"Everybody called Gertrude Stein Gertrude, or at most Mademoiselle Gertrude, everybody called Picasso Pablo and Fernande Fernande and everybody called Guillaume Apollinaire Guillaume and Max Jacob Max but everybody called Marie Laurencin Marie Laurencin."

(Gertrude Stein)

Portrait of Apollinaire with Picasso, Fernande Olivier and Marie Laurencin. Gertrude Stein bought it. It was the first "painting, Marie Laurencin sold.

June 8, 1956 Dies in her apartment in Paris. She is buried in the cemetery Père-Lachaise according to her wishes, dressed in white with a rose in one hand and Apollinaire’s love letters by her heart."

study her biography

Tell me another painter showing such pastel colours and fragile and airy personages! Maybe the fragility of her works emerged with her education as porcelain-painter? Most interesting: the mask-like faces on her works. Marie Laurencin was born 1883 in Paris, where she lived most of her life.  She was involved in the story of “Jules et Jim” by having Pierre Roché (the author of the autobiographic book “Jules et Jim”) and Frank Hessel as lovers. She became romantically involved with Guillaume Apollinaire but with the US-author Nathalie Clifford Barney too, had lifelong female lovers, was married to a German pacifist, had to endure an exile in Spain during WWI, but returned to Paris, had good relations with the Germans during WWII (she was nearly shorn after the liberation) stayed in Paris, where she died 1956. I saw her grave in the graveyard of Montparnasse. “Flap”, as she was surnamed by Roché, was an important member of the art-movements in France, as well of Fauvisme, Cubism as of Dadaism and new all the important members of Paris-avantgarde in the twenties, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Francis Picabia, Marcel Duchamp, André Derain, Robert Delaunay, André Salmon (Marie, named “Coco” by Picasso, will write poetry too, much under influence of Baudelaire’s “Fleurs du Mal” and the free verses of Mallarmé) and especially Max Jacob. Her painting “Groupe d’artistes”, showing Picasso, his dog Flicka, herself, Apollinaire and Fernande Olivier, was owned by Gertrude Stein. She was a multi-talent, doing lots of portraits of famous people (for example Somerset Maugham) - having a big love for poetry – illustrating the works of countless famous authors – doing concepts for clothes and coulisses – and even designing champagne-labels (Mouton-Rothschild). She loved women and men, Nazis (Ernst Jünger) and Jews, was married to a German (Picasso never forgave her). She fenced with foil and sabre. (Remains, 17.9.2020)