Jeune Fille avec Chien

Description

Jeune Fille Avec Chien, 1950 by Marie Laurencin is an Etching and Aquatint print in colors on BFK Rives paper with full margins. This print is from the edition of 150 signed and numbered in pencil by Marie Laurencin.

Marie Laurencin, (born October 31, 1883, Paris, France—died June 8, 1956, Paris), French painter, printmaker, and stage designer known for her delicate portraits of elegant, vaguely melancholic women. From 1903 to 1904 Laurencin studied art at the Humbert Academy in Paris. Among her fellow students was Georges Braque, who, with Pablo Picasso, soon developed the style of painting known as Cubism. The art dealer Clovis Sagot introduced Laurencin to Picasso in 1907, and she consequently became involved in the avant-garde milieu of the Cubists. Although Laurencin exhibited with the Cubist artists, she did not herself exploit the movement’s idiom. Her paintings typically are stylized depictions of pale, dark-eyed women and girls painted in pastel colours. The American expatriate writer Gertrude Stein, an important patron of avant-garde artists, was one of the first buyers of Laurencin’s work. Laurencin was romantically involved with the poet Guillaume Apollinaire for several years and produced several portraits of him and of their mutual friends, such as Group of Artists (1908). She illustrated several books, including a 1930 edition of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Her stage designs included scenery for the Ballets Russes (1924) and the Comédie Française (1928).

Marie Laurencin’s signature paintings feature graceful, pale-skinned, dark-eyed young women with dreamy expressions, rendered in pastel hues. After briefly flirting with the tenets of Cubism early on, Laurencin shied away from the modern styles of her day, drawing influence from Persian miniatures and the Rococo instead. Nonetheless, she befriended and exhibited alongside Pablo Picasso, including him in a group portrait along with herself and their respective lovers Fernande Olivier and Guillaume Apollinaire (Group of Artists, 1908). The anonymous seated figures in Women with a Dog (1923) exemplify the lyricism and idealized feminine beauty with which she was known to portray society women. In 1923 Coco Chanel commissioned a portrait, but rejected Laurencin’s image of her languishing in a chair for lack of likeness.