Marie LAURENCIN (Paris, 1883 - Paris, 1956) Lot n° 53

ANEMONES IN A BLUE VASE 1933 Oil on canvas Signed and dated lower left "Marie Laurencin 1933" 49 x 64 cm History : - The Mayor Gallery, London ; - Sale London, Sotheby's, 6 April 1966, n°6. Exhibition : - Flower Paintings by Laurencin, London, The Mayor Gallery, December 1934, n°6. Bibliography : - Daniel Marchesseau, Catalogue raisonné de l'OEuvre Peint, Paris, 1986, p.247, n°564. Reproduced work ; - Charlotte Gere, Marie Laurencin, London 1977, p.70. Marie Laurencin succeeded in creating an original style impregnated with sensitivity, delicacy and invented a rainbow world with a French perfume. About fifteen anemones with wide-open corollas emerge from an oblong blue vase, set in the centre of the composition. There is no indication of space or even depth. The vase is flush with the edge of the frame when the background declines in a gradation from light yellow to dark grey, suddenly interrupted by a pinkish band on the right. Reduced to their simplest forms, the disc of a black pistil in the centre of a multi-lobed mass evoking the petals, these flowers are a kind of purity. The poetry that emanates from them, typical of Marie Laurencin's style, resides in a certain naivety of touch, with frank but subtle colours, in a palette that is recognisable among all. The warm greys of the background serve to exalt the brighter tones of the anemones, declensions of reds and mauves, punctuated with white. Just as in her portraits, which use the same range of colours, Marie Laurencin likes to synthesize forms and colours to draw the essence of her subjects. Marie Laurencin (1883 - 1956) was a French painter, poet and illustrator. She enrolled at the École de Sèvres, to become a painter on porcelain, as well as at the Académie Humbert, and became friends with Braque and Picabia. In 1907, she exhibited for the first time at the Salon des Indépendants in the company of Picasso and Derain, thus flirting with cubism, in her famous Group of Artists, now at the Baltimore Museum. Her fame then increased in France, then in Germany. Exiled to Spain during the First World War, she frequented the Dada milieu but her style was not very permeable to the influences of these artists. It was during the interwar period that her career as a socialite portrait painter reached its peak. His singular style does not seek so much the resemblance of the model as a recognizable mask of his palette with its cold flat colors. Her portraits, if they are fashionable objects, also express the search for an eternal feminine. Her graceful bouquets of flowers seem to be their vegetal counterpart, in search of the same purity.