Masks and muses: Marie Laurencin's artist-group portraits

Marie Laurencin's (1883-1965) marginality in the history of French Modernism persists in spite her insider status as a member of the "Bateau-Lavoir" group in her early career, and her substantial success thereafter. Rather than attempting to engage with why and how Laurencin's style related to the larger aesthetic movements with which she has been associated (Cubism, Fauvism, Symbolism, Dada and the like) scholars all to often dismiss her work as merely derivative of her male peers. In what follows, I examine Laurencin's two artist-group portraits, Group of Artists (1908) and Apollinaire and His Friends (1909). I return both paintings to the original context of their production, examining their formal stylistic components in relation to avant-garde ideologies of Cubism and Fauvism. I argue that there is a mobilization of the theories of Cubist portraiture, as they were understood in 1907-1908 visible in the Group of Artists. To illustrate this point I draw heavily upon structuralist interpretations of Cubism. In Apollinaire and His Friends I look at the way that Laurencin drew from the practices of both Cubism and Fauvism to both assert her legitimacy as an avant-gardist and to construct her own hybrid style. In doing so, I argue that Laurencin's two artist-group portraits functioned as visual manifesti, simultaneously demonstrating her prowess as an avant-gardist, while also mobilizing those same ideologies to navigate and make commentary on her particular circumstance as female painter.