NEW YORK, NY.- If you want what is commonly accepted as a straight answer to a straight question, dont go to Marie Laurencin to get it, Dorothy Todd, the British magazine editor, wrote in 1928. If answers from Laurencin one of the most notable female painters in interwar France were anything like her work, of course they wouldnt be straight, but coy, queer, covert and very pretty.
Marie Laurencin: Sapphic Paris, a new exhibition that puts all of the artists coded qualities on full display, opened this week at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia.
Born in 1883 in Paris, Laurencin became a central member of the artistic avant-garde, ruled by her friend Picasso, in early 1900s Paris. By the 1910s, she had broken free of the cubist grip to create a distinctive, immediately recognizable aesthetic all her own, in macaron tints that collectors couldnt get enough of. After her death, in 1956, her work fell into relative obscurity.
The Barnes show is the first major solo Laurencin exhibition in the United States in three decades, and the first exhibition of her work to highlight the obvious: Laurencins art is unavoidably queer, and noticeably lacking in men.
Marie Laurencin is of the lipstick lesbian variety: She constructs this very soft, feminine world that really spoke to viewers at the time, said Libby Otto, an art history professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo. And if you realize that, in her soft way, shes constructing a world without men, of female harmony, theres something pretty revolutionary in there as well.
Jenni Sorkin, a professor of art history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, called Laurencin a separatist, describing the artists intentional and coded scenes. This show emphasizes Laurencins vision of a Sapphic world without men, which, Sorkin noted, makes it the first of its kind in a major institution.
Of the dozens of faces featured in the Barnes exhibition, only two are male. One of her lovers, poet and critic Guillaume Apollinaire, makes the cut, as does Laurencins longtime art dealer, Paul Rosenberg. Outside of portraiture (Laurencin reportedly charged more to paint both men and brunettes), male faces almost never appear in the hundreds of paintings that she created over the course of her 50-year career.
This is a central Laurencin paradox: She thrived in an art world that was almost entirely male by painting a world filled almost exclusively by women. When Laurencin pursued the French tradition of the 18th-century fête galante painting pastoral scenes of courtship, flirtation and romantic intrigue epitomized by the work of Antoine Watteau she excised all the men. There are animals and feminine mystique only, figures with her signature wide-set eyes with eerie hollow gazes, drenched in a creamy pastel palette.
Were always saying its diaphanous, because theres a gauzy transparency to these paintings and everything is kind of floating, said Cindy Kang, a curator at the Barnes. This is an alternative world she draws you into thats very dreamy.
Simonetta Fraquelli, who curated the show with Kang, said Laurencin wanted to create an alternative world for women. But at the same time, she was very conscious of the male-dominated market, she said. Laurencin made work that appealed to wealthy male buyers who might not interpret women embracing, kissing, and dancing as lesbian activities.
She was adept at exploiting all the different constituents for her success, Fraquelli added, invoking the Barbie movie, which similarly has no shame about either its sweet, girlie aesthetic or its profit-seeking ambitions.
Perhaps we finally arrived at a moment that we can read Marie Laurencin in an interesting and robust way that we havent been able to in the past, due to her high femme style, said Kenneth E. Silver, a professor of art history at New York University and the author of Esprit de Corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World War, 1914-1925.
According to Kang, part of the reason Laurencin is once again enticing the wider art world is that there is clearly more of an openness to taking that femininity seriously.
One issue that Laurencin did have with being taken seriously by, say, feminist art historians in the 90s is that she was so feminine, she said. They just couldnt get it. After Laurencins death, her work fell into an especially peculiar trap: It was dismissed for its femininity and criticized for its supposed lack of feminist sensibility.
The intentional absence of men should speak volumes about her priorities, but Laurencins paintings arent shouters. Their figures whisper; they operate in secrets. Theyre very private works, said Katy Hessel, an art historian and the author of The Story of Art Without Men. Her figures share some intimacy. Youre actually looking at someones private world, someones interior world.
It feels like this incredible utopian world, she said.
Otto noted Laurencins ambition to find a new visual language for feminine beauty thats not the same as it was in the 19th century or with the impressionists. Shes really striving to come up with a new aesthetic language to express female modernity and embrace the feminine from the inside, the professor said.
Kang and other scholars argue that Laurencins Sapphic themes were ignored or overlooked for so long precisely because of their femininity. One scholar, Milo Wippermann, calls the neglect of Laurencins queerness a matter of femme invisibility.
To see her from the queer feminine perspective, you see a type of queer feminine gender performance and you start to see what Laurencin was actually doing, Kang said. A male collector like Albert C. Barnes, who created the Barnes Foundation in 1922 and acquired five of Laurencins works, could think of her as easily feminine, but theres a surrealist edge. And I think were now positioned to start to see that out, as opposed to ignoring it.
Laurencins fantasy visions were not restrained to the canvas. She designed sets and costumes for theater and ballet; she illustrated books; she created decorative plates and wallpaper (Gertrude Stein bought several rolls).
And in each medium, Laurencins weightless, floaty, femme aesthetic never wavers. Laurencin was so firm about her style that she declined to repaint a commissioned portrait of Coco Chanel, after Chanel complained it didnt look enough like her. But Laurencin had no interest in adhering to straightforward likenesses. She was interested only in creating an entirely new world.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.