Marie Laurencin

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Marie Laurencin (October 31, 1883–June 8, 1956) was a French painter and printmaker.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Work 3 External links 4 Bibliography

[edit] Biography

Laurencin was born in Paris where she was raised by her mother and lived much of her life. When she was 18 years old, she studied porcelain painting in Sèvres. She then returned to Paris and continued her art education at Académie Humbert, where she changed her focus to oil on canvas.

During the early years of the 20th century, Laurencin was an important figure of the Parisian avant-garde and a member of the circle of Pablo Picasso. She became romantically involved with Picasso's friend, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire and has often been remembered as his muse. In addition, Laurencin had important connections to the literary salon of the American expatriate and famed lesbian writer Natalie Clifford Barney.

During the period of the First World War, Laurencin left France for exile in Spain with her German born husband, Baron Otto von Waëtjen (1914), since through her marriage she had automatically lost her French citizenship. The couple subsequently lived together briefly in Düsseldorf. After they divorced in 1920, she returned to Paris, where she lived for the remainder of her life and achieved great success as an artist.

[edit] Work

Laurencin's works include paintings, watercolors, drawings, and prints. She is known as one of the few female Cubist painters, with Sonia Delaunay, Marie Vorobieff, and Franciska Clausen^{[citation needed]}. While her work does show the influence of Cubist painters Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, who was her close friend, she developed a unique approach to abstraction which often centered on the representation of groups of women and female portraits. Further, her work lies outside the bounds of Cubist norms in her pursuit of a specifically feminine aesthetic by her use of pastel colors and curvilinear forms. Laurencin, when painting her tender visions, attempted to reaffirm feminine seduction in the face of victorious modernism. The insistence on the creation of a visual vocabulary of femininity in her art can be seen as a response to what some consider to be the arrogant masculinity of Cubism. Laurencin continued to explore themes of femininity and feminine modes of representation until her death.

In 1983, on the one hundredth anniversary of Laurencin's birth, the Musée Marie Laurencin opened in Nagano Prefecture, Japan. The museum is home to more than 500 of her works and an archive.

[edit] External links

• Marielaurencin.com
• Musée Marie Laurencin, Japan.
• Artcyclopedia.com: Marie Laurencin
• Elizabeth Otto (2002). "Memories of Bilitis: Marie Laurencin beyond the Cublist Context," Genders 36. [1]

[edit] Bibliography

• Kahn, Elizabeth Louise. Marie Laurencin: Une Femme Inadaptee in Feminist Histories of Art. Ashgate Publishing, 2003.
• Otto, Elizabeth. "Memories of Bilitis: Marie Laurencin beyond the Cublist Context," Genders 36 (2002). [2]

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