The painter Marie Laurencin (1883-1956) was also known for her poetry and her many friends among the poets of her day. Perhaps the most famous among her poems is Le Calmant, which ends,
　...worse than being dead
　even more pathetic
　is being a forgotten woman."

For a collection of poetry that friends published in 1922 as a tribute to Marie the title The Fan was chosen. The fan was suggestive of an elegant and mysterious woman, and it had become Marie Laurencin’s symbol.

Knowing this, the word fan becomes a key word associated with the world of Marie Laurencin in two dimensions, first in connection with painting and poetry and secondly in connection with the “feminine world.” The lyrical underpinnings of Marie’s paintings can be seen as a fusion of color and poetry and the world she painted was a woman’s dream kingdom defined by elegance, sophistication and allure that could indeed be likened to the fan.

In this exhibition, through the cooperation of the Musée Marie Laurencin, we are able to present not only representative oil paintings spanning the artist’s career and its development, from youth through to her late period, but also a number of self-portraits and book illustrations from different periods of her life. In all, these works to be displayed total 33. As the opening of a fan reveals beautiful patterns not visible when it is closed, we hope that these works will reveal new emotions and rewarding discoveries to the viewer.

In the early part of the 20th century, Paris was an art capital where the likes of Picasso and Matisse were active. Surrounded by young avant-garde artist friend in this stimulating environment, Marie Laurencin developed her own style of painting with a palette of pastel colors. During World War I she fled to Spain, and after returning to Paris in the postwar period, she continued to develop her unique world of painting in a rewarding career that brought her into her mature period. All the while, her art changed and matured as her life experiences changed. This exhibition focuses especially on the changes Marie’s colors underwent during her career.

Marie became acquainted with Picasso and Braque and became the lover of the poet Apollinaire and was welcomed into the circle of avant-garde artists. Her subdued palette based in browns showed the influence of the Cubism developed by Picasso and Braque, as well as Egyptian and other ancient art and arts of the Orient.

Eventually, Marie developed her own style of painting that combined the geometric lines of Cubism with a palette of pastel colors dominated by pinks, greys and light blues. She became recognized as an independent female artist and her work was shown both in France and abroad.

After separation with her lover Apollinaire and the loss of her mother, Marie married a German, which made her the “wife of an enemy” when World War I broke out and forced her to go into exile in the neutral nation of Spain for five years. Reflecting the pain of separation from her beloved friends, her paints came to show deeper colors and motifs symbolic of captivity, such as window bars and checker patterns and curtains.

With divorce, Marie recovered her French citizenship and retuned to her native Paris, where she began to paint fervently again, free of the solitude and uncertainties of her years in exile. The poetry collection The Fan that friends published for her was in fact to commemorate her return to France. Before her return to France Marie had visited her husband’s homeland, Germany, several times, and there she had acquired a new motif of young girls playing with a background of “Green Woods” that she used in numerous paintings. The elegant, sensuous colors of Marie’s paintings expressed the cultural and social state of postwar Paris beautifully, and it would be a rewarding period for the artist as members of the social elite like Coco Chanel commissioned portraits from her.

When war came to Europe again, Marie lived quietly with her maid (and later adopted daughter) Suzanne. All the while she continued to paint scenes of beautiful young girls. As her eyesight began to fail, brighter, more radiant colors than ever before began to appear in her paintings. The pastel colors of her palette were now joined by reds and yellows that she had avoided in her younger years. At the same time, the girls that had previously appeared like nymphs in a dream world were now painted as young women with more clearly drawn lines in their arms and legs and the forms of their faces.

The Japanese poet Daigaku Horiguchi, who had met Marie during her exile in Spain, would later translate poems by her and Apollinaire into Japanese and publish them in a collection of contemporary French poetry titled Gekka no Ichigun. It was from this collection that the now famous lines “worse than being dead / even more pathetic / is being a forgotten woman” became known in Japan. Although a more faithful translation might be “rather than being dead / I am forgotten,” The famous translation by Daigaku Horiguchi, who actually knew Marie, continues to move the hearts of Japanese readers to this day.

Marie once wrote, “There is a marvelous book translated from the Japanese called Makurano-soshi (the pillow book).” As one who had longed to be like the favorites of Louis XIV in her high school days and loved the art of the woman artist Élisabeth-Louise Vigée Le Brun, who had painted portraits of Marie Antoinette, perhaps Laurencin felt something in common with the sensitive and elegant depictions in Makurano-soshi. The novelist Shinichiro Nakamura once commented that the reason the Japanese love the art of Marie Laurencin is the familiarity they feel in her sense of “lyricism.” The Japanese, for whom tanka and haiku poetry are a familiar part of daily life, feel a familiar sensitivity in aesthetic in the paintings of Marie, with their elegant and sophisticated expressions of the emotions and sensuality that touches the heartstrings.

It is surely a well-known fact that there is a museum to that art of Marie Laurencin in Japan. Masahiro Takano, founder of the Green Cap taxi company familiar to all for its emerald green taxis, developed a great love of Marie Laurencin’s paintings and collected many works. The Musée Marie Laurencin was then opened in 1983 to house his collection. It is a collection that includes several of the artist’s representative works and is reputed to be one of the world’s leading collections of the art of Marie Laurencin, in both the quality and number of works. This makes Japan a special place for the art of Marie Laurencin, in terms of collected works and research.

The tremendous popularity that the art of Marie Laurencin enjoyed in Japan during the 1970s and ’80s seems to have lessened somewhat since the 1990s. The era when French painting of the Modern period led Western Art is over and museums and exhibitions today focus on a wider variety of art, such as Renaissance art, Japanese art and contemporary art. Also, as women play a more active role in society, attention tends to focus less on “femininity” and more on artists portraying female strength and individualism.

Amidst these changes, however, the art of Marie Laurencin has not become obsolete but continues to enjoy a substantial, albeit quieter, popularity. Among those who admire the art of Marie, there appear to be many those who favor things like poetry and essays or craft works, and those who value the nostalgia and delicacy. And there may also many who find empathy and soothing in the works of Marie that appear dream-like at first glance but also harbor deeper layers of emotions such as solitude and pain.

As we learn about the life of Marie Laurencin, we come to understand her art on deeper levels. In the exhibition catalog we present poems and essays by Marie herself, along with poems from The Fan and words of her lover Apollinaire, Picasso’s lover Fernande Olivier, Daigaku Horiguchi and others who knew Marie well. We also present an essay by the often-critical essayist Nameko Shinsan, who analyzes Marie Laurencin anew from the perspective of the contemporary woman.

Exhibition List Download （PDF:114KB）

Dates	Lecturer
Tue., Jan. 26, Sat., Feb. 20, Sat., Mar. 13, 14:00 - 15:00	Yukiko Yokoyama ( Kawamura Memorial Museum of Art)

• First 40 visitors gathering at Entrance Hall at 14:00

Every day except Jan. 26, Feb. 20 and Mar. 13

• First 40 visitors gathering at Entrance Hall at 14:00
• May include only collection explanations when the Museum is crowded

Contains recorded explanations of the Museum collection and the Laurencin exhibition

• Rental fee: 500 yen per headset

Adults

¥1100

Students & Seniors over 65 with ID

¥900

Elementary, middle and high school students

¥500

[Group rate over 20 persons (following price is for one person)]

Adults

¥900

Students & Seniors over 65 with ID

¥700

Elementary, middle and high school students

¥400

[Persons with disability pass (+ one attendant each)]

Adults

¥800

Students & Seniors over 65 with ID

¥600

Elementary, middle and high school students

¥300

Joseph Cornell × Mutuo Takahashi : Intimate Worlds Enclosed

Date：April 10 - July 19, 2010

List of exhibitions organized in the past is available.