Marie Laurencin: A Woman of Genius

Some Reflections on the French Artist's Her Curious and Exquisite Canvases Recent Paintings

ALDOUS HUXLEY

IT is in the purely decorative applied arts that women have done most. In early times it was the women who stayed at home to practice the useful arts and crafts, while the men were abroad in the fields or at the chase.

Such arts as weaving, pottery, embroidery and the like undoubtedly owe much of the beauty and elegance they possess to the inspiration of the women who originally practised them. One may safely say, indeed, that in all the applied arts woman's influence has made itself directly or indirectly felt; in all of them her contribution of elegance and grace and charm has been considerable.

But in the fine, the unapplied arts, women have, so far at any rate, done little. Whether, as a result of increased liberty and a more satisfactory education, we shall see in the future a great increase in the amount and importance of feminine art is a question which we need not discuss here. We must admit that her actual achievement in the arts has been up till now inconsiderable. There have been no great feminine personalities in the history of the arts, no creators of types, no inventors, among the woman painters, of new elegances and unexplored graces, to say nothing of new grandeurs and strengths. Rosalba, Vigee Lebrun, Angelica Kaufmann, Rosa Bonheur, Berthe Morisot —they do not amount to very much, the women painters of the past.

One finds, on the whole, more talent among such contemporaries as Goncharova, Therese Lessore, Tour Donas, Nina Hamnett and several more whom one might mention. And in one of these contemporaries, surely we find what we have vainly looked for in the past —the personality, the creator, the inventor of new and essentially feminine elegance. Her name is Marie Laurencin and in Paul Rosenberg's galleries in the Rue de la Boetie you may see, in a few weeks time, a representative exhibition of her works.

Marie Laurencin is not a painter to whom one can attach a convenient descriptive label. She belongs to no school, she is determinedly and egotistically herself. She is, of course, vaguely "modern," inasmuch as she does not try to paint realistically nor to illustrate particular dramatic incidents. But that is about as far as one can go in the way of labelling and pigeon-holing. The cubists were her friends; she lived and worked amongst them, listened to their grimly pedantic theories of art—and did not allow herself to be influenced by them in the smallest degree. While her friends were busy with their austerely geometrical arrangements of planes and lines, Marie Laurencin went on quietly recording on canvas her own fantastic visions. And what curious and exquisite things she saw in the world that lay behind her vague myopic eyes! How individually she portrayed them! Cats with the faces of women and women with the faces of cats, horses and birds and monkeys of a fabulous elegance, delicate white girls with disquieting black and beadlike eyes, imaginary dogs and flowers—these are the fauna and flora of her universe. Her pictures are like the illustrations to some fantastic story of which we do not know the plot; they are subject pictures painted round themes unknown and exquisitely absurd.

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The austere cubistic critics would have us ignore in every work of art, all qualities but the purely plastic. Born of a reaction against the too literary standards of academism, this doctrine has done good work in reminding people that there are other things in art besides sentiment and drama, that art has other functions than the pointing of a moral or the accurate description of a scene.

But, like every other creed that has issued from a polemic, this doctrine of the purely aesthetic function of art has been carried too far. It is absurd to try and ignore the other-than-plastic qualities of art; you are ignoring facts if you do. Michelangelo's statuesque conception of form moves us; but so does his amazing terribiloá. Raphael's sweetness affects us as intimately as his beautifully studied compositions. The brooding reflectiveness and the dramatic force are as integral a part of Rembrandt's work as is the open composition and the new sense of space. And so it is with Marie Laurencin. It is not only the composition, the colouring, the method of painting that please us in her pictures; it is also the feminine charm, the dim and beautiful fantasy. The literary qualities of her work—if anything so indefinite and vague and undramatic can be called "literary"—are quite as important as its aesthetic qualities.

Taken as purely aesthetic phenomena, her pictures are certainly curious and interesting. Her universe of forms is a queer shallow place, not completely flat, but possessing, so to speak, only a rudimentary third dimension. It consists generally of only two or three planes lying quite close to the surface and, more often than not, parallel with the picture plane. There are no deep vistas and no statuesque masses standing solidly in a surrounding space. Her world, in fact, is the closely bounded world of the very short-sighted person who is only aware of the immediately surrounding reality. In this shallow universe there is no chiaroscuro, no sharply defined modelling The paint is laid on flatly and unbrokenly. The colour is always soft and very subtly harmonized. The best of her compositions have a pleasing and generally simple rhythmic pattern.

The final impression which her work leaves upon us is one of exquisitely graceful elegance. Her pictures are the most charming of decorations. And in that word "decoration" we are surely assessing the nature and value of her contribution, her essentially feminine contribution, to art. She has invented a new and subtle form of adornment, which takes its place with all the other things that have been invented in the past for the enrichment of daily life. Hers is certainly not the grandest form of art; but it is one of the most gracious.