“Why should I paint dead fish, onions and beer glasses? … Girls are so much prettier,” Marie Laurencin once told a Time magazine reporter. This often-repeated quote suggests that the late artist made pretty pictures — and the pastel-hued images in the exhibition Marie Laurencin: Works from 1905 to 1952 at Almine Rech Gallery are lovely to behold.
However, in the art world, then as now, “pretty” can be a slight, connoting the lightweight or unserious. Laurencin’s works are not lightweight, but they are light, in a sense: They’re unburdened by the hubris of so many male artists who painted conventionally attractive (and often nude) women — “pretty” paintings from a perspective that privileges the self-important male gaze rather than the female subject.
Laurencin’s art responds to that tradition by making prettiness a manifesto. The women in her works on view, along with white horses and one femme man, are like sighs come to life, diaphanous figures who interact with each other or engage viewers by gazing out at them. The beauty that charmed Laurencin is not limited to an individual’s appearance; it is a state of being. In an untitled and undated watercolor that feels removed from a specific place or time, for instance, two femme figures dissolve into one another amid watery washes of pale blue and green; a swath of faded black adds intrigue to the image.
In some works, like “Trois danseuses” (c. 1927), the figures appear more schematic, like dolls performing a ballet, but Laurencin weaves ribbons of soft Ladurée pinks and greens across and around the dancers and throughout the overall composition to establish that they exist fully within this dreamlike realm. The portrait “Mme Alexandre Rosenberg” (1952), one of the show’s latest works, is uncharacteristically present and austere. The subject’s delicate alabaster skin and pale pink dress read almost as an elegy to the light of earlier artworks, here shrouded by her dark hair and the shadowy background.
Nestled among the women is “Portrait d’homme” (1913–14), a rendering of a Parisian dandy in translucent oils. The painting is less an intrusion of masculine energy than a modified take on femininity in the form of an effete drag king. The washed-out palette and gray suit are the only indications that we’ve stepped outside Laurencin’s enchanting feminine fever dream.
And Laurencin has a point: Why is aesthetic pleasure often relegated to the sidelines of art? Why paint rotting fish when you can paint pretty femmes? Her work is a riposte to the second-class status of female-presenting (or simply non-cis-het male) creators via the long-standing trivialization of “feminine” art. In Laurencin’s artwork, prettiness is political.
Marie Laurencin: Works from 1905 to 1952 continues at Almine Rech Gallery (39 East 78th Street, Floor 2, Upper East Side, Manhattan) through February 22. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
