It’s a predicament that plagues women artists throughout history: to be known and named in relation to the male artists with whom you associate. There are hardly any versions of the Marie Laurencin story that don’t include Georges Braque, her classmate at the Académie Humbert in Paris; Francis Picabia, with whom she collaborated; or Pablo Picasso, who introduced her to her soon-to-be lover, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, in 1907. In fact, Laurencin permanently committed herself to the company of Picasso and Apollinaire by painting a 1908 group portrait, Group of Artists, that asserted her presence within their artistic milieu. But Laurencin painted herself at a slight remove from the others, towering above them—hinting at her sense of disconnection, and her own burgeoning stature.
Group of Artists was created before Laurencin arrived at a signature style, and before the height of her commercial popularity in France in the 1920s. It predates her answer to the question of how to step out from the shadows cast by men: to invent a world without them. “Marie Laurencin: Sapphic Paris,” a noteworthy new exhibition at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, posits the artist’s hyper-feminine, ethereal paintings of women in cotton-candy pinks and blues as exercises in worldbuilding. In their soft domestic and pastoral settings, Laurencin’s subjects live in evident harmony with animals, and offer tender, queer-coded gestures of affection to one another. With the exception of two early portraits, men are nowhere to be found.
“The way she’s been traditionally taught in art history…she was seen as a more minor figure working alongside the major Cubist artists in Paris in the early 20th century,” said Simonetta Fraquelli, who co-curated the exhibition alongside Cindy Kang, during a curator talk at the foundation. The exhibition, she said, was an attempt to reexamine that reputation. “What we discovered, in fact, was that she created almost like an alternative reality—a dreamlike form of modernism which was totally unique to her, and which was populated by an aesthetic which was totally female.”
Despite Laurencin’s notoriety during her lifetime, her profile has receded since her death in 1956. This new reappraisal of the artist marks her first major institutional survey in the United States since 1989. But a handful of smaller recent presentations have hinted that a Laurencin revival was on its way. This fall, Nahmad Contemporary showed her work in a solo booth at Independent 20th Century in New York. In 2021, she figured prominently in “A Future We Begin to Feel,” a group show at New York’s Rosenberg & Co. organized to honor the 50th anniversary of Linda Nochlin’s seminal essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” And in 2019, when the Museum of Modern Art reinstalled its permanent collection galleries, two of Laurencin’s self-portraits were given a high-profile spot alongside Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907)—doing little to sever her discursive ties to the Spanish painter, but increasing her visibility nonetheless.
However, it’s only at the Barnes exhibition that queer themes in the work of Laurencin—who is known to have had relationships with both men and women—are fully foregrounded. The exhibition is chronologically bookended by two works that demonstrate the persistence of sapphic themes over the course of the artist’s career: Song of Bilitis (1904) and Poèmes de Sappho (1950). The former, a print completed while Laurencin was still in art school, takes its name and subject—an all-consuming kiss between two female figures—from a poetry collection, published in French in 1894, purportedly by an affiliate of the ancient Greek poet Sappho. Though Bilitis and her work turned out to be the fictional invention of the French poet Pierre Louÿs, the text nonetheless was highly influential in lesbian literary circles. It evidently captivated Laurencin, who made at least 20 versions of this print between 1904 and 1905. Nearly a half-century later, she returned to Sappho when she illustrated a new translation of her poems with loose, curvilinear line drawings.
Sappho, with her lyrical, first-person expressions of desire for women and her thiasos, the all-female community assembled under her tutelage, offered a model of feminine eroticism and companionship with which Laurencin identified. Even when not explicitly invoked, the poet’s spirit is felt in Laurencin’s paradisiacal, woman-centric visual world. The Elegant Ball, also known as The Country Dance (1913), an early example, shows two women dancing, one with her hand wrapped around the other’s waist, both gazing coquettishly at the viewer while a third woman plays a stringed instrument nearby. Stylistically, the painting reflects the artist’s early association with Cubism, with its angular, flattened shapes and thick black lines. But as Laurencin’s vision solidified, so did her physical forms: Over time, her women became rounder and more full-bodied, her paint more thickly applied—as if her alternate reality was steadily becoming more material.
Works like Song of Bilitis deploy what the art historian Rachel Silveri describes in the catalogue accompanying “Sapphic Paris” as “strategic queer classicism”—they use imagery that produces different meanings for different audiences. Where more mainstream viewers might see references to the past, members of the lesbian avant-garde in which Laurencin moved would have understood their context of contemporary queer intimacy. Women in the Forest (1920), too, wears historicism as a veil. The painting of four figures gallivanting in a lush green landscape may have been read as a reference to fêtes galantes, an 18th-century genre of painting featuring amorous, well-heeled subjects in outdoor settings. But no men were invited to this fête, and the presence of a pink curtain—a recurring motif in Laurencin’s work—suggests a realm that is secret or hidden away. The deer-like creatures with which the women mingle invoke a French double entendre: “une biche” could have been understood as either “a doe” or “a lesbian.”
Laurencin frequently used animals as symbols in her work. Birds came to signify her relationship with the fashion designer Nicole Groult, in reference to a poem that Groult wrote for her (“Your eyes are bluebirds / Your breasts are white birds…Your heart is a rare bird”). In Women with a Dove (1919), Goult is depicted resting her chin on Laurencin’s shoulder while a white bird perches in the crook of her arm. The tenderness of the moment is palpable, yet, to audiences at the time, the relationship between the pair may not have been obvious. Silveri emphasizes that, when this work was on view at the Musée du Luxembourg and the Musée National d’Art Moderne in subsequent decades, many viewers would have seen a platonic friendship.
Laurencin’s ability to hide in plain sight was a key factor in her success during the early 20th century—and may also have contributed to her dwindling popularity since then. In an essay for the 2021 Rosenberg & Co. exhibition, the writer Milo Wippermann framed this as a problem of femme invisibility, referring to the “misrecognition of feminine-presenting but queer-identifying people” in both heteronormative and queer contexts. Queer and feminist reappraisals of art history have often neglected Laurencin because her girly aesthetic does not scan as sufficiently serious or subversive—and, perhaps, because her popularity during her own lifetime made her seem less in need of retroactive redemption. But as years have passed without serious critical assessment of Laurencin’s work, that dynamic has become inverted. Now, nearly 70 years after her death, the pink curtain shrouding Laurencin’s world without men is lifted.
from Artsy News https://ift.tt/OBUpLSn
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