Marie Laurencin Biography
Marie Laurencin (Paris, 31 October 1883 – Paris, 8 June 1956) was a French painter, printmaker and illustrator. In 1907 he exhibited for the first time at the Salon des Indépendants. In the same year Picasso introduced her to Guillaume Apollinaire. From this meeting was born a passionate and tumultuous bond that lasted until 1912. In 1914, she married Baron Otto von Wätjen. The couple moved to Spain after the declaration of war, first to Madrid and then to Barcelona. Here the artist met Sonia and Robert Delaunay, thanks to a meeting organized by Francis Picabia, for whom she composed poems for the magazine Dada in 1917. She returned to Paris in 1920. Her style is characterized by a particular use of colors fluid and sweet, from a simple composition, and from a predilection for certain long-limbed and graceful female shapes. This will allow it to soon occupy a privileged place in the heart of the fashionable Paris of the 1920s. He formed deep and fruitful bonds with numerous writers whose works he illustrated: among many, André Gide, Max Jacob, Saint-John Perse, Marcel Jouhandeau and Jean Paulhan; of many others of the past (e.g. Lewis Carroll) he took care of the iconography in the editions of the main masterpieces. Having become the official portraitist of the female social scene (Nicole Groult, Coco Chanel) of the 1920s, Marie Laurencin also worked as a decorator for Serge Diaghilev's ballet Les Biches to music by Francis Poulenc (1924), then for the Opéra-Comique , the Comédie-Française and Roland Petit's ballets at the Theater des Champs-Elysées.
