Marie Laurencin 'Self Portrait with Siamese Cat' 1946 Art Exhibition Poster

Self Portrait with Siamese Cat (1946) is a late oil painting by Marie Laurencin, produced during the final phase of her career. The work presents a simplified frontal figure, rendered with diluted pigments and restrained brushwork, accompanied by a Siamese cat positioned as a compositional extension of the sitter. Laurencin once claimed to base all women's faces on the face of her cat — a characteristically playful deflection from an artist who preferred wit to explanation.

Born in Paris in 1883, Laurencin was a central figure in the pre-war avant-garde. She exhibited with the Section d'Or Cubists at the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon d'Automne, participated in the Maison Cubiste installation in 1912, and was included in the landmark 1913 Armory Show in New York. Her work was reproduced in the first theoretical treatise on Cubism — Gleizes and Metzinger's Du "Cubisme" — and Guillaume Apollinaire, her lover, devoted an entire chapter to her in Les Peintres Cubistes. Yet by the 1950s, the version of Cubism that became canonical had no room for her soft palette, figurative subjects and flowing forms. She was written out of the story she had helped to make.

Laurencin's mature work, from the 1920s onwards, developed a visual language entirely her own: elongated women 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 additions — they function as compositional counterparts to the human figures, their forms rhyming with the sitters they accompany. In this self-portrait, the Siamese cat's cool grey markings and simplified face echo the tonal palette and formal economy of the composition as a whole. It was completed ten years before her death in 1956, during a period of greater formal simplification and withdrawal from the fashionable Paris art world.

Our poster imagines an autumn 1986 exhibition at a fictional gallery on the Avenue Notre Dame in Nice, using period-appropriate French typography and the restrained institutional voice typical of Riviera gallery announcements from that era. The setting reflects the continuing visibility of Laurencin's work in southern France — a region with deep connections to the School of Paris tradition and to the kind of intimate, light-filled painting that defined her later career.