Marie Laurencin: Sapphic Paris (Yale Press, 2024)

Video (0:20): A quick look inside the artbook: Marie Laurencin: Sapphic Paris.

Marie Laurencin: Sapphic Paris
Edited by Simonetta Fraquelli and Cindy Kang
Contributions by Jelena Kristic, Christine Poggi, Rachel Silveri, Corrinne Chong and Oriane Poret
Yale Press, 2024. Published in association Columbus Museum of Art

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. – Yale Press, 2024

The book is the catalogue of the exhibition Marie Laurencin: Sapphic Paris (On view April 5–August 18, 2024) at the Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, Ohio, USA.

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