Marie Laurencin

Marie Laurencin was born on 31 October 1883 in Paris. As a young woman she studied porcelain painting in Sevres around 1902, then took drawing classes at the Academie Humbert in Paris from 1904; no degree or diploma from either program is documented. She held her first solo exhibition in 1907, the same year she met Pablo Picasso and the poet and critic Guillaume Apollinaire, with whom she had a well-documented romantic relationship. She exhibited alongside the Cubists at the Salon des Independants and the Salon d'Automne, and in 1912 had her first major exhibition alongside Robert Delaunay, cementing her place within the Section d'Or circle.

In 1914 Laurencin married the German baron Otto von Waetjen. The marriage cost her French citizenship at the outbreak of the First World War, and the couple lived in exile in Spain before she returned to Paris in 1921. Back in Paris, she built a wide practice as a portraitist and illustrator, painting figures including Coco Chanel and Jean Cocteau and illustrating books alongside her exhibited paintings. She was later awarded the Legion d'honneur by the French government, in 1937. Laurencin died on 8 June 1956 in Paris; the New York Times reported at the time that she died of a heart attack at her home. A dedicated Musee Marie Laurencin opened in Nagano, Japan, in 1983, built around the collection of the businessman and collector Masahiro Takano.

Laurencin was closely tied, in her own lifetime, to the critical language of the Parisian avant-garde. Guillaume Apollinaire, one of the era's central champions of Cubism, was an early and vocal supporter of her work at the height of her association with the movement. Her visibility receded in the decades after her 1956 death, but she was restored to art-historical attention through Ann Sutherland Harris and Linda Nochlin's landmark 1976 to 1977 traveling exhibition Women Artists: 1550 to 1950. More recently, museum exhibitions including the Barnes Foundation's Marie Laurencin: Sapphic Paris (2023 to 2024) and the Artizon Museum's Marie Laurencin: An Eye for Her Time (2023 to 2024) have reframed her within the history of women and queer artists in the Parisian avant-garde, rather than treating her as a minor satellite of Cubism.

Laurencin's confirmed world auction record is Femme aux tulipes (1936), which sold for USD 602,500 at Christie's in 2010; Christie's itself described the result as a world auction record for the artist. Market press has also cited a higher figure, about USD 1.4 million, for La Vie au Chateau (1925), reportedly sold to Masahiro Takano around 1989, but the auction house, city, and exact sale date for that figure are not documented in the sources available, so it is treated here as a lower-confidence data point rather than the confirmed record. Her work circulates in high volume across the market, with thousands of paintings, prints, and decorative objects tracked by major auction databases, reflecting a long, prolific career across painting, printmaking, and book illustration.

Laurencin's market spans painting, prints, and illustrated books, which gives her unusually deep supply and liquidity for an artist of her period, but it also means top-line auction figures can vary sharply by medium and by work. Her confirmed record, USD 602,500 for Femme aux tulipes at Christie's in 2010, is well documented, while an earlier, higher figure reported in the press for a 1989 sale lacks confirmed sale details and should be treated with caution rather than cited as the benchmark. There is no confirmed catalogue raisonne, so provenance and authentication rest on the records of major auction houses and current dealers, such as Almine Rech, who handle her work.