Marie Laurencin

Spanish Dancers

While visiting the Orangerie during our visit to Paris I was taken by a group of paintings by Marie Laurencin.  I’d never come across this female French artist before and so followed up the visit by doing a bit of research.

There doesn’t seem to be many of her paintings in galleries in Britain (although the Tate apparently have a couple) or in France, which would partly explain why I haven’t come across her work before. There seem to be more examples in the USA, and for some reason there is a museum dedicated to her work in Tokyo.

She was born in 1883 and lived until 1956. She used to hang around “le Bateau-Lavoir” in Montmartre and was associated with Picasso and his circle. She was the lover and muse of the poet Apollinaire, apparently inspiring some of his most famous poems. They appear together in a painting by Henri Rousseau

Although the Orangerie guidebook describes her as the “lady of cubism”, to me her work doesn’t really justify that label. She may have associated with cubists, but her paintings were quite different.  The five works displayed in the Orangerie are all paintings of women. Her style is distinctive and, in my view, very feminine. if I hadn’t already known, I would have guessed that they were painted by a woman.

Portrait de Mademoiselle Chanel

She seems to have mainly taken women as her subjects and used a limited range of soft, pastel colours.  The Orangerie guidebook quotes her as saying

“I didn’t like every colour, so why use those I don’t like? I simply left them aside. I only used blue, pink, green, white and black. With age I came to accept yellow and red“

I couldn’t find too much about her on the web, but there is a good article about her life and work here.

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