Marie Laurencin (1883-1956) was a pioneering French avant-garde artist who carved out a uniquely poetic, independent style. While she closely associated with Pablo Picasso and the Cubists in Montmartre, she bypassed their analytical abstraction for a much softer world. Instead, she combined modern, simplified shapes with an ethereal palette of grays, pinks, and pastels to create dreamlike portraits of graceful young women and animals.
Her artistic journey started with porcelain painting at Sèvres and classical drawing courses at the Académie Humbert. By 1907, she had launched her first solo exhibition and met influential creative figures like the poet Guillaume Apollinaire. Laurencin artfully blended many styles into her signature look, borrowing symbolic deer and fans from the Rococo period, experimenting with unusual Impressionist color schemes, and drawing a cozy, dreamlike sensibility from Symbolist poetry.
By the 1920s, she was widely famous for painting graceful, pale-toned female figures that celebrated independent identity and hidden queer subcultures in interwar Paris. Modern historians celebrate her legacy as a radical queer painter who intentionally captured an enchanted, woman-centric world.
Today, you can explore her beautiful work all over the globe. Her art lives in world-class collections and major museums, including the Musée de l'Orangerie and Centre Pompidou in Paris, MoMA and the Met in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and various prestigious galleries across Japan.
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| Ms. Marie Laurencin |
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| Self-Portrait, 1928 |
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| Autoportrait au chapeau, tête penchée, 1906 |
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| Tête de femme de profil, 1909 |
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| Les jeunes filles, 1911 |
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| Femme à l'éventail, 1912 |
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| Le Bal élégant, La Danse à la campagne, 1913 |
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| Jeune fille au noeud papillon bleu, 1920 |
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| Femmes à la colombe, 1922 |
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| Deux jeunes filles, 1923 |
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| Portrait de la Baronne Gourgaud au manteau rose, 1923 |
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| Portrait de Mademoiselle Chanel, 1923 |
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| Le Baiser, 1927 |
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| Jeune femme en bleu, 1929 |
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| Judith, 1930 |
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| La danseuse, 1932 |
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| Femme tenant des fleurs, 1934 |
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| Deux têtes, 1935 |
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| Mandolin, 1935 |
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| Ballerina, 1935-40 |
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| La Répétition, 1936 |
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| The Angels, 1936 |
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| Femme à l'éventail, 1937 |
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| Young Girl with Dog, 1937 |
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| Maquette (II), 1939 |
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| Fillette en blanc, 1940 |
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| Jeune fille à la guitare, 1940 |
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| Femme au turban, 1941 |
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| Trois jeunes femmes, 1953 |
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