Marie Laurencin

Born and raised in Paris, Laurencin began her artistic education at the age of 18, enrolling in porcelain painting classes at the renowned Ecole de Manufacture de Sèvres before taking private classes in fine art painting at l’Academie Humbert in Paris starting in 1904. Here, she met Francis Picabia and Georges Braque, and established connections that placed her squarely within the orbit of the emergent Cubist milieu.

After receiving her first solo show occurred in 1907, she went on to exhibit prominently at the Salon des Indépendants in 1910 and 1911, the Salon d’Automne in 1911 and 1912, and at the first Cubist exhibition in Spain held at the Galeries Dalmau in 1912. Though often framed as a Cubist painter, Laurencin herself repeatedly distanced her practice from the rigid idioms of Cubism, and was well aware of how her gender linked her art to the men around her, stating in a 1923 interview, “As long as I was influenced by the great men surrounding me, I could do nothing”.

The outbreak of the First World War in 1914 marked a turning point when she and her German husband were classed as enemy nationals and forced to flee to Spain. Here, she collaborated with Picabia at 391 magazine began an affair with fashion designer Nicole Groult which would continue for the next forty years.

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s she was situated among Paris’s most established artists with many of her works being acquired by international collections, and her studio became a locus for modern female-creative identity. Her paintings from this period, most of which depict young adolescents, women and children, are imprinted with a grace considered entirely feminine by the critics of the time, which Laurencin did not deny nor attempt to distance herself from. These paintings of women are not, however, a simple representation of an atemporal gilded age. Instead, they are representative of the liberated New Woman of the 1920s.

Despite her acclaim, Laurencin remained somewhat marginalised in the canonical histories of Modernism, her delicate feminine vision often deemed less serious by the dominance of the male-centred avant-garde. In recent decades, however, her contribution has been re-evaluated in light of feminist art history, queer studies and the increasingly recognised importance of female artistic agency in the early twentieth century.