Marie Laurencin and the Cubists Who Forgot Her
Marie Laurencin was at the centre of the Paris avant-garde in 1910. She exhibited alongside Picasso, Braque and Léger. Her work was reproduced in the first theoretical treatise ever written on Cubism. Guillaume Apollinaire — her lover, and the man who coined the term "Cubism" — called her "Our Lady of Cubism" and devoted an entire chapter to her in Les Peintres Cubistes, placing her alongside Picasso, Braque and Gris as one of the movement's defining figures. By the time art history wrote the story of Cubism in the decades after the Second World War, she had been edited out.
The mechanism of that exclusion is more interesting than the fact of it. Laurencin was not overlooked because she was marginal. She was written out because the version of Cubism that became canonical — analytical, austere, dominated by the formal problem-solving of Picasso and Braque — had no room for what she was doing. Her palette was soft where theirs was monochrome. Her subject matter was figurative and feminine where theirs was still-life and structural. Her forms flowed where theirs fractured. The art historians who consolidated Cubism's legacy in the 1950s and 1960s were building a narrative of radical formal innovation, and Laurencin's work — with its pastel pinks, its willowy women, its dreamlike stillness — simply did not fit the story they wanted to tell.
Yet the documentary evidence is unambiguous. In 1912, Laurencin participated in the Maison Cubiste installation at the Salon d'Automne — the controversial collaborative project, conceived by André Mare and fronted by a sculptural facade by Raymond Duchamp-Villon, that presented Cubism as a total design environment. The same year, her painting Femme à l'éventail was reproduced in Gleizes and Metzinger's Du "Cubisme", the first book-length defence of the movement, where the illustrations were arranged in the chronological order each artist had embraced Cubism: Cézanne, Picasso, Derain, Braque, Metzinger, Laurencin, Gleizes, Léger, Duchamp, Gris, Picabia. Not a footnote — a participant, placed chronologically before Gleizes, Léger and Duchamp. She showed with the Section d'Or at the Galerie La Boétie the same year, and was included in the landmark 1913 Armory Show in New York that introduced European modernism to American audiences. Paul Rosenberg — the dealer who represented Braque, Matisse and Picasso — took her on as a client in 1913.
Then the story fractures. In 1914, Laurencin married the German painter Otto von Waëtjen. Under French law at the time, a woman who married a foreign national automatically lost her French citizenship. When war broke out, she was classified as an enemy national and forced into exile — first to Spain, then to Düsseldorf. She spent the war years cut off from Paris entirely, at precisely the moment when the city's artistic networks were being consolidated into the narratives that would shape art history for a century. When she returned in 1921, divorced and alone, she no longer had any interest in belonging to the Cubist circle. In a 1923 interview she was blunt about it: Cubism, she said, had poisoned three years of her life, and as long as she had been influenced by the great men around her, she could do nothing.
What Laurencin did instead, from the early 1920s onwards, was build one of the most distinctive and commercially successful practices in interwar Paris. She became the portraitist of choice for fashionable society — Coco Chanel, the Baronne Gourgaud, Lady Cunard — while developing a visual language that was entirely her own. Her mature paintings are populated almost exclusively by women: pale, elongated figures with dark almond-shaped eyes, rendered in muted pinks, greys and powder blues, often accompanied by deer, doves, dogs and cats. The animals are not decorative. In Laurencin's visual system, they function as compositional extensions of the human figures, doubling and rhyming with the women they accompany. Her Siamese cat, which appears in several late paintings including this 1946 self-portrait, is a characteristic example: positioned at the sitter's shoulder, its cool grey markings echoing the tonal palette of the whole composition, its face a formal counterpart to the simplified oval of the human face beside it.
Laurencin's connections to lesbian artistic and literary circles in Paris — particularly the salon of the American expatriate writer Natalie Clifford Barney — were central to her life and work. Her longest intimate relationship was with the fashion designer Nicole Groult, and her paintings of women in pairs, often titled simply Amies (the French word carrying deliberate ambiguity between "friends" and "lovers"), make visible a world of female intimacy and independence that was radical in its quiet insistence. In her 1918 painting La Femme-cheval, she depicted herself as a centaur-like creature holding a paintbrush — an artist in full command of her own mythology. She designed costumes and sets for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in 1924, illustrated books for leading Paris publishers, and in 1949 was made an officer of the Légion d'Honneur. She was not a marginal figure. She was a major artist operating on her own terms.
After her death in 1956, the forgetting was swift. The postwar art market, dominated by Abstract Expressionism and its cult of masculine intensity, had little use for Laurencin's pastel palette and feminine subjects. Helen Frankenthaler — one of the very few women admitted to the Abstract Expressionist inner circle — was so wary of Laurencin's influence that she gave a 1962 painting made in tribute a cautionary title. Even the feminist art historians who began recovering women artists in the 1970s and 1980s were uncertain what to do with Laurencin: her unapologetic embrace of the decorative and the feminine sat uneasily with a generation that tended to value confrontation over subtlety. It took until the 2020s — specifically the Barnes Foundation's 2023 retrospective Marie Laurencin: Sapphic Paris — for a major American institution to present her work on its own terms, reading the softness not as weakness but as strategy.
There is a detail about Laurencin that tells you everything. She was extremely short-sighted for most of her life — she did not acquire glasses until 1937, when she was fifty-four. When asked why all the women in her paintings looked the same, she offered two explanations, both delivered with the poker-faced wit that characterised her public persona. The first: she simply painted what she saw, which without glasses was soft, blurred and simplified. The second: she based all women's faces on the face of her cat. Both explanations are probably partly true. Both are also deflections — ways of refusing to explain her art in the analytical, theoretical terms that the men around her preferred. Laurencin understood very well what she was doing. She just declined to discuss it on anyone else's terms.