Marie Laurencin: The Paris Painter Who Built a World of Women

Laurencin began by painting porcelain, took drawing classes at a city art school and then enrolled at the Académie Humbert, where she switched to oil. In 1907 she held her first solo show and joined the group around the Bateau-Lavoir in Montmartre.

For a while she was drawn to Fauvism, then simplified her forms under the influence of Cubism. She exhibited alongside Metzinger, Gleizes and Delaunay, and from 1910 her palette settled on grey, pink and soft pastel tones. She was close to Georges Braque, and had a relationship with the poet Guillaume Apollinaire until 1912.

She later distanced herself from the movement. In a 1923 interview she said Cubism had poisoned three years of her life, because the influence of the men around her had kept her from doing her own work.

In the summer of 1914 she married a German baron, Otto von Wätjen, and automatically lost her French nationality. The war forced her into exile, mainly in Spain, then in Switzerland and Germany, and cut her off from her dealers. She did not settle back in France until 1921.

Back in Paris her painting changed. The muted colours and Cubist geometry gave way to light tones and flowing compositions, and women and animals became her favourite theme.

In 1923 Serge de Diaghilev, on the advice of the composer Francis Poulenc, asked her to design the sets and costumes for the ballet Les Biches. It opened in Monte-Carlo on 6 January 1924, and she saw her part in it as an artistic manifesto.

In the 1920s Laurencin became a sought-after portraitist of Parisian society. Coco Chanel commissioned a portrait in 1923, then disliked it and refused to pay. Laurencin, furious, would not paint her a second one and kept the first. Domenica Guillaume’s portrait, painted around 1928, is unusual in her work for how closely it captures a real face.

She had relationships with both men and women, including a bond of some forty years with the fashion designer Nicole Groult. The art historian Elizabeth Otto describes her paintings as a world without men, of female harmony.

Her success lasted until the Depression of the 1930s, a decade in which she also taught painting. She lived in Paris for the rest of her life and died there in 1956.