Marie Laurencin (1883–1956)
Critical Biography

Origins and Training

Born in Paris in 1883, Marie Laurencin is one of the major figures of French modern art. Initially trained in porcelain painting and drawing, she soon turned to painting and studied at the Académie Humbert, where she met Georges Braque.

Artistic Circle and Recognition

Closely connected to the Montmartre and Bateau-Lavoir circles, Laurencin moved within the Parisian avant-garde. She formed a close relationship with Guillaume Apollinaire, becoming his companion, and mingled with Picasso, Derain, Rousseau, and the Delaunays. While in dialogue with Cubism, her style stood apart, marked instead by lyrical femininity and chromatic delicacy. From early on she asserted a distinctive pictorial identity, where modernity and poetic sensitivity coexist.

Style and Themes

Her work is characterized by elongated feminine figures staged within dreamlike settings, often accompanied by dancers, musicians, or young girls. Pastel tones—soft pinks, bluish greys, and gentle greens—lend her compositions an atmosphere both delicate and melancholic. Laurencin’s art thus occupies a unique territory, between figuration and poetic abstraction.

Institutional Recognition

In 1937, at the height of her career, Marie Laurencin was named Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur. That same year, the French state commissioned her to produce “Les Fêtes de la danse” for the Cabinet des Estampes at the Louvre, consecrating her position within France’s national artistic heritage.

Analysis of the Print
Les Fêtes de la danse (1937)

Medium and Edition

Original color lithograph, signed in the stone. An early proof published by the Chalcographie du Louvre around 1960, printed on large Arches wove paper with watermark and bearing the publisher’s blindstamp. Dimensions: 34 × 43 cm (without margins), 50 × 65 cm (with margins). Listed in Marchesseau’s catalogue raisonné under number 187.

Composition and Style

The composition presents a group of young women engaged in a stylized choreography. Their graceful bodies unfold in arabesques, arms raised in light, floating gestures. Both ordered and fluid, the arrangement conveys an idealized vision of dance—celebration of feminine grace rather than literal depiction of movement.

Laurencin’s delicate, nervous line situates the figures within a textured background of colored hatching, suggesting a setting without imposing one. The pastel palette—dominated by gentle pinks, blues, and greens—immerses the scene in a dreamlike, almost musical atmosphere.

Critical Reading

Les Fêtes de la danse encapsulates Laurencin’s universe: intimate, feminine, and poetic, where line and color combine to create a suspended world. Dance here becomes metaphor for harmony, softness, and grace—values that permeate her entire oeuvre.

With this print, Laurencin situates herself at the intersection of modernist innovation and the French decorative tradition inherited from Watteau and the fêtes galantes, reinvented in the language of the 20th century.