“Why would I paint dead fish, onions and beer glasses? … Girls are so much nicer, “Marie Laurencin Once told one Time magazine reporter. This often repeated quote suggests that the deceased artist has taken beautiful photos-and the pastel-tinted images in the exhibition Marie Laurencin: Works from 1905 to 1952 In the Almine Rech Gallery are wonderful to see.
In the art world, however, ‘beautiful’ can be a light ‘beautiful’, connect the lightweight or unbridder. The works of Laurencin are not lightweight, but they are in a certain sense light: they are not based on the reclamation of so many male artists who painted conventionally attractive (and often nude) women- “beautiful” paintings from a perspective that the self-privileged Important male look instead of the female subject.
The art of Laurencin responds to that tradition by making beauty a manifesto. The women in her works, together with white horses and a femme man, are as if sighs come to life, Diaphanous figures who interact with each other or involve viewers by staring at them. The beauty that charmed Laurencin is not limited to the appearance of an individual; It’s a state of being. For example, in a title and undated watercolor that is removed from a specific place or time, for example, two Femme figures dissolves in each other in the midst of watery washes of light blue and green; A strip of faded black adds intrigues to the image.
In some works, such as “Trois Dansseeues” (ca. 1927), the figures seem more schematic, such as dolls performing a ballet, but Laurencin weaves ribbons of soft Ladurée Pinks and Greens About and around the dancers and during the overall composition to determine that they exist fully within this dreamy empire. The portrait “Mme Alexandre Rosenberg” (1952), one of the latest works in the show, is unusually present and sober. The delicate alcohol skin and the light pink dress of the subject read almost as an elegy for the light of earlier works of art, here dressed through her dark hair and the shadow -like background.
Nestled among the women is “Portrait d’Homme” (1913–14), a representation of a Parisian Dandy in translucent oils. The painting is less an intrusion of male energy than a modified view of femininity in the form of an effete dragking. The faded palette and the gray suit are the only instructions that we have stepped outside of Laurencin’s enchanting female fever dream.
And Laurencin has a point: why is aesthetic pleasure often exiled to the sidelines of art? Why paint rotting fish when you can paint beautiful women? Her work is a riposte for the second class status of makers of female presenting (or just non-CIS-it-Deet) through the long-term trivialization of “female” art. Beauty is politics in the artwork of Laurencin.
Marie Laurencin: Works from 1905 to 1952 Continue in Almine Rech Gallery (39 East 78th Street, Floor 2, Upper East Side, Manhattan) up to and including 22 February. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
