Marie Laurencin

Marie Laurencin started off by learning to paint on porcelain, before going on to take drawing classes at the City of Paris’ Municipal Art School and finally enrolling at the Humbert Academy. She held her first solo exhibition in 1907 and met Pablo Picasso and the group of artists living in the Bateau-Lavoir in Montmartre, as well as the poet and art critic Guillaume Apollinaire, with whom she had a passionate affair that lasted until 1912, nourished by intellectual and artistic exchanges. Drawn to fauvism for a while, Marie Laurencin simplified and synthesized forms under the cubists’ influence.
In summer 1914, she married a German baron and took his nationality, a move that forced her to go into exile while the war also deprived her of her dealers. She only finally returned to France in 1921. Marie Laurencin certainly met the young Paul Guillaume around 1912, through Apollinaire. He acted as her dealer for a while in the 1920s, and she befriended the gallerist’s wife, Domenica.
Back in Paris, she started depicting slender, wispy female figures, which she would then reproduce more or less faithfully on canvases in pastel tones, evocations of an enchanted world. She painted portraits of Parisian celebrities and created theatre sets, for the Ballets Russes in particular. She developed a taste for metamorphosis in her works, combining two of her favorite themes: young women and animals.

View Marie Laurencin's works