NEW YORK — At first glance, Marie Laurencin’s paintings seem innocuous and mostly decorative, portraying girls and women gazing steadily but passively at the viewer or dancing across the canvas. Nearly dissolving into their billowy and delicate gowns, the women appear in a very muted color palette of pale blues, grays, and rose hues. The French painter (1883-1956) was singular among her contemporaries in Paris, most of whom were male Cubist artists.
“She created very unique paintings that placed women in the center of art. Her style is very original. Although she is associated with the Cubist avant-garde circle of the early 20th century and was friends with all the major Cubist artists, she wasn’t so influenced by them,” said Jelena Restovic James, director of fine art at New Orleans Auction Galleries.“She really did develop her own style … these kind of elegant women with big, dark eyes that just kind of glide through the landscape. Some people describe her style as feminine and discreetly queer, because she did have relationships with men and women. Her paintings are all of women, and you can tell some of them are couples.”
A handful of the most renowned artists have seen their work remain perennially popular, but most drift in and out of vogue as art styles and tastes change. Across the decades, Laurencin’s art has sold well, off and on. A high point for her work came during a spike in interest for post-Impressionism and modern art between 2007 and 2009 and again between 2016 and 2019, according to James. Major museum exhibitions often help revive interest in artists, and James cited the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia as an example of Laurencin receiving just such a boost. From October 2023 to January 2024, the Barnes presented Marie Laurencin: Sapphic Paris, the first U.S. museum retrospective of the artist in 30 years. According to the museum, “Laurencin’s feminine yet sexually fluid aesthetic defined 1920s Paris”, and her romantic relationships with women encouraged her to paint tender portraits that reflected the sapphic culture of the circles she traveled in.
With exhibitions such as the one at the Barnes, as well as further scholarship, Laurencin’s intentions are now seen more clearly, but James said that many people in the 1980s and 1990s didn’t understand she was a queer artist. “They just thought that because of that soft and lovely palette, it was just purely feminine,” she said. “It is feminine, but there is a point to it.” Her works can be seen as a power move, but Laurencin was not overtly aggressive. The implications were there, but veiled.
Laurencin’s top-selling painting on the LiveAuctioneers platform is an oil on canvas, Trois Jeunes Filles et Un Chien (Three Young Girls and a Dog), which attained $60,000 plus the buyer’s premium in April 2018 at New Orleans Auction Galleries. “The work presented here is a wonderful example of Laurencin at her most engaging and accomplished … The central figure gazes directly and assertively at the viewer, while the two flanking figures are more internally involved with their own movements. There is a sense of energy and vivacity which is indicative of Laurencin’s mature style,” according to the auction house’s description. The figures are depicted delicately in a flowy style in the artist’s signature palette of bright blues, yellows, and pinks. James also said that the solid provenance of this painting, which came from the Paul E. Manheim collection, helped drive bidding.
Besides her color palette, her artworks are characterized by the sitters’ large and dark eyes that give few hints into their private thoughts. A fine example of this is her oil-on-canvas portrait of a young girl gazing directly at the viewer, which sold for $30,000 plus the buyer’s premium in December 2020 at Brunk Auctions. The treatment of the eyes, which show an assertive use of the color black, is all the more striking, standing out against the muted swaths of color in the unidentified girl’s pale-pink dress and hair bow.
A similarly commanding painting is her 1935 oil on canvas titled Rose, which made $27,000 plus the buyer’s premium in May 2020 at Capsule Auctions. This portrait depicts a fashionable young woman draped in pearls, wearing a corsage, and having pale pink lips that are the exact shade of the pink rose in her hair.
Laurencin was very familiar with the fashion and dance worlds in Paris, so it made eminent sense for her to paint dancers. While her watercolors are generally more affordable than her oil paintings, one watercolor defying that trend was Danseuses, a 1940 picture of four dancers delicately rendered in diaphanous attire. It earned CHF 33,000 ($37,460) plus the buyer’s premium in December 2022 at Piguet Hôtel des Ventes.
Horses were also a frequent motif in Laurencin’s work. A 1930 watercolor and pencil on paper, Deux Jeunes Femmes et Un Cheval, showing two women — possibly a couple? — with a horse, went for a robust price of $20,000 plus the buyer’s premium in April 2019 at New Orleans Auction Galleries.
Dogs were another favorite of Laurencin, who is quoted as having said, “I cannot be without a dog or a lover.” An especially gauzy watercolor of hers featuring dogs, Trois Jeunes Filles aux Chiens Devant le Château (Three Young Girls with Dogs in Front of the Castle), realized CHF15,000 ($17,035) plus the buyer’s premium at Piguet Hôtel des Ventes in December 2021. Another of her dog paintings that buyers found appealing was a 1937 oil-on-canvas, Dinah, featuring a dog (possibly hers, as the painting is titled with a name), a cup, and a pitcher, which went for $26,000 plus the buyer’s premium at Freeman’s Hindman in February 2024. Laurencin’s world is free of men in both senses of the word, but the horses and dogs she includes in her compositions might be meant to serve as stand-ins.
Outside of a September 2023 sale at Sotheby’s, which commanded about $330,000, few oil paintings by Laurencin have gone to auction of late, but James stated the market for the artist is strengthening. “I think when a major institution mounts a retrospective and sheds a new light on that artist’s work, there is renewed interest,” she said. “I think people will start looking at it with a lot more appreciation then they might have had before.”
In her lifetime, Laurencin’s art was often misunderstood and undervalued, but now her subversive style is receiving its due. Her ultra girly-girl subjects, who were once dismissed as purely ornamental and lacking substance, have taken on increased importance as definitions of what it means to be feminine evolve. The lesbian symbolism and her replacement of men with dogs and horses also are better understood from a contemporary perspective in which art featuring women is no longer exclusively created by men for the male gaze.
