LAURENCIN Marie

Marie Mélanie LAURENCIN (born October 31, 1883 in Paris) is a French figurative artist and illustrator, closely associated with the birth of modern art. Decorator of neoclassical ballets, along with her admirer Max Jacob, a transgression of artistic genres, she was also an epistolary with disconcerting fantasy and composed poems in free verses, inseparable, in the course of her creative process, from the pictorial expression of the fantasy scenes she represents.

Marie Laurencin made her style, called "nymphism," an overstepping of both fauvism and cubism. Along with the great artists of the time, including Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, André Derain and Henri Matisse, she was one of the pioneers of both Cubism and Dadaism. Her very personal style, criticized for her mevererie, repeats in the cameacious pastels patterns of princesses and fairy beasts, flowers, and androgynous teenagers with unreal paleness.

Bisexual, Marie Laurencin had many male adventures, notably with the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, but also long relationships with women, especially Nicole Groult. His marriage to German painter and pacifist Otto de Waetjen earned him exile in Spain during World War I. During the Entre-deux-guerres, she returned to France and was a figure in Parisian world life; on this occasion she painted numerous portraits of the parisian intelligentsia. Under the occupation, she continued her activities in collaboration with the regime, although she tried to free her friend Max Jacob, arrested and died in the Drancy camp in March 1944.

His life as his painting has aroused interest again since the singer Joe Dassin evoked him in 1975 in his greatest popular success, Indian Summer. Adulée in Japan, very little exposed in France, however, it is necessary to wait until 2011 for a biography of Bertrand Meyer-Stabley to explore his part of shadow and in spring 2013 for a Parisian exhibition to rediscover it to the general public.