Art: Pretty Girls

Paris renewed an old and well-remembered friendship. Marie Laurencin, 68, had her first one-man show in years. One look was enough to convince Paris that Marie still belongs in the inner circle of French moderns and that her touch is as light and pleasure-bent as ever. Said admiring Poet Andre Salmon: “She can paint a girl with eyes like a doe, and a doe with eyes like a girl.”

Girls—pretty girls—were the subjects of practically all of Marie Laurencin’s 32 recent oils. There were young girls, teen-age girls, groups of schoolgirls talking, girls dancing, looking demure or just gazing quietly off into space. All had Marie Laurencin’s personal mark: smooth young faces with skimpy noses or none at all, skins the color of pale roses and eyes dark as black cherries.

Nowadays Paris critics rank Painter Laurencin roughly on a level with Utrillo and Vlaminck. But there was no such accolade when she first started painting half a century ago. Three times she tried to enter Paris’ famed Ecole des Beaux Arts, and each time she was coldly refused. Critics called her work “decadent,” “ugly,” “without talent.”

Marie’s early work showed the influence of Toulouse-Lautrec and of her dabbling in cubism. But World War I took Marie out of her Paris circle for a while; she had married a German painter, Otto von Watgen, and when the war came along, she and her husband had to leave France. They lived in Spain until 1918; then Marie got a divorce and went back to Paris.

There she sat herself down and began to paint young girls in a style of her own. The critics suddenly took interest, and soon doting mothers were asking for appointments. Sometimes when commissions were slow, Marie got the concierge’s young daughter to sit for an hour or so; at other times she just sat by a mirror and painted herself.

Marie Laurencin does not paint self-portraits any more. “At my age,” she says, shaking her white head, “that is finished now.” She lives alone, and except for an occasional spin around Paris in a bus, she seldom goes out. But the mothers with daughters in tow still come to her. Marie Laurencin shrugs at the thought of landscapes or still lifes: “Why should I paint dead fish, onions and beer glasses? Girls are so much prettier.”