Pod Insights Stuff You Missed in History Class SYMHC Classics: Marie Laurencin About this episode This 2019 episode explores the difficult-to-study work of Laurencin. In addition to her work not quite falling in line with the artists who were her contemporaries, her personal papers are difficult to access, are censored, and have strict limitations put on their use.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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2:30 Tracy V. Wilson? Happy Saturday. After this week's episode on Teufil Steinland, we thought we would return to Montmartre and the French artists there with an episode on Marie Laurence Sa. At the end of this episode, we talk about the Marie Laurence Sa Museum in Japan, which closed in 2019. The museum is still curating a large collection of her art, though, and the museum collaborated with the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia for an exhibit called Marie Laurence Sa, Sefic, Paris, which ran from October of 2023 until January of 2024. I went to it. It was lovely. That was followed by another version of the exhibit
3:12 Tracy V. Wilson? at the Columbus Museum of Art later in 2024, so maybe there will be other exhibitions of her artwork in the future. This episode originally came out on June 26, 2019.
3:26 Holly Frey? Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio.
3:37 Tracy V. Wilson? Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson.
3:40 Holly Frey? And I'm Holly Frey.
3:42 Tracy V. Wilson? We are just back from Paris.
3:44 Holly Frey? Indeed.
3:45 Tracy V. Wilson? I, I'm sure Holly did this too. Of course, I came back from Paris with a list of ideas for future episodes of the podcast.
3:52 Holly Frey? Oh, yeah, the list is long.
3:54 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, I'm planning to spread mine out, so it's not just like all 19th century France all the time, even though that is fun. This is more 20th century than 19th. So when we had our trip to Paris, I went out just a little early for a little extra time, a little jet lag recovery before the trip officially started. And one of the places I went during that time was the Musée de l'Orangerie, and I and my husband had been drawn there by Monet's Water Lilies. But later on in our visit, I found myself just totally spellbound by five paintings by Parisian artist Marie Laurence Sa.
4:33 Tracy V. Wilson? These are in another part of the museum. All five of them were of women and animals with very simple and willowy lines and this muted color palette of pink and blue and green and gray. And they just seemed wistful and ethereal, and I just loved them. The audio guide had a little bit about what I was looking at and who painted them, but I really wanted to know more about this woman who had created these works. And that proved to be a little trickier than I expected. She produced a lot of work and she was really well-known and internationally sought after in her time, but that is less true today. It is especially less true outside of France. Her personal papers are in a French library, but they have been censored, like with words
5:17 Tracy V. Wilson? physically cut out of them, either by her or by somebody connected to her estate. And then they can also only be accessed with the estate's authorization. And one of the conditions of that authorization is that unpublished material from her work cannot be directly quoted. So her biography has not gotten nearly as much in-depth attention as some of her contemporaries, and a lot of what's there is in French. And she also hasn't gotten as much attention from art historians because some of the nature of her work, which we'll be talking about as well. That didn't make any of this impossible. It just meant that when my husband was at the fancy library, helping me out with getting me a book, and he sent me a photo of like, what would you like from this shelf?
6:01 Tracy V. Wilson? I said, "Everything in English." Bring it all to me. It's a little more challenging than normal, but not impossible.
6:09 Holly Frey? Still laughing at that. So, to begin, Marie Melanie L'Anson was born in Paris on October 31st, 1883. I already love her as a Halloween baby. Her mother Pauline may have had some Creole ancestry, and her father was a government official named Alfred Toullet. Pauline and Alfred were not married. Alfred was not particularly present in Marie's young life. She actually didn't know he was her father until she was in her twenties, and at that point, he had died.
6:40 Tracy V. Wilson? Although he didn't acknowledge Marie as his daughter, Alfred Toullet might have given the family some financial support. Pauline was able to establish herself as a seamstress and an embroiderer and provide herself and her daughter with a pretty middle-class lifestyle. They lived in an apartment at the foot of Montmartre, usually with at least one cat, which is another reason to love her.
7:01 Holly Frey? Of course. Pauline was very strict. Gertrude Stein described her and Marie as being like a pair of nuns living in a convent. Pauline also wanted Marie to be educated and cultured, and their apartment was filled with books, something that Marie would carry into her adult life. She had a library of about 5,000 volumes by the time that she died. Marie and her mother also took frequent trips to the Louvre and other museums. Pauline loved to sing, and Marie loved to listen to her. She would later say that without her mother's singing, she probably never would have picked up a paintbrush. But otherwise, their life at home was very quiet and almost austere.
7:40 Tracy V. Wilson? Pauline was really hoping that Marie would grow up to be a teacher, but Marie dashed that hope very thoroughly by coming in last in every subject at Lycée La Martin. That included art class, although Marie was interested in art from a young age. By the turn of the century, she was particularly drawn to the Impressionists, the Post-Impressionists, and the Fauvists, including Cezanne, Renoir, Manet, Toulouse Lautrec, and Matisse. She also wrote poems, some of which were later published under the pseudonym Louise Lalanne.
8:11 Holly Frey? Without teaching as a possible way to support herself, Marie turned to painting, specifically painting on porcelain through the Sevres Porcelain Factory. And this was a challenging path for her. She was extremely nearsighted, and eyeglasses were not fashionable in Paris in the early 20th century. Laurencin used a lorgnette, or a pair of lenses on a handle, to look at her work. She didn't let her vision keep her from doing anything, though. She enjoyed fencing, which she would do with glasses in one hand and a foil in the other. This delighted Paul Poiret, previous podcast subject, so much that he made her a special costume to do it in and let her fence in his apartment.
8:51 Tracy V. Wilson? While she was studying porcelain painting, Laurencin was also attending regular gatherings hosted by Natalie Barney, who had moved to Paris from the United States. Barney was a writer, a poet, and an heiress, and she hosted a salon in Paris's Latin Quarter that was frequented by some of the city's most prominent artists, writers, musicians, and patrons. Barney was also unapologetically publicly lesbian at a time when homosexuality was really heavily stigmatized. She was actually one of the inspirations for the character of Valerie Seymour in Radcliffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, which was one of the first lesbian novels written in English.
9:27 Holly Frey? Barney had been nicknamed the Amazon after being seen riding a horse by sitting astride it instead of side saddle. When she first started the salon, she called it the Salon of the Amazon and admitted only women. She held other women-only events as well, including all-women pagan circles, and she later established a women's art academy, since l'Académie Française admitted only men. But eventually Barney made the Salon of the Amazon open to anyone regardless of gender.
9:54 Tracy V. Wilson? Laurence Saum was a regular at the salon and at other gatherings at Barney's home. Pierre Louis, who was the author of Chanson de Bilites, attended the salon as well. We talked about Chanson de Bilites recently in our Sappho episode, but just in case you missed that one, this was a supposedly unearthed set of erotic poems that were purportedly by one of Sappho's students. They were really Pierre Louise's own creation, though. One of Laurence Saum's first-produced works of art was an etching titled Chanson de Bilites, which she printed repeatedly in 1904 and 1905, really experimenting with colors and techniques as she did it. This depicts two women kissing with an oil
10:37 Tracy V. Wilson? lamp that looks a little bit like a waterfowl of some sort in the corner.
10:41 Holly Frey? By the time she was doing this print work, Laurence Saum had decided to branch out from porcelain painting. She started studying at the Académie Humbert, which was one of the many art academies in the Montmartre district of Paris. She learned drawing and printmaking and started meeting members of the Parisian avant-garde, including Georges Braque, with whom she developed a very close friendship.
11:03 Tracy V. Wilson? Along with Pablo Picasso, Braque was one of the founders of Cubism. Braque introduced Laurence Saum to Picasso, and Picasso introduced her to Guillaume Apollinaire around 1907, telling him that she would make him a good fiance.
11:17 Holly Frey? Apollinaire was eight years older than Laurence Saum, born in Rome. As Wilhelm Apollinaire de Kestrovitsky. He was raised in various parts of southern France before finally settling down in Paris. He and Laurence Saum had a lot in common. They were both raised by unmarried mothers, both connected to Paris's avant-garde community, and both passionately creative on their own. They started an intense and sometimes volatile relationship, both of them seeming to draw creative inspiration from each other and from the relationship itself.
11:48 Tracy V. Wilson? Sometimes Laurence Saum is described as Apollinaire's muse. That's something that was possibly inspired and definitely reinforced by Henri Rousseau's 1909 portrait of them, which is titled "The Muse Inspiring the Poet." This is actually the picture that is used for the artwork on our website for copyright reasons, meaning it's the one we had access to because of copyright. So if you come to our website, that is what you're seeing, not some of her own work.
12:19 Holly Frey? And it is clear that Apollinaire's work was changed significantly while they were together. His early writings were explicit erotica, but in 1909, he published his first volume of poetry. He also became a literary and art critic, helping to define the Cubist movement and supporting the work of writers and painters all across the world of Parisian modern art. Apollinaire said Laurence Saum invented poetry for him, and he described her as his feminine counterpart.
12:46 Tracy V. Wilson? But this was not at all a one-way street with Laurence Saum just sort of passively inspiring Apollinaire to greatness merely by existing, which is sort of how people imagine muse's work. They were both really drawing from and challenging each other, and she was developing as an artist in her own right while they were together. These were really formative years for Marine Laurence Saum. Her work through the 19-teens was stylized, somewhat influenced by the Cubists. She was often working in color palettes that were dominated by a lot of brown. And she was also exploring her technique through creating self-portraits. She did at least 36 self-portraits during her lifetime, those just being the ones that were titled as self-portraits. A third of those were before 1914.
13:31 Holly Frey? Laurence Saum continued to live with her mother during her study of art and her relationship with Apollinaire. And we'll get into how these years unfolded after we first take a pause for a little sponsor break.
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17:56 Tracy V. Wilson? The Parisian avant-garde community of the 1900s and 19 teens was really highly interconnected. Many painters also wrote poetry and many poets also painted or did some other visual or plastic art. Artists and writers were gathering constantly in cafes and coffee shops and galleries and people's homes.
18:15 Holly Frey? Laurence Saint was an active and visible part of this scene. And although her mother had her doubts about Marie's future as an artist, she hosted groups of cubists at their Montmartre apartment. Laurence Saint was also frequently at the Batteau de L'Homme where Picasso and other cubists had their studios. And she was a regular at some of the most influential literary salons in the city.
18:36 Tracy V. Wilson? She wasn't universally beloved by this community, though. Apollinaire praised her work really effusively, to the point that people sometimes thought that his feelings for her were coloring his judgment about her work. But Gertrude Stein and Pablo Picasso's girlfriend Fernand Olivier were both pretty dismissive and disparaging of her. Both Stein and Olivier wrote derisive accounts of an incident in which Laurence Saint was drunk at a party. Olivier also called her affected and a bit silly and claimed that she was only successful because of her connection to a Apollinaire. Stein implied that Laurence Saint didn't really fit in with the rest of the community either, writing, quote, "Everybody
19:18 Tracy V. Wilson? called Gertrude Stein Gertrude, or at most Mademoiselle Gertrude. Everybody called Picasso Pablo and Fernand Fernand. And everybody called Guillaume Apollinaire Guillaume and Max Jacob Max. But everybody called Marie Laurence Saint Marie Laurence Saint."
19:33 Holly Frey? It's like the opposite of the Madonna thing. She wants all the names.
19:38 Tracy V. Wilson? If you're wondering why Gertrude Stein refers to herself in third person, this is from the autobiography of Alice B. Toklis, which was written that way.
19:46 Holly Frey? In 1907, with Apollinaire's encouragement, Laurence Saint exhibited at the Salon des Independent. This was an annual exhibition of independent artists that was established in 1884, after the official salon held by the Académie Royale repeatedly rejected The work of the Impressionists. The Academy Royale later became the École de Beaux-Arts, and this was the first of many exhibitions for Laurencin.
20:10 Tracy V. Wilson? In 1908, Laurencin sold her first piece of art, which was a painting called Group of Artists. It depicts the artist herself with Pablo Picasso and Fernand Olivier arranged around Guillaume Apollinaire. Also in the painting is Picasso's dog, Frika. Laurencin's buyer for this was past podcast subject Gertrude Stein. And eventually, Laurencin would also paint a portrait of one of Stein's dogs, that dog being Basket the Second.
20:37 Holly Frey? In 1909, Laurencin painted a larger version of a similar scene, known as reunion in the country, or Apollinaire and His Friends. This larger piece featured Gertrude Stein, Fernand Olivier, and an unidentified third woman as the three graces on the left-hand side of the frame. Guillaume Apollinaire is roughly in the center, and to his right are Pablo Picasso, Marguerite Giotte, Maurice Kremlitz, and Marie Laurencin herself. There is a dog in this painting as well, facing away from the center of the frame, but with its head turned back toward Apollinaire. Laurencin gave this one to Apollinaire as a gift, and it hung above his bed until his death.
21:18 Tracy V. Wilson? These two paintings are some of the most examined in Laurencin's work, and they both show the influence of Cubism in her early painting, especially the earlier years of Cubism before it progressed to being just really abstract a lot of the time. They're both very flat with primitive lines and lots of brown, gray, and black. And both of them show Laurencin as part of this group that also included Pablo Picasso.
21:40 Holly Frey? But while she was fascinated by the Cubists and was nicknamed Our Lady of Cubism, Laurencin didn't really consider herself to be a Cubist. She counted people like Picasso and Matisse as contemporaries and credited them with teaching her what she knew about art. But she also thought they would be embarrassed by her association with them.
22:00 Tracy V. Wilson? And as a side note, Apollinaire was his own potential source of embarrassment. On September 7th, 1911, he was arrested for stealing the Mona Lisa from the Louvre, which he had not done. However, he and Picasso had gotten someone else to steal a couple of ancient Iberian busts for them, which Picasso used as models for his painting Les Demoiselles d'Amiens. Apollinaire tried to anonymously return these busts, and that led to him being held for six days for the unrelated Mona Lisa theft. He wasn't ultimately prosecuted for the theft of these busts, but this did put quite a bit of strain on his and Laurence's relationship.
22:38 Holly Frey? In 1912, Laurence was the only woman to be part of La Maison Cubiste, or The Cubist House, which was an art installation for the 1912 Salon d'Autumne. Like the Salon des Independants, the Salon d'Autumne had been established in response to the conservatism of the academy. The Cubist House was an architectural installation with a facade full of angles and interior rooms adorned with Cubist art. The response in the press was incredibly critical. This combination of a structure meant to look like a family home filled with avant-garde art really struck a nerve with the public. In the face of all this criticism, Laurence and a couple of other women stood guard outside, armed with umbrellas.
23:21 Tracy V. Wilson? Laurence continued to make connections and show her work in the early 19 teens. She was part of the group of artists known as the Section d'Or, and she exhibited her work with them. She had several pieces at the International Exhibition of Modern Art in New York City in 1913, which came to be known as the Armory Show. This was just a groundbreaking and incredibly influential exhibition, and it was many Americans' first experience with modern art.
23:48 Holly Frey? Laurence and Apollinaire ended their involvement in 1912 or 1913, after about six years together. Although he had a reputation as a philanderer, they stayed in touch, and apparently Apollinaire thought they would get back together, until 1914. That's when Laurence married German artist Otto van Vetjens. Laurencin said Van Vaetien reminded her of her mother, who had died at about the same time that she broke up with Apollinaire.
24:16 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, this was a difficult year or so in her life. And this marriage wasn't particularly happy. World War I started while the two of them were on their honeymoon. And because Van Vaetien was German, they had to leave France. They went to Spain, which was neutral during the war.
24:32 Holly Frey? Laurencin soon made connections among Spain's modern artists, particularly the Dadaists. She also had lots of letters from France and visitors from time to time. One eagerly welcomed visitor was fashion designer Nicole Gru, who was Paul Poiret's sister. Laurencin and Gru had met in 1911, and they were extremely close for the rest of their lives, including a love affair during at least some of that time. Nicole's daughter Flora was one of Marie Laurencin's first biographers. And in 2018, Marie and Nicole's relationship was the subject of a novel, J'ai un tel désir, or I Have Such A Desire.
25:09 Tracy V. Wilson? While she wasn't totally cut off from her friends in France, Laurencin desperately missed Paris and felt isolated and depressed. Parts of the avant-garde community had also really heavily criticized her for her split with Apollinaire and her marriage to a German. She eventually broke off from the Cubists, but she continued to work. And she started to really establish some of the visual style that she became more known for with lots of pinks and blues and greens rather than the browns that had dominated a lot of her earlier work and depictions of women and animals more often than her depictions of men.
25:41 Holly Frey? Many of her wartime paintings also show how unhappy she was during these years with elements that suggest being trapped or imprisoned. For example, The Prisoner shows a woman in blue looking out from behind flowing pink curtains with a black pattern that resembles a chain link fence.
25:58 Tracy V. Wilson? While Laurencin was away from France, Guillaume Apollinaire died. He was injured in the war, and then he died of influenza. Van Vaetien also started abusing alcohol, and Laurencin filed for divorce in 1919. The split was apparently amicable, though. They stayed in touch until his death in 1942.
26:16 Holly Frey? Laurencin was finally Able to return to France in 1921. A year later, she underwent surgery to treat stomach cancer, and she also had a hysterectomy.
26:26 Tracy V. Wilson? Back in France, Laurencin secured the representation of influential art dealer Paul Rosenberg, who also represented people like Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. Rosenberg would continue to be her art dealer until 1940, when he had to flee France in the face of the Nazi occupation.
26:43 Holly Frey? From her return to France until about 1937, Laurencin was at the height of her career. Her work was exhibited in London, Paris, and New York, and she was financially successful through commissions and the sale of her work. She continued to work mainly in pinks, blues, grays, and greens, often depicting women and girls in dreamy, slightly unreal settings. At one point, she said, quote, "Why should I paint dead fish, onions, and beer glasses? Girls are so much prettier." In the words of an art critic quoted in her obituary in The New York Times, quote, "She can paint a girl with eyes like a doe and a doe with eyes like a girl."
27:22 Tracy V. Wilson? Laurencin also started working as a portrait artist, and she was successful enough to be selective about who she painted, although her dealer repeatedly had to discourage her from just giving her paintings away to people that she liked. She reportedly charged men more than she charged women, and because she found blond women to be the most inspiring, she charged brunettes more than blondes. She would also only paint children if she liked them.
27:45 Holly Frey? One of her most famous paintings is of French fashion designer Coco Chanel, done early in Laurencin's career as a portrait artist. This is one of the paintings in the Musée de l'Orangerie. Chanel is draped in blue and black with a dog on her lap. She has her head resting in her hand, and she looks somewhere between wistful and pensive. Another dog is in the background, along with a gray dove.
28:09 Tracy V. Wilson? Laurencin's portraits followed the same style as the rest of her art that she was doing around this time, so they were not really realistic likenesses of her subjects in their clothing. So when she saw this painting, Chanel refused to pay for it because it didn't look like her. Then Laurencin refused to do it over and kept the original for herself.
28:28 Holly Frey? In spite of this inauspicious start, Laurenes became famous and sought after for these pastel simplified portraits. People would arrive to be painted wearing couture ensembles, only for Laurenes to cover them up with scarves and drapes that she had around for that purpose. She also had romantic relationships with many of her subjects, regardless of their gender.
28:50 Tracy V. Wilson? And she did a lot besides paintings and portraits of the 1920s and 30s. I mean, she did a lot of those, but other work as well. In 1924, she designed the costumes and sets for the Ballet Russe's Les Biches, or The Does, by Sergei Diaghilev. When this ballet was staged in the United States, dancing in the principal role was past podcast subject Maria Tallchief. Laurenes also designed costumes and sets for the Comedy Française, which is one of France's state theaters.
29:19 Holly Frey? Laurenes was a book illustrator as well. Just as a few examples, in 1930, she drew a set of illustrations for an edition of Alice in Wonderland. She also illustrated The Garden Party and Other Stories by Catherine Mansfield, and an American edition of Camille by Alexandre Dumont-Fils. That last one drew some criticism, because all 12 of the illustrations she created were of the book's main character, Marguerite Gautier.
29:45 Tracy V. Wilson? In 1931, she became a founder member of the French Society of Women Modern Artists. She taught at Villa Malakoff from 1932 to 1935, and she managed to stay financially afloat even during the Great Depression. In 1937, a retrospective of Laurenes's work was held at the Great Exhibition of Independent Art Masters at the Petit Palais in Paris. She also finally started wearing glasses that year, and it's around this time that her career started to slow. More about that after another quick sponsor break.
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30:50 Speaker 04 In military families, service is more than a job. It's a legacy. At American Military University, that legacy can help open new doors through education. If someone in your family served in the military, you could be eligible for reduced tuition. Take the next step with flexible online programs built for real life. Learn more at amu.apus.edu/military.
31:14 Holly Frey? We've all done it. Tumble down an internet rabbit hole trying to self-diagnose. And sometimes doing our own research can leave us more anxious than informed. Your feed is packed with wellness trends telling you to cold plunge, protein max, detox, track your sleep. But what's actually real? What's exaggerated? What's just wrong? That's exactly what Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association and iHeartMedia's Ruby Studio is here to find out. Each episode, Emmy-nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez, who's racked up billions of views across PBS Discovery Channel and YouTube, talks to doctors, influencers, and real people trying these trends.
31:56 Holly Frey? Not to cancel them, not to hype them more, but to actually understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. Start asking better questions and listen to Health vs. Hype on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
32:17 Holly Frey? Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jess A. have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane navigating life, love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you. All sass, zero filter, and decades of perspective from four friends proving that queer joy
33:02 Holly Frey? only gets better with age on the podcast that never gets old. Listen to Silver Linings, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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34:17 Tracy V. Wilson? When World War II started in Europe, Marie Laurencin stayed in Paris. She published a semi-autobiographical collection of poetry and prose in 1942 that was called Le Carnet de Noël. And although she continued to work in visual art, her output slowed down, as we said earlier. Most critics consider her work, at this point, to be a repeat of the techniques and themes that she was developing earlier in her career, rather than experimenting or breaking new ground. She did start to use some darker, brighter colors, rather than the pastels that had become her hallmark in the 1920s and 30s, and this change in palette may have been connected to the ongoing deterioration of her vision.
34:56 Holly Frey? Although she was able to stay in Paris, Germans requisitioned her apartment during the occupation, and she stayed with friends for the duration of the war. Some of her art was branded "degenerate" or looted by Nazis. Her politics during this time seemed to have been contradictory. She was part of an intellectual scene that had lots of connections to the Vichy government, and in some ways Laurencin was complicit with them and with German authorities. At the same time, she tried to personally intervene to save her friend Max Jacob, who was a poet and a painter. Jacob was of Jewish ancestry but had converted to Catholicism. He was ultimately deported to a concentration camp and he died in 1944.
35:37 Tracy V. Wilson? When France was liberated at the end of World War II, Laurence Ains was arrested as part of the wave of arrests and purges known as the Eperation or Purification. She was briefly incarcerated at Dancian Turnament Camp but was ultimately exonerated and released.
35:52 Holly Frey? After the war, Laurence Ains was prone to cycles of depression and isolation. Her closest companion became Suzanne Moreau, who had originally been her maid. It is not entirely clear if the two of them were romantically involved or if Laurence Ains was more like Moreau's surrogate mother, but they were together for almost 20 years. Laurence Ains legally adopted Moreau in 1954, when she was 70 and Moreau was 49.
36:19 Tracy V. Wilson? In 1950, Laurence Ains produced a series of 23 etchings for an illustrated collection of Sappho's poetry, which had been translated by Edith de Beaumont. In her earlier book illustrations, her work had tended to resemble her paintings with similarly flowing lines and pastel palettes. These Sappho illustrations, though, are still flowing in style but with a much simpler black and white design.
36:43 Holly Frey? Marie Laurence Ains died of a heart attack at her home in Paris on June 8, 1956. She was 72. She was buried in Pere Lachaise Cemetery. And at her request, she was dressed in white with a rose in her hand and her love letters from Guillaume Polonair close to her heart.
37:00 Tracy V. Wilson? I think one of my few regrets about our trip to Paris is that I didn't realize until after we were back, all of these things about Marie Laurence Ains, including her burial at Pere Lachaise, because we were there, but hers is not one of the graves that we went to.
37:15 Holly Frey? There are so many things to look at in Perilous as you cannot fault yourself for missing anything.
37:20 Tracy V. Wilson? Well, you could be there really all day long. I think at that point, like, because that was one of the things that we sort of did on one of our free days while we were in Paris. And at that point, I think she was written in my list of ideas for podcast episodes for after the show as something like that painter from the orangery. Like, I didn't even have her name clearly affixed to my mind yet. So, anyway, although she had been well-known and sought after during her lifetime, her reputation faded pretty quickly after her death. She left instructions to Moreau not to sell her paintings or to allow people to research her. So it wasn't really until the 1970s, which I think was after Moreau's death, and when
38:02 Tracy V. Wilson? there was renewed interest in women's and LGBT history, that people started researching her life and seeking out more of her work, especially outside of France.
38:11 Holly Frey? The nature of her work also may have acted as a deterrent for biographers and art historians. There was a decorative element to Laurence's paintings. She didn't push boundaries in the same way that many of her contemporaries did. Many of the Cubists, who were so important to Laurence's early development and artistic network, were creating work that was increasingly abstract. And Laurence, on the other hand, ultimately broke away from the Cubists, and she painted in a way that was pretty and appealing. She wanted to make art that people would enjoy looking at.
38:42 Tracy V. Wilson? Added to that, Laurence and her work were explicitly intentionally feminine, given the gender standards of the day. Her pastel color palette and willowy, fluid lines impressed people as just intrinsically female. And this made it really easy to write her off as just girl stuff, rather than as a serious work of art that was full of nuance and symbolism and subtlety and sometimes humor. She clearly had an affinity for women in her work and her life as well, and that was something that earlier art historians seemed really reluctant to explore because of all the stigma surrounding lesbianism and bisexuality.
39:20 Holly Frey? Because so much of the interest into women's art in the 1970s was coming from the feminist movement, Laurence's own preferences and opinions complicated things as well. She really favored one type of model, one who was young, white, fair, and slender. And she also believed that women and men were fundamentally different and that women's art was fundamentally different from men's art. She said, quote, "If I feel so far removed from painters, it is because they are men. And in my view, men are difficult problems to solve. But if the genius of men intimidates me, I feel perfectly at ease with everything that is feminine." That made her a less appealing subject of study in the context of a movement for women's
40:02 Holly Frey? empowerment, autonomy, equality, and independence.
40:06 Tracy V. Wilson? As a counterpoint to that idea, though, Marie Laurence was one of very few women artists to hold her own in the male-dominated world of French modernists. Although she was connected to the Cubists in her early work, so some Cubist influence, she ultimately broke away from all that and developed her own distinct, unapologetically feminine style, and that was transgressive in its own way.
40:30 Holly Frey? There's been more interest in Marie Laurence's life and work in Europe and North America over the past few decades, but she's been especially beloved in Japan. Japanese collector Masahiro Tokano developed an interest in her work and acquired a huge amount of it, founding the Marie Laurence Museum in Nagano, Japan, which first opened in 1983 to mark her 100th birthday. At the time, it was the only museum in the world dedicated to the work of a woman artist. The museum closed in 2011 for financial reasons. In 2013, pictures from the museum were part of a temporary exhibition at the Musée Montmartre in Paris. After that, the Marie Laurence Museum reopened in Tokyo in July 2017.
41:15 Holly Frey? Unfortunately, it closed again on January 14 of 2019.
41:19 Tracy V. Wilson? When I was looking at the website for it, because sometimes I am calendar challenged, somehow I thought January 14, 2019 had not happened yet. And I was like, I gotta go to Japan right now. And then I realized, no.
41:33 Holly Frey? You've got six months.
41:34 Tracy V. Wilson? Already too late. But yeah, the wording suggests that they're...
41:42 Tracy V. Wilson? Maybe like a future exhibition at some point in the in the future. And it's also clear that the people who have all this art of hers really love it and are caring for it. So maybe it will be on public view somewhere at some point in the future. Anyway, I love her.
41:59 Holly Frey? Yeah, she's great. Her art is very pretty. It's not my jam, but I appreciate it and think it's beautiful.
42:05 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, it's I definitely I kind of came around a corner where all five of the paintings that were on display all were. And I was immediately like, I am here for this.
42:16 Holly Frey? Yeah, that's the beautiful thing about art is when you have that visceral, just unexplainable emotional reaction to it. That is why I love art so much.
42:26 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah. And there's also we'll have a link in the show notes to the episode because we couldn't personally put some of her artwork onto our website. We will have a link to the museum's page on her that has all five, I think, of the paintings that you can look at there. I think they're really beautiful.
42:49 Tracy V. Wilson? Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note, our email address is [email protected] . And you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
43:11 Holly Frey? A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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