In 1923, Marie Laurencin painted the stage curtain of the ballet Les biches, which premiered in Monte Carlo in January of the following year—a somewhat plotless, vibe-filled stage production of young people living it up in a spacious white room at a party in the incandescent heat of summer. The title of the ballet loosely translates to ‘The does’ in French, but held multiple illusory meanings in the double-entendre slang of the Parisian underworld, significantly a woman of experimental sexual morals, or a lesbian—maybe both.
Rendered in depressed shades of pastels like sea green, robin’s egg blue, brownish gray, white and dashes of Laurencin’s pale pink, the ethereal gray-haired figure of a woman dominates a painting. She’s surrounded by wolves, dogs, deer, a faceless young girl and other animals, blurring the boundaries of the mythic and the real. It’s difficult to tell if the woman is just a woman or a creature of the forest herself, pointing to Laurencin’s tendency to anthropomorphize her subjects and create an aesthetic otherworld in which only women live, where Sapphic desire and irreverence for the male gaze prevail.
Marie Laurencin’s unapologetically feminine, avant-garde artworks enjoyed commercial success when she was alive. She famously painted Coco Chanel’s portrait, illustrated Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and designed an August 1923 cover of Vogue, but fell to relative obscurity after she died in 1956. The exhibition “Marie Laurencin: Sapphic Paris” at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, which closes on January 21, is the first major retrospective to restore Laurencin’s pastel-hued vision of a dreamy womanhood to the public eye and emerges at a time when the pink-infused aesthetics of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie or Sofia Coppola’s cinematographic gilded cages of heroines like Marie Antoinette and Priscilla Presley dominate the popular imagination.
“As art historians, we were intrigued to find out more about her and how she created a unique artistic vision,” Cindy Kang and Simonetta Fraquelli, who curated the exhibition, told Observer. While Laurencin appears in “accounts of art in Paris in the early twentieth century,” in-depth engagement with her work since then has been limited, and she lacks the posthumous fame of her contemporaries like Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, who famously remarked of Laurencin’s independent grit as a painter, “She, at least, is no mere Fauvette.”
Laurencin started as a Cubist painter with the collective Section d’Or, but resisted the aesthetic constraints of the masculine-dominated art movements of the time to develop her unique style and vision. Laurencin’s girly, almost delicate style depicting beautiful, elongated women provoked the curiosity and infantilization of art critics. Her lover, Guillaume Apollinaire, characterized Laurencin’s artworks as “tender manifestations” of a “childlike” feminine mind. “As long as I was influenced by the great men surrounding me, I could do nothing,” Laurencin reflected years later in an interview with French art critic Gabrièle Buffet-Picabia. By that time, she had not just broken up with Apollinaire but abandoned Cubism altogether.
And yet, Laurencin’s choice to forge a path attracted celebrities, publishers, collectors and critics alike to her pastel cult. Gertrude Stein, who lived as an expat in Paris, was her first buyer. Looking at the paintings on view at the Barnes Foundation, it’s easy to understand why the ethereal beauty of Laurencin’s artwork endures to this day. Whether it’s a small, oval-shaped portrait of a girl in a gray hat sitting on a wispy black horse, an oil painting of slender female figures dancing in a diaphanous garden as a woman strums a banjo or a self-referential painting in which a female artist paints her model, a lacy curtain pulled to the side as an adorable dog glances up at the viewer, Laurencin captured the charm and idyll of Paris as a city, not unlike the luxuriant novels of Colette, or Ludwig Bemelmans’ iconic Madeline books. Most importantly, she provided glimpses of the creative demimonde to which she belonged as a bisexual woman in her paintings.
The early artworks in the exhibition show Laurencin’s evolution from Cubism to her signature style, typified in a quaint self-portrait seemingly trying to break free from the movement’s jagged lines. In the second room, Laurencin’s dreamy snapshots of Paris are on full view, notably in Maison Meublée, which provides a street view of a building with two balconies, foliage curling over the stenciled black railings. On the first, a woman resembling the painter herself stands in soft contemplation, dressed in a nondescript gray outfit with pops of color in a dusty rose-colored scarf and a hat embellished with a cobalt-blue feather. On the second balcony, a woman with curly black hair puts her head in her hands, as she sits with an older woman whose back is turned, the silhouette of a cigarette protruding from her lips. Even in her surrealist style, the painting reflects the mundane poetry of everyday life in Paris, the lurching contrast between the thrilling and the humdrum, mirroring the logic of street photography. Ultimately, Maison Meublée reflects Laurencin’s trajectory: the fact she chose a truthful, if magical realist depiction of Paris and the immediacy of commercial projects over the suffocating success of a career as a Cubist painter.
Much of Laurencin’s personal life remains a mystery, even if a queer feminist sensibility appeared throughout her works. In an early sketch, Laurencin imagined herself as Diana the Huntress, the virginal Roman goddess of unmarried girls and the hunt, who traversed the woods with her handmaidens and once turned a peeping tom into a stag as punishment for spying on her bathing huntresses. This same mythic setting provides the foundation for Laurencin’s trademark scenes of women enjoying themselves in garden parties, dancing, lying in states of repose, running with animals and sometimes touching each other. The crown jewel of the exhibition remains Les biches, which shows Laurencin at the height of her powers, the mystic figures in the painting tempting and dangerous at the same time. The feral style of the characters in Les biches informed Laurencin’s portrait of Coco Chanel, which she painted not long after the ballet’s onstage premiere. Chanel disliked the portrait and demanded Laurencin paint it again, but Laurencin refused to budge from her artistic license, dismissing the legendary fashion designer as a “peasant from Auvergne.”
Laurencin had both male and female lovers and rushed into a short-lived marriage with Baron Otto von Waëtjen after leaving Paris in exile for Spain during World War I. She frequently attended the salons of Natalie Clifford Barney, who arranged events for queer women to mingle and had a long-term relationship with Nicole Groult. The sister of artist-couturier Paul Poiret and married to Art Deco powerhouse André Groult, Nicole Groult was an emerging fashion designer in her own right and likely influenced Laurencin’s visual turn towards a style that riffed from women’s fashion. Diaphanous scarves, taffeta-like tutus, pearl chokers, silky chemises and embellished hats all appear in Laurencin’s paintings.
While no artwork is overtly sexualized and remains open to interpretation, it’s unmistakable the scenes of feminine companionship and the sensuous paints in which they’re rendered border on the romantic, a depiction of queerness centered on emotional pleasure and relaxation, a secret world away from men and the demands of compulsory heterosexuality. Laurencin’s proclivity to fade the paints into each other, bathing her paintings in a gossamer veil, suggests the fantasy of queer utopian romance, but also coquettish deniability pointing to the secrecy of the closet. If the romance is so surreal, can it reasonably be pinned as lesbian? In any case, the ambiguity reflects not just the time in which Laurencin lived and painted, but her bravery and ingenuity in how she operated as an artist and queer woman in 1920s Paris.
