Marie Laurencin - Original 1946, signed by Etching Ets "Young girl with guitar"

You are bidding on an original eau forte etching "Jeune fille à la guitare" made in 1946 by the famous French Avant Gardist artist Marie Laurencin (1883-1956). Signed in the plate as well as in pencil. The etching is in very good condition with strikingly fresh colours.


The Etching (image) measures 20 x 17 cm (HxW). Dimensions including passe partout are approx. 50 x 33 cm.
Origin: Voskuyl collection - Bubb Kuyper auctions Haarlem.


Marie Laurencin (Paris, 31 October 1883 – ibid., 8 June 1956) was a French figurative painter, engraver and illustrator, who was closely associated with the emergence of modern art. As a set designer for neoclassical ballet performances, she strove, like her admirer Max Jacob, to transcend the various disciplines in the arts. She also wrote letters and free verse poems, which in her creative process were inextricably linked to the way in which she expressed her boundless imagination in her painting.

Marie Laurencin's style was also called 'nymphism' and transcends both Fauvism and Cubism. Together with other great artists of the time, such as Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, André Derain and Henri Matisse, she was one of the pioneers of both Cubism and Dadaism. In her very own style, which was criticized for being too sweet, she used pastel colors to paint recurring subjects such as fairytale animals, flowers and androgynous and unrealistically pale young women.

Although she had been the partner of the poet Guillaume Apollinaire for six years, Flap, as her first lover Henri-Pierre Roché called her, eventually married the German painter Otto de Waetjen in 1914. Because he, as a pacifist, refused to take up arms against the French, she lost her nationality when the First World War broke out, had all her possessions taken from her and had to go into exile in Spain. After her divorce, she regained her position during the interwar period and continued her love affair with Nicole Groult, an inconspicuous but not secret relationship that would last for about forty years. As an international personality, she portrayed celebrities from all over Paris during this time. During the occupation, she maintained her fashionable lifestyle and reconciled with her German friends, while also helping Max Jacob, her companion in esoteric teachings. However, she was unable to get him released from the Drancy internment camp in time; he died there on 5 March 1944. After the liberation, she was in turn interned in this camp as part of large-scale purges – she narrowly escaped the fate of the women who were shaved bald – until she was acquitted and nine days later was taken in by her friend Marguerite Donnadieu.

Both her life and her paintings were briefly in the spotlight again when singer Joe Dassin mentioned her in his greatest hit L'été Indien in 1975. While she was adored in Japan, her works were rarely exhibited in France, and it was not until 2011 that Bertrand Meyer-Stabley published a biography of her in which he explores the unknown sides of her personality. In 2013, her work was finally introduced to the general public through an exhibition in Paris.