of the Musée Marie Laurencin, Nagano collection in Japan.

Portrait de jeune femme by Marie Laurencin

It was at the Académie Humbert that she first encountered fellow French students Georges Braque and Francis Picabia who would become famous artists of the twentieth century.  It was through her friendship with Braque that she soon became part of a group that included Picasso.

Natalie Clifford Barney

It was around this time that Marie first encountered Natalie Barney, an American writer born in Dayton, Ohio and after coming to Paris to live, hosted a literary salon at her Rue Jacob home, in Paris that attracted French and international writers.  Although the guests included some of the most prominent male writers of her time, Natalie Barney attempted to showcase female writers and their work.  For her, the events were celebrations inspired by the archaic Greek poet Sappho’s group on the island of Lesbos.  Many of these soirees were neo-Sapphic get-togethers, at which a crowd mainly comprised of lesbian and bisexual women would mingle and discuss links between female desire and creative production.  It was these events that were to influence Laurencin’s creative production which can be seen throughout her artwork.

Aléoutiennes by Marie Laurencin

Laurencin’s first print-making efforts came in 1904 with her illustrations of Pierre Louÿs’s The Songs of Bilitis, a collection of erotica, which basically was a set of lesbian poems celebrating erotic love between women. It was around this time that Marie Laurençin indicated her own preference for women.  In 1907, twenty-four-year-old Laurencin had her work shown at her exhibition debut at the Salon des Indépendants, which was held at the Gallery Clovis Sagot in Montmartre. Many of the Cubists painters had their artwork displayed at this event and they wanted to claim Laurencin as one of their own.  However, she refused to be compartmentalised with any one genre. 

Guillaume Apollinaire,

Whilst attending the exhibition Pablo Picasso introduced her to Guillaume Apollinaire, the French poet, playwright, short story writer, novelist and art critic of Polish descent.  Laurençin and Apollinaire had a relationship that lasted for six years, during which Apollinaire wrote often about his lover and would refer to her as “Our Lady of Cubism” which of course led more people to associate her with the Cubism movement.

The Muse Inspires the Poet by Henri Rousseau (1909)

The relationship between the two lovers was a strange one. Both were illegitimate children of a single mother and whether this had something to do with it but they lived apart throughout their relationship. The pair never married, and it is thought that this was to the disapproval of their mothers and also they both believed in the modern lifestyle which reject the bourgeois convention of marriage. The “partnership” was depicted in Henri Rousseau’s 1909 portrait of Laurencin and Apollinaire, in 1909, entitled The Muse Inspires the Poet. The two were great influence on each other and their artistic vision so much so that Apollinaire referred to Laurençin as “a female version of himself” and his literary works inspired her dreamy imagery and the symbolism of her work.

Apollinaire and his Friends by Marie Laurencin (1909)

Laurencin completed an interesting painting in 1909 entitled Apollinaire and his Friends.  The painting depicts a gathering of intellectuals, artists, and bohemians, with their host, Guillaume Apollinaire, the celebrated poet and art critic, in the centre of the painting.  He is surrounded by a group of friends.  Before him sits a dog who is depicted with its head turned in loving admiration of the poet !  On the left of Apollinaire are Gertrude Stein, the novelist and art collector, Fernande Olivier, a French artist and model known primarily for having been the model and first muse of painter Pablo Picasso, and for her written accounts of her relationship with him and an unknown woman with a lavish headdress.  To the right of Apollinaire, behind a vase of flowers, are the poets, Maurice Cremnitz, Marguerite Gillot, and Picasso.  Laurencin is seated on the ground wearing a pale blue dress.  She has turned her body turned toward Apollinaire while she looks out at us.  The colour of her dress and the colour of Apollinaire’s tie are similar and she has probably consciously did this to serve as a pictorially connection between her and him.  Laurencin gave the portrait to Apollinaire as a gift and she sold a smaller version to Gertrude Stein.  Apollinaire had the painting placed above his bed in his apartment on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, and it remained there throughout his life and after his death was preserved by his family. The painting can now be seen in the collection of the Musée Picasso in Paris

Laurencin’s paintings dating from around 1910 have a strong flavour of cubism. However, she once again stated that although the experiments of cubism fascinated her, she was adamant that she would never become a cubist painter because she was not capable of it.

…………to be continued.