annebarone.com
French Chic & Slim
|| 9 March 2017
Marie Laurencin
She was a beautiful artist who created beautiful art. Times changed and, with that change, her popularity faded. Nevertheless, Marie Laurencin remains important as one of the rare women artists who painted in the Cubist style.
In the 5 March 2017 Sunday’s Nouvelles, I featured an exhibition current at the Musée Maillol, Paris focusing on the art gallery of dealer Paul Rosenberg at 21 Rue La Boétie. In French journalist Anne Sinclair’s book on her grandfather’s art gallery, she relates that Marie Laurencin was the first artist her grandfather signed to an exclusive contract. Later would come the exclusive representation of Picasso, Braque, Léger and Matisse.
The relationship between Paul Rosenberg and Marie Laurencin was generally amicable. But Anne Sinclair writes:
Marie Laurencin complained that Paul had treated her harshly when she asked for an advance of the pocket money she needed to settle the bill for her Chanel coats. “Stop ordering them, then!” Paul was suppsed to have said to her one day when he’d had enough of her complaints, provoking a furious response.
Anne Sinclair about Marie Laurencin's art:
The delightful, feminine paintings of Laurencin, who was loved by the poet Apollinaire, stood out in the male-dominated cubist world. They have fallen out of fashion today, as paintings for gray and pink boudoirs, but they have a grace that touches me, grace in a time of war and fragmentation. Laurencin painted gentle figures when Léger was painting his industrial structures, violent in form and color. Was Laurencin behind the times? Perhaps it was more that she was out of step with a brutal world, and that strikes me as refreshing.
image: (left) Ballerinas by Marie Laurencin (next) The Reader by Laurencin (next) Marie Laurencin circa 1912 (right) Marie Laurencin 1949 the year she painted Anne Sinclair's portrait