Marie Laurencin, Marmottan Museum in Paris

I once met an art historian who made it his retirement project to seek out and photograph all known Johannes Vermeer paintings. After seeing five of Marie Laurencin’s paintings in a corner of the Orangerie Museum in Paris last year, I half-thought about doing the same (so lovely and so haunting were those works). A bit of digging revealed that the bulk of Marie’s paintings, watercolours and ballet costume sketches had been bought and whisked away to Japan where her biggest fan, industrialist Masahiro Takano, established a museum in 1983 to house her art. Thankfully, after a half century of relative anonymity (she was a much sought-after portraitist in the 1920s but then forgotten) 90 of Marie Laurencin’s works have been reassembled at the Marmottan Gallery in Paris. 

Marie Laurencin’s trademark pink, blue, grey and turquoise palate, her interior, mostly female and small animal groupings, and her outdoor, girls-astride-horses impressionist-inspired scenes are simultaneously innocent and voluptuous. They have been described as “Sapphic”, “fresh”, “ambiguous” and “evanescent”. 

It has been suggested by the curatorial staff at the Orangerie that over time, “la magie s’évente”, that the magic of the early and middle works turns stale despite modifications and nuanced changes in her style. Essentially, her late work “trades in its mystery for smoothness”.

Perhaps. Marie’s declining eyesight may have been a factor. And, late in her career she did introduce the occasional (misplaced) dark line into her paintings to delineate boundaries and stem the fuzziness. Nevermind. She was one of only three or four women painters in Paris during the Picasso-Braque revolution who helped invent modern art. Those lovely figures, most of whom have piercing black eyes and pale oval faces will forever hail the viewer, and ask us all to look and look some more.

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Gertrude Stein: A Composite Portrait (1974), Gertrude Stein Remembered (1994)

Let’s play a literary guessing game. The clues go from hardest to easiest. Ten points if you get it on the first go (you won’t). Guess who this couple is...

1. One is a “rhomboidal woman”, the other is a “deciduous female”.
2. The first one looks like a “great pyramidal Buddha”, the other, a “sleepy vulture”.
3. A is an “Easter Island idol”, B is a “gypsy”;
4. The dominant one looks like a “caesar” and has the “assurance of Cleopatra”, the one in a supporting role is a “swarthy-faced shrew with a furry mustache”.
5. The writer penned “a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose”, the cook is best known for her hash brownie recipe.

You guessed it — Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas.
Linda Simon has edited two excellent collections of reminiscences by people who knew the couple personally. They’re an entertaining read, mixing academic seriousness (is Gertrude an “eccentric innovator with no inheritors”) with plain, friendly gossip. Any student of modernism, American expats in the first half of the twentieth century or any traveler going to Paris today will enjoy these two books.

Man Ray Trust/Artists Rights Society, Yale University

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