Marie Laurencin - Original ca. 1900, pencil signed ETS - Self portrait - SPECIAL!! - Sold

You are bidding on an ORIGINAL, PENCIL SIGNED Etching "Auto-Portrait avec une couronne de fleurs / self-portrait with floral wreath" made around 1900 by the famous French Avant Gardist artist Marie Laurencin (1883-1956).

Bottom right monogrammed in pencil / provenance: Bubb Kuyper Haarlem

The etching (sheet size) measures 20 x 15 cm (HxW). Dimensions including frame are approximately 35 x 28 cm.

Origin: Voskuyl collection - Bubb Kuyper auctions Haarlem.


Marie Laurencin (Paris, October 31, 1883 - Paris, June 8, 1956) was a French figurative painter, engraver and illustrator, who was closely linked to the origins 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 transcended both Fauvism and Cubism. Together with other great artists of that 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 fairy-tale animals, flowers and androgynous and surreally 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, all her possessions were taken from her and she 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 about forty years. As an international personality, she portrayed celebrities from all over Paris at that time. During the occupation she maintained her fashionable lifestyle and reconciled with her German friends, while also helping Max Jacob, her companion in the esoteric teachings. However, she was unable to get him released from the Drancy internment camp in time; he died there on March 5, 1944. After the liberation, she was in turn interned in this camp as part of large-scale purges - she barely escaped the fate of the women who were shaved - until she was acquitted and received nine days later by her friend Marguerite Donnadieu.

Both her life and her painting were briefly in the spotlight again when the singer Joe Dassin mentioned her in 1975 in his biggest success song L'été redactie. While she was held in high esteem in Japan, her works were rarely exhibited in France, and it was only in 2011 that Bertrand Meyer-Stabley published a biography of her in which he explores the unknown sides of her person. In 2013, the general public was finally introduced to her work thanks to an exhibition in Paris.