“Marie Laurencin: Sapphic Paris” at The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia

Marie Laurencin, Portrait of Helena Rubinstein (Portrait de Helena Rubinstein) (1934); courtesy Private collection, Stowe, Vermont.

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“Presentism” is a term that has taken on new vitality in recent years. The Oxford English Dictionary cites 1916 as its first published usage in the sense that we now know the word—that is to say, the judgment or interpretation of past events, people, or works of art according to contemporary standards. We’ve all read or heard about instances in which historical figures have been deemed dubious, villainous, or worthy of censure when considered under the (ahem) elevated mores of twenty-first-century elite culture. Titian encourages rape, Frederick Douglass is a white supremacist, and John Wayne was—can you just imagine it?—a Republican. We know the routine. But is there an equal-and-opposite theory that imagines historical figures pondering how future audiences might consider their pursuits? This endeavor is, of course, an intellectual lark or, as a colleague has it, a stoner’s question. But there I was, visiting the Barnes Foundation, engaging in some “forwardism” by wondering what the painter Marie Laurencin (1883–1956) might think of her life and work being heralded under the “queer” rubric.

Which is how the Barnes is promoting “Marie Laurencin: Sapphic Paris,” an overview of one of the many fascinating figures populating the demimonde of early twentieth-century France. We learn upon reading the exhibition wall labels that “the excessive femininity of her art hinted at its queerness.” Writing in the catalogue, Rachel Silveri, a professor of art and art history at the University of Florida, avers that Laurencin’s femininity was “strategically coded, enabling her to achieve success in a masculinist art world while nonetheless picturing nonnormative desires.” The curators Simonetta Fraquelli and Cindy Kang write of Laurencin’s “almost exclusively female aesthetic.” Laurencin did state that the “genius of man intimidates me, I feel perfectly at ease with all that is feminine,” but she also said that “I have only one desire, that my paintings have more importance than my presence.” Fraquelli, Kang, and Silveri press hard on Laurencin’s “presence” to the point where we can’t help but wonder how much they value the paintings as paintings.

Albert Barnes liked Laurencin’s paintings. He placed her among “the best French women painters” and promptly snapped up such pictures as Still Life with Bowl and Fruit (1907), Woman with Muff (1914), and Head (ca. 1921), all of which are on display in the Barnes’s permanent collection. “Sapphic Paris,” the first U.S. retrospective in over thirty years, is sequestered in the suite of galleries adjoining the main body of the foundation. The works on display span close to five decades, roughly from1904 to 1950, but concentrate primarily on the heady days of the Parisian avant-garde. The show is divided into sections with titles such as “Picturing Herself,” “In the Thick of It: Paris Before the War,” and “Women Supporting Women.” Alongside Laurencin’s paintings, drawings, and prints, there are corollary objects and art by André Mare, Jean Metzinger, Francis Picabia, and Max Ernst, but not, oddly, her friends Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso. An integral component of the “bande à Picasso,” Laurencin was famously photographed in the Spaniard’s studio in 1911, striking a pose. Still, she went on to distance herself from Cubism, stating that it “poisoned three years of my life . . . aesthetic problems always make me shiver.”

Marie Laurencin, c. 1912; Via Wikimedia Commons

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Laurencin was born in Paris to Alfred Toulet, a government official, and Pauline-Mélanie Laurencin, a domestic and seamstress. Monsieur Toulet visited and supported the offspring of this extramarital dalliance, but Laurencin was raised, in the main, by her mother. The young woman’s interest in art was evident early on, and she eventually studied at the Académie Humbert, at which she met Braque and the future illustrator and fashion designer Georges Lepape. Around 1907, Laurencin encountered Picasso and was subsequently swept into his orbit. She attended the famous dinner held in honor of “Le Douanier” Rousseau, had her work collected by Gertrude Stein, exhibited paintings in a two-person show with Robert Delaunay, and met Wilhelm de Kostrowitzky, better known to history as Guillaume Apollinaire. Laurencin and Apollinaire begin a long and tumultuous affair. Over the years, she involved herself romantically with a variety of men and women. She spent the war years exiled in Spain with Picabia, Stein, Alice B. Toklas, and Albert Gleizes. Laurencin, you see, had married a German baron.

What Do Young Women Dream Of? (1932) is the title of a scene posited somewhere between Wuthering Heights, Greek myth, and the art deco–inspired illustrations of Laurencin’s former schoolmate Lepape. It’s an emblematic work, with a palette predicated on gray and pink, an overriding mood of arcadian yearning, and attenuated almond-eyed ingenues. Laurencin was as much defined and, in the end, constrained by her stylistic mannerisms as Modigliani. Her streamlined figuration can tend toward picture-book fancies or, as one visitor to the Barnes had it, the “princessy.” The finest canvases are those in which Laurencin bumped up against reality. Portraits of Helena Rubinstein, Coco Chanel, and Juliette Lacaze, the wife of the art dealer Paul Guillaume, benefit from the specificity that accrues from having to achieve a likeness, of conveying bone, muscle, and personality. Not that all of her clients were amused: Chanel rejected her portrait as playing too fast and loose with the facts. Laurencin summarily pegged the fashion icon as “a peasant from Auvergne” and remained friendly with her all the same. This admixture of the acidic and the convivial is evident in even the dreamiest of Laurencin’s tableaux. What might an accounting of the oeuvre look like without the baggage of identity politics? We may have to wait another thirty years to find out.

(c) 2024

This review was originally published in the January 2024 edition of The New Criterion.

A Weekend in Philadelphia

“Rocky” stands outside the Philadelphia Museum of Art on January 28, 2023. Tim Nwachukwu/Getty Images
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Should you want to spend a brisk fall weekend in the City of Brotherly Love, Philadelphia’s cultural institutions have some offerings that are, at the least, diverting; at their best, they’re sublime. Be prepared, though, to queue up outside the Philadelphia Museum of Art — no, not for anything inside its august halls. Rather, it would be for “Rocky” (1980), A. Thomas Schomberg’s larger-than-life bronze portrait of Sylvester Stallone as the cinematic character that made him famous. 

You might recall the brouhaha that resulted upon Mr. Stallone gifting the piece to Philadelphia. The stairs leading up to the museum figured in a memorable scene from the original “Rocky,” and the actor thought Mr. Schomberg’s sculpture — really, a prop from “Rocky III” — was its own kind of homage. 

Arts professionals fretted that placing “Rocky” outside one of the country’s great museums would be a sign that the institution was ratifying kitsch. City officials, eager to place the work in a public venue, argued that the sculpture wasn’t “art as it has been defined by aesthetic standards,” and that won the day. What Messrs. Stallone and Schomberg made of this backhanded vote of support is a good question.

“Rocky” is a popular draw, occasioning lineups of tourists, curiosity seekers, and movie fans wanting photo ops. All the while, Auguste Rodin’s “The Thinker” (1902-04; cast 1919), ensconced on Benjamin Franklin Parkway just a hop, skip, and jump from Rocky Balboa, can’t get any love — unless the stray pigeon counts. Perhaps Rodin’s mascot for the museum that bears the sculptor’s name is mulling what, exactly, the role of artistic worth might be in a culture dominated by celebrity.

Two eye-catching banners on the exterior of the Philadelphia Museum herald celebrities of another sort. One of them is an internationally beloved Dutch painter, Johannes Vermeer; the other is James McNeill Whistler or, even better, his mother. Although there were a healthy number of visitors to the museum during the weekend on which I visited, few of them saw fit to stop by “The Artist’s Mother: Whistler and Philadelphia.” True, the exhibition is small in scale and selective in concentration, but, come on: We’re talkin’ “Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1: Portrait of the Artist’s Mother” here.

Marie Laurencin, Portrait of Helena Rubinstein, 1934. © Fondation Foujita, Artists Rights Society, New York
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On loan from the Musee d’Orsay at Paris, the canvas commonly known as “Whistler’s Mother” hasn’t been seen at Philly since it was exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1881. I caught the exhibition toward the end of its run — the show closes this weekend — so the initial buzz might have passed. 

Still, over the two days I wandered through the museum, few people seemed to take note of the picture and its masterful array of pearlescent grays and velvety blacks. The curators surrounded Whistler’s picture with depictions of mothers by other artists, the best of the bunch being by the underrated Henry Ossawa Tanner and the almost forgotten Sidney Goodman.

Perhaps “Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1: Portrait of the Artist’s Mother” has lost its currency as an iconic image on the scale of “The Scream” by Edvard Munch or “Girl With a Pearl Earring.” Knowing full well the box office draw of Meneer Vermeer, the good folks at the Philadelphia Museum are hoping against hope that a painting in its collection long considered a “Copy After Vermeer” might be the real thing. Before the picture is sent out for extensive research, gallery-goers can decide for themselves by visiting “Vermeer? A Conversation Through Time” until the end of 2023.

Blame for this goes to an independent scholar who formerly worked at Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, Arie Wallert. At a symposium held during March of this year, Mr. Wallert stated that the Philadelphia picture is the real thing. “Copy of Vermeer” was considered a genuine Vermeer up until 1927, when “The Guitar Player” (c. 1672), now in the collection of Britain’s Kenwood House, was rediscovered and given a quick stamp of approval.

Will the copy — which is similar to the Kenwood painting save for those fetching ringlets of hair — find approval upon restoration? My eye says “no”: the gray wall behind the title figure is unlike anything else in the canon and Vermeer wasn’t known to make copies of his own work. Still, it’s hard to begrudge the Philadelphia Museum its wishful thinking.

Down the parkway past Rocky and Rodin, the Barnes Foundation is in the process of being discreetly queered. This phrase, ahem, is lifted from the press release for “Marie Laurencin: Sapphic Paris,” the first U.S. retrospective of paintings by a figure who was an indispensable component of the Parisian art scene. Not only did Laurencin (1883-1956) pal around with the likes of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braques, Francis Picabia, and Guillame Appolinaire, but she was declared among “the best French women painters” by no less an eminence than the man himself, Albert C. Barnes.

The institution that bears his name has devoted itself in recent years to “exploring the achievements of significant but underrecognized women working in the European modernist vanguard.” The results have been invariably interesting and, in the case of 2018’s Berthe Morisot retrospective, revelatory. How “Sapphic Paris” will fare by the standards of Philadelphia’s city elders — you remember, “not art as it has been defined by aesthetic standards” — remains to be seen, but the Barnes Foundation should be commended for braving another Modernist byway worthy of recognition.

(c) 2023 Mario Naves

This article was published in the October 26, 2023 edition of The New York Sun.