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This selection of works demonstrates the genius in Laurencin’s vision of a self-sufficient world of female affection and creativity. This exhibition seeks to celebrate Marie Laurencin’s qualities as a great modernist painter, her instrumental role in defining the Art Deco style, and her influence on a generation of the Parisian intellectual elite. As a young artist, Laurencin rose quickly as a prominent figure within the Cubists. She sold her first painting to Gertrude Stein and exhibited with Cubist group the Section d’Or in 1911. Yet her friendship with male artists and romance with Guillaume Apollinaire occluded historians’ ability to recognise her contribution to modernism. Many, including those closest to her, celebrated her feminine touch but balked at the notion of equal standing with her fellow male artists. Some, however, did notice her. Henri Matisse said of Laurencin in relation to her earlier connection with the Fauvist group: “She, at least, is no mere Fauvette.” Marie Laurencin’s work is canonical in the history of twentieth-century painting, with contemporary art historian Elizabeth Otto hailing the artist as a “heroine of modernism” for giving form to female independence and to lesbian love and desire. However, this was not always the case. Her effeminate style – exemplified in her choice of pastel colours and domestic settings – contributed to critics sidelining her work through “avoidance, blindness or denial,” in the words of Elizabeth Louise Kahn. Now, these very same qualities define Laurencin’s vision of the modern woman. This exhibition showcases paintings from Laurencin’s mature period from the 1920s onwards. These refined works are a window onto the artist’s world, customising avant-garde techniques to her own mission. In these mature works, Laurencin combines her exposure to modernist painting with a unique combination of references to craft a utopia for women beyond the reach of men. Neoclassical Sapphic iconography, Japanese literature and nineteenth-century Romantic symbolism play a game of hide and seek within her soft palette and abstracted forms. It takes a second glance to lift the veil, to uncover hints of a life hiding in plain sight. As André Salmon wrote presciently in 1912, Laurencin’s paintings are “too subtle to be simple.” A highlight of the exhibition, Buste de femme aux seins nus (1926), depicts an artist model in vibrant clothes which reveal both breasts. While her frontal pose projects an airy sensuality, her wide black eyes arrest the viewer. Enlarged pupils recur in Laurencin’s portraits, and read differently on each face. Her eyes can sometimes read as feline, deer eyes, tribal masks, or human melancholy. Deux femmes aux rideau (1924) depicts a woman opening a curtain which at once conceals and uncovers another behind. The women here are derived from a combination of life studies and the artist’s imagination. Here we find a conspiratorial atmosphere, of women making a space their own.
