Marie Laurencin

Born on October 31, 1883, in Paris, Marie Laurencin initially learned porcelain painting at the Manufacture nationale de Sèvres before taking drawing courses with the City of Paris and at the Académie Humbert. She was close to the French avant-garde artists of the Section d'Or movement, including Robert Delaunay, Jean Metzinger, and Francis Picabia. In 1907, she had her first solo exhibition and met Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) as well as the group of artists from the Bateau-Lavoir in Montmartre, and the poet and art critic Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918). Although influenced by Fauvism at one point, Marie Laurencin simplified and idealized forms under the influence of Cubist painters. Working mainly in a palette of neutral tones such as gray, pink, and pastels, her delicate portraits focused on young women and animals. In the 1920s, she began painting graceful, ethereal female figures, which she later revisited in pale-toned canvases, evoking an enchanted world. Marie Laurencin created a style distinctively her own whilst expanding upon earlier periods and movements in both art and literature. She borrowed symbolic imagery, such as fans and deer, from Rococo painting, experimented with unusual color schemes as did the impressionists, and drew upon modern ideas of abstraction in stripping her images of extraneous detail. Her dreamlike sensibility, meanwhile, borrowed from Symbolist poetry.