Neal Baer Collection

Marie Laurencin (1883-1956) was born in Paris and lived most of her life in France. Laurencin produced a prolific output of painting, works on paper, prints and book illustrations whose constant subject was the stylized portrait of the jeune fille, or young woman. This early self-portrait features graphic lines and flattened figures, rendered in an intentionally naïve, Sunday painter style similar to that of Henri Rousseau. But while she recalls Rousseau stylistically, she uses a deskilled gesture as a vehicle for inquiry into the stereotypes associated with female painting as both a critical reflection of them and a marketing operation fashioning her artistic identity. This early portrait, in its mannered simplicity, paved the way for Laurencin’s signature jeune fille of the 1920s for which she became famous:

Mme Laurencin has painted pretty sets for Les Biches and the whole ballet comes to look like the figures she paints. In the corridor I heard a woman say to a man: ‘Look around the house, all the women look as though they were by Marie Laurencin; she has fashioned a type just as Boldini created the eel look fifteen years ago.

– René Gimpel, Diary of an Art Dealer (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1966), p. 260

Provenance
Galerie Buchholz

Exhibitions
“Marie Laurencin,” Galerie Buchholz, New York, 5 March 2020 – 16 May 2020

See also
Marie Laurencin, Femmes au chien (1923) at the Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris

Marie Laurencin, Portrait de Coco Chanel (1923) at the Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris

Marie Laurencin in the Baltimore Museum of Art

Marie Laurencin in the collection of the Centre Pompidou

Marie Laurencin in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art  

Marie Laurencin in the collection of the MoMA

Marie Laurencin in the collection of the Tate