Almine Rech Spotlights Marie Laurencin’s Singular Sapphic Vision

The exhibition of works from 1905 to 1952 comes at a moment of renewed attention for the artist, as institutions and collectors acknowledge the uniqueness of her liberated feminine and queer style.

Painting of two female dancers
Marie Laurencin,Trois danseuses, circa 1927; oil on canvas, 61.1 x 50.2 cm / 24 x 19 3/4 in (unframed), 93 x 82.2 x 8.6 cm / 36 5/8 x 32 3/8 x 3 3/8 in. (framed). Courtesy Almine Rech

Although French painter Marie Laurencin achieved significant commercial success during her lifetime, her name slipped into relative obscurity after her death in the late 1950s. Deeply embedded in the Parisian cultural scene, she carved out her own space within avant-garde circles, asserting a singular artistic voice amid the city’s most influential movements.

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From her twenties onward, Laurencin unapologetically committed herself to painting only women. As she bluntly put it in a 1952 interview, “Why should I paint dead fish, onions and beer glasses? Girls are so much prettier.” Though linked to Cubism and Fauvism and often associated with the poetic sensibilities of Orphism, she developed a style distinctly her own—later dubbed “Nymphism”—which fused the refined elegance of Rococo and Art Nouveau with an expressive freedom of gesture and impressionistic abstraction. Over time, she refined an immediately recognizable visual language, marked by a delicate pastel palette, a simplification of forms and a focus on female figures, celebrating their beauty, intimacy and relationships.

An installation view of “Marie Laurencin: Works from 1905 to 1952,” at Almine Rech, New York. Photo Dan Bradica

An exhibition at Almine Rech’s Upper East Side location offers a rare opportunity to experience a luminous selection of Marie Laurencin’s works from 1905 to 1952, featuring jewel-toned paintings and intuitive watercolors that capture the graceful sensuality of her subjects. Marking the first curated gallery survey dedicated to introducing her work to the American market in years, the show aims to reestablish Laurencin’s presence among the key artists of her time.

“Born in the 19th century, only two years after Picasso in 1883, Laurencin represents, for me, one of the most free-spirited people, women, of her time, and the only woman, at the very beginning of the 20th Century, who managed to impose herself as an artist among other modern art painters, writers and thinkers,” Almine Rech told Observer when asked about her motivation for bringing Laurencin’s work to her collectors’ attention with this museum-quality show.

Despite their intimate scale, the works in the show are priced between $60,000 and $250,000—a testament to Laurencin’s resurgent market appeal as museums and collectors alike rediscover her contributions. Last year’s retrospective at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia further cemented her place among the overlooked figures of the early 20th-century Parisian scene, proving that she was perhaps one of the best—certainly among her male peers—at capturing the spirit and atmosphere of that golden age.

In recent years, Laurencin’s works, particularly her paintings, have consistently outperformed pre-auction estimates, signaling strong and active demand. Most recently, Les Anges (1936) sold for $135,000 at Christie’s in October 2024. However, her auction record still stands at $1.4 million for La Vie au Château (1925), acquired at Sotheby’s New York by Japanese collector Masahiro Takano in 1989, just before the collapse of Japan’s economic bubble.

Painting of a young lady with flowers
Marie Laurencin, Jeune Fille au bouquet, circa 1935; oil on canvas 45.9 x 37.5 cm – 18 1/8 x 14 3/4 in (unframed); 78.1 x 70.2 x 8.6 cm/ 30 3/4 x 27 5/8 x 3 3/8 in. (framed). Courtesy Almine Rech

Trained in porcelain decoration, Laurencin carried this sensitivity into her paintings and watercolors, rendering her subjects with refined elegance and a mastery of small, impressionistic color touches that distilled their essence. What truly sets her portrayals of feminine beauty apart from those of her male peers, however, is the distinctly female and queer gaze through which she captures her beautiful, often ethereal subjects—an approach that is at once elegant, seemingly intuitive and deeply personal. By embracing an unsettling yet natural sense of intimacy and celebrating female bonds, Laurencin freed women’s representation from the all-male-gaze-centered historical canons and societal expectations surrounding female sexuality and relationships. More than just an aesthetic pursuit, her art was profoundly personal, shaped by a singular queer vision that, as the curators of the Barnes retrospective recently argued, “subtly but radically challenges existing narratives of modern European art.”

In this sense, Laurencin’s paintings fully embody the new liberal spirit of the “New Woman” emerging in the cosmopolitan Paris of the 1920s—a world in which she actively participated not only as an artist but as a creative force engaged in everything from fashion to theater and ballet. She was among the pioneers of a new model of independent female creative entrepreneurship, asserting her agency in an era when women were only beginning to claim space for themselves beyond the domestic sphere.

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It is no surprise, then, that in 1923, Coco Chanel—another emblem of the newly liberated woman and already a celebrated fashion designer—chose Laurencin to paint her portrait, which now resides in the collection of the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris. Notably, Chanel reportedly disliked the portrait and refused to buy it, likely finding it too sentimental for the fiercely independent image she had carefully cultivated through both her persona and her fashion. Laurencin, apparently angered by Chanel’s rejection, refused to paint another portrait and kept the original, a standoff that underscores how both women were uncompromising in shaping and defending their identities as strong, unapologetic creators determined to succeed on their own terms.

Photo of paintings in the space.
The show is the first solo exhibition of works by the artist at Almine Rech. Photo Dan Bradica

Notably, both Chanel and Laurencin collaborated with Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes: Laurencin designed costumes and sets for Les Biches in 1924, while Chanel created the costumes for Le Train Bleu. As Almine Rech emphasizes in our exchange, Laurencin was remarkably versatile, moving fluidly across disciplines as a painter, engraver and poet. “Apollinaire would actually ask her to write for him,” Rech points out. Laurencin was also romantically involved with Apollinaire for a time, ultimately breaking up with him when the First World War began. She later married a German count but also embarked on an affair with Nicole Groult, sister of renowned Parisian couturier Paul Poiret.

“Admired by Max Jacob and Apollinaire, Laurencin was the first ‘contemporary artist’ to whom Paul Rosenberg proposed representation at his Paris gallery in 1913. Rosenberg was one of the most talented and important dealers of the first half of the 20th century, who exhibited great living artists such as Picasso and Matisse. He showed Laurencin throughout his entire lifetime, first in Paris and then in NYC from 1940,” Rech said, tracing how her predecessor had already succeeded in bringing Laurencin to international attention a century ago. Rosenberg himself appears in one of Laurencin’s rare paintings featuring a male subject, Portrait d’un Homme (1913/14), included in the exhibition alongside works originally displayed in Rosenberg’s Paris and New York galleries.

Laurencin’s paintings have long been part of the collections of America’s most prestigious institutions. In addition to the Barnes Foundation, her work is held by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, the National Gallery in Washington D.C., the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, among others—further proof of the lasting institutional recognition of her role in challenging traditional artistic conventions from a uniquely feminine and queer perspective.

“At that time, women were considered the fair sex, and that was all… she fought well, even then! From there, the modernity of the 1920s was a bit more open to women,” states Almine Rech. “Apart from her role as an artist, in these sensitive periods between the two World Wars in Paris, Marie Laurencin embodied the liberated woman, a queer figure ahead of her time and an icon of sapphism in Paris.”

Photo of paintings in the space.
For all its transgressive subtext, Laurencin’s oeuvre was commercially and critically celebrated in her lifetime. Photo Dan Bradica

 “Marie Laurencin: Works from 1905 to 1952” is on view at Almine Rech through March 1.

Almine Rech Spotlights Marie Laurencin’s Singular Sapphic Vision