Revealing the vital influence of the French artist Marie Laurencin, her visual idiom, and her sexual expression on the modernism of twentieth-century Paris This book offers a long-overdue reassessment of the career of the Parisian-born artist Marie Laurencin (1883-1956), who moved seamlessly between the Cubist avant-garde and lesbian literary and artistic circles, as well as the realms fashion, ballet, and decorative arts. Critical essays explore her early experiments with Cubism; her exile in Spain during World War I; her collaborative projects with major figures of her time such as André Mare, Serge Diaghilev, Francis Poulenc, and André Groult; and her role in the emergence of a «Sapphic modernity» in Paris in the 1920s. Along with more than 60 full-color plates, Laurencin's life and career are documented through an illustrated chronology and exhibition history, as well as an appendix charting her network of female patrons and associates. Laurencin became a fixture of the contemporary art scene in pre-World War I Paris, including as a muse and romantic partner of the poet Guillaume Apollinaire. She returned to the city after the war, having developed her signature style of diaphanous female figures in a blue-rose-gray palette. Laurencin's feminine yet sexually fluid aesthetic defined 1920s Paris, and her work as an artist and designer met with high demand, with commissions by Ballets Russes and Coco Chanel, among others. Her romantic relationships with women inspired homoerotic paintings that visualized the modern Sapphism of contemporary lesbian writers like Nathalie Clifford Barney. Indeed, one of Laurencin's final projects was to illustrate the poems of Sappho in 1950.
Distributed for the Barnes Foundation.
Exhibition Schedule:
Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia (October 22, 2023-January 21, 2024).
"I've always been crazy about Soutine - all of his paintings," said the Dutch-American abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning (1904-1997) in 1977. How much de Kooning's approach was due to the influence of Lithuanian artist Chaim Soutine
(1893-1943) is examined in this exhibition catalogue, in which the two artists are dramatically juxtaposed.
This book accompanies an exhibition organized by the Musée de l'Orangerie, Paris, and The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, dedicated to the affinities between the work of Chaim Soutine and Willem de Kooning. It was Dr Alfred Barnes who had made
Soutine's career by buying the bulk of the unknown artist's available work in Paris in 1923. The exhibition and accompanying publication will show how the work of Soutine had a decisive influence on the development of de Kooning's art, especially following Soutine's posthumous retrospective held at The Museum of Modern Art in 1950.
The expressive force of Soutine's painting, coupled with his image as an 'accursed' (maudit) artist struggling with the vicissitudes and excesses of bohemian life in Paris during the interwar years, exerted a particular influence on a new generation of postwar painters in the United States. In 1977 de Kooning emphatically declared: "I think I would choose Soutine [as my favourite artist] .... I've always been crazy about Soutine - all of his paintings". Of all the Abstract Expressionists, de Kooning was the only one who continued to praise Soutine throughout his career and to credit him with an
influence on his work. De Kooning very likely first discovered Soutine's work before the Second World War in the New York galleries. Indeed, his figure paintings of the 1940s with their distortion and sense of compression already shared characteristics
with Soutine's figures painted of two decades earlier. A significant turning point in de Kooning's work, evident in his celebrated series of Women paintings of the early 1950s, coincides with his in-depth study of the artistic world of Soutine at both The Modern's retrospective and his visit to the Barnes Foundation with his wife Elaine de Kooning
in June 1952. It was during these years that the Dutch-American artist matured his own personal form of expressionism, which, with its visceral brushstrokes and heavy impasto, lies somewhere between figuration and abstraction.
La Kunsthaus de Zürich (8/02 - 12/05) puis la Tate Liverpool (7/06 - 6/10) consacrent une grande exposition à Chagall. Le parcours se concentre sur la période parisienne de l'artiste avant la Seconde Guerre Mondiale, son séjour à Berlin et l'exposition qu'il y a présentée en 1914, puis les années passées dans sa Russie natale autour de la Révolution de 1917.
